How AI can transform Indigenous entrepreneurship and aid in cultural preservation

Artificial intelligence tools have the potential to help Indigenous entrepreneurs scale their businesses and support the preservation of Indigenous culture and languages. But existing infrastructure challenges could slow the technology’s uptake, experts said during a roundtable event, At the Table, hosted by Mastercard in partnership with the Globe & Mail in May.

Entrepreneur Brian Ritchie, founder and chief executive officer of Kama.ai, sees numerous potential applications of AI, including creativity tools that can help entrepreneurs with marketing, and applications that can interact with customers on behalf of the business. His company builds responsible AI tools for businesses to communicate with customers, for example. Handing over some tasks to AI, he said, will allow entrepreneurs to do more strategic work.

There are other opportunities, too. As noted by Michelle Okere, executive director of the Indigenous Prosperity Foundation, access to capital has been a particular challenge for Indigenous entrepreneurs for a long time. Darrell MacMullin, senior vice-president of commercial and money transfer solutions at Mastercard in Canada, agreed, explaining this is partly due to antiquated credit models that incorrectly consider certain businesses or communities to be higher risk than they are.

However, AI tools are now helping financial institutions to harness their vast amounts of data, to provide a more inclusive credit picture of applicants from underserved communities.

Cody Lewis, senior associate of research and public policy at the Canadian Council for Indigenous Business, added that several of the organization’s member companies have begun using AI to streamline parts of their business, including bidding on contracts and writing proposals.

AI tools can even improve a company’s financial health, Mr. MacMullin said. At the business-owner level, he pointed to optimizing working capital as the “single biggest education gap” for sole proprietors and small businesses. To this end, Mastercard recently released an AI-powered tool that analyzes a business-owner’s accounts payable and receivable information to tell them which invoices they should pay first, which ones they can delay or put on credit to give them extra days or months of working capital.

“We’ve helped companies go from the red to the black by optimizing their accounts receivable,” Mr. MacMullin said. AI-powered tools can help Indigenous businesses compete more effectively, providing access to advanced analytics and personalized customer experiences.

But there are also unique challenges for Indigenous entrepreneurs, Mr. Ritchie says.

When it comes to marketing or other creative applications, Indigenous entrepreneurs “really want [their] words to be [their] words — the word of the Indigenous marketer, the words of the Indigenous storyteller, the words of the elder” when engaging with AI. Generative AI applications can often summarize or change wording based on a prompt.

Entrepreneurs also need to be able to trust that their chatbots or other AI agents won’t generate false statements — also called hallucinations — or respond to prompts that are irrelevant to their business. It’s something Mr. Ritchie’s company has been aiming to address by pairing the large language model technology that backs all generative AI chatbots with knowledge-graph networks to create applications that are accurate, remain on-brand in customer interactions and don’t hallucinate.

And, while AI applications could help Indigenous businesses scale faster, many entrepreneurs are still facing a significant digital access gap, said Ms. Okere.

The Indigenous Prosperity Foundation’s recent report found two-thirds of Indigenous entrepreneurs struggle with high internet costs and 17 per cent with unreliable broadband access, and many lack digital tools that could help them advance their business, including customer relationship management, project management and cybersecurity software. Many respondents reported missing funding and networking opportunities and lower productivity due to digital access challenges.

“This is actually creating haves and have nots,” Ms. Okere said. “A lot of Indigenous entrepreneurs still live in their own rural communities, and part of the benefit is that I can live at home in my community and start this business, but if I want to compete, especially in the e-commerce space… I need to be able to access high-speed internet.”

In an effort to improve access to and training for this necessary tool, the Indigenous Prosperity Foundation recently launched a program for entrepreneurs that includes training on business, marketing, finances, hiring employees and more, and is exploring training to address the digital divide.

But the solution to this digital divide really depends on infrastructure, according to Keegan Leahy, senior director of the Indigenous Innovation Initiative. Indigenous communities urgently need better access to broadband internet and satellite communications, he said. According to a 2023 auditor general report, less than 43 per cent of households on reserve had access to high-speed internet in 2021, compared to 91 per cent of all Canadian households. He pointed to Canada’s Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program, which provides up to $10 billion in loan guarantees to allow Indigenous Peoples to take equity stakes in major projects.

Leahy said his organization is in discussions to build out infrastructure that would support the growth of AI, such as “sovereign data centres on reserve potentially, sovereign data lines going across the country.”

Those mega-projects would have multiple benefits, including economic development on reserve, creating enough computing capacity for Indigenous entrepreneurs who want to use and innovate with AI, and “making sure we protect our own [intellectual property] and our own data,” he said.

While he acknowledged that AI data centres are significant power draws, Mr. Leahy said he believes further development of microgrids, renewable energy and small modular nuclear reactors could help to address the additional power demand.

Mr. Leahy, Mr. Ritchie and Ms. Okere highlighted the potential of AI to preserve Indigenous cultures, languages and stories. “I would love an AI that could help me learn Cree on my own terms,” Mr. Ritchie said.

But the flipside, Mr. Leahy said, is the potential “dilution of culture and language. … It’s so easy for somebody to take an archive of Indigenous culture and disseminate it out there, and it’s lost.”

For that reason, he argued, it’s critical for Indigenous communities to have control over some AI models to “control our digital and cultural identity.”

Mastercard is leveraging AI to help create a more inclusive financial system, placing a strong emphasis on ethical AI practices, data privacy and responsible development to ensure that its innovative solutions benefit everyone. Focused on building an inclusive digital economy, Mastercard supports Indigenous small businesses with tools and resources via community partnerships and STEM education and digital literacy initiatives to empower the next generation with the necessary skills. Learn more here.

Advertising feature produced by Globe Content Studio with Mastercard. The Globe’s editorial department was not involved.