Community AI Pathways for BC’s Look West Report

November 24, 2025

How BC’s Grassroots AI Ecosystem Delivers on the Province’s 10-Year Vision

British Columbia just dropped Look West a 10-year bet on major projects, skilled workers, and strategic sectors like AI and quantum.

Cool. Now here’s the missing piece:

You don’t get a resilient AI economy just by funding big projects.

You get it by powering up the community layer: the humans, networks, and local infrastructures that actually make this tech land well.

Look West Report (PDF)
Look West Report (PDF)

The BC + AI Ecosystem is already doing this work. This memo maps Look West’s goals to community-driven pathways that can turn this strategy from industrial plan into living system.

1. What Look West Wants (AI Edition)

From the AI / innovation side, Look West is basically saying:

  • Double the AI & quantum sector and grow tech’s economic value and jobs over the next decade.
  • Integrate AI into K–12 via a new provincial advisory committee and early skills exposure.
  • Upskill and reskill workers as trades, construction, manufacturing, and clean energy all get automated and instrumented.
  • Help SMEs adopt advanced tech, so it’s not just the usual suspects capturing all the gains.
  • Align with national security, critical minerals, ports, and clean energy while keeping public trust and social license intact.

All good ambitions. But none of that sticks without trust, real local legitimacy, AI literacy that’s actually grounded in the cultures and communities it touches, and meaningful participation from people on the ground. That’s where the existing network comes in.

2. What Already Exists: BC’s Community AI Backbone

Over the last 18+ months, BC’s grassroots AI ecosystem has quietly built out:

TL;DR: the “mycelium” is already in the soil. Look West is the trellis. We can grow this thing together or we can let it get captured by the same old extractive patterns.

3. Mapping Look West → Community AI Pathways

Here’s the simple translation layer….

Now let’s break those into actual moves….

Pathway 1: K–12 & AI Literacy

From “advisory committee” to living ecosystem

Look West goal: Set up a K-12 advisory committee to explore integration of AI platforms and skills into schools.

Community pathway:

Seat community at the table.
  • Include BC + AI’s AI + Education working group, youth organizers (e.g. national AI youth forums), Indigenous educators, creative technologists, and classroom teachers already using AI with students.
Co-design a BC-specific AI literacy framework
  • Covers critical and creative uses of AI, not just “how to prompt.”
  • Integrates Indigenous knowledge systems, language revitalization, and local stories.
  • Treats AI as media and infrastructure, not magic.
Pilot in real classrooms with open tooling
  • Use open-source / low-cost tools wherever possible.
  • Run small, rapid pilots in diverse districts (urban, rural, remote, Indigenous, newcomer communities) with community support.

Result: The K–12 advisory isn’t just a policy table; it becomes a living network of students, teachers, and communities building AI capacity together.

Pathway 2: SME Adoption & Trades / Applied Sectors

From “advanced tech” buzzwords to actual deployment in shops, sets, and studios

Look West goal: Help businesses, especially SMEs, adopt innovation, and double down on trades training and applied sectors.

Community pathway:

Use meetups as SME intake & triage
  • Turn BC + AI events into structured “AI clinics” where SMEs show up with their actual workflows and leave with 1–2 concrete pilots.
Connect trades and creative programs to AI labs
  • Partner with colleges, unions, and training orgs to run hands-on labs: AI for estimating, scheduling, safety, BIM, post-production, sound, animation, etc.
Democratize access to infrastructure
  • Co-design shared GPU / compute pools and tooling programs for SMEs and individuals, framed as critical AI infrastructure in line with Look West.

Result: AI adoption stops being a consulting buzzword and becomes a community service — accessible, practical, and grounded in real work.

Pathway 3: JEDI, Reconciliation & Governance

From “consultation” to actual power-sharing

Look West goal: Grow major projects and strategic sectors while advancing reconciliation and maintaining social license.

Community pathway:

  • Embed JEDI from day zero in AI sector action plans.
    • Use the BC AI JEDI work as a baseline lens: who is at the table, who gets funded, who controls the data, whose languages and lands are involved.
  • Center Indigenous governance in AI projects that touch land, resources, and communities.
    • Tie in work like Indigenomics AI and Indigenous data sovereignty frameworks.
    • FPIC for AI/data projects too, not just physical infrastructure.
  • Build a standing “Community AI & Ethics Council.”
    • Multi-stakeholder group (Indigenous leaders, labour, youth, disability justice, creatives, technologists, researchers).
    • Reviews major AI-reliant initiatives and provides public, transparent guidance.

Result: AI isn’t just another extraction layer on top of resource projects in BC it becomes a space where justice, equity, and sovereignty are non-negotiable design constraints.

Pathway 4: Hubs, Networks & Shared Infrastructure

From “sectors” to systems

Look West goal: Grow AI, quantum, life sciences, and innovation ecosystems that attract capital and talent.

Community pathway:

  • Recognize BC+AI as the “front door” to the ecosystem.
    • Fund the convening layer: meetups, subgroups, regional nodes (Surrey, Island, Interior, North), online infrastructure, knowledge commons.
  • Stand up regional AI hubs with community governance.
    • Not just corporate accelerators: hubs where students, SMEs, creators, and community orgs share space, tools, and mentorship.
  • Open-source the learnings.
    • Treat all playbooks, curriculum, pilot results, and tooling as a public resource — the “source code” of the BC AI ecosystem.

Result: Instead of isolated flagship projects, BC gets a connected mesh of people, places, and practices that keep AI talent and value rooted here.

Pathway 5: Mind, Culture & Public Trust

From fear/hype cycles to grounded, ongoing dialogue

Look West goal: Maintain public trust while accelerating major projects and AI-enabled sectors.

Community pathway:

  • Use existing spaces like MAC (Mind, AI, Consciousness) and community forums as permanent venues for:
    • Mental health impacts
    • Automation anxiety
    • Cultural, spiritual, and philosophical implications of AI
  • Bring creatives and storytellers into the process.
    • Commission artists, filmmakers, writers, and community media to translate AI policy and projects into human stories.
  • Run recurring “open audits” of AI in BC.
    • Annual or semi-annual assemblies where communities review how AI is actually being used across sectors and feed input back into policy.

Result: Public trust isn’t managed through press releases it’s built via ongoing, messy, honest conversation with the people who live here.

4. The Offer

BC + AI and the wider community ecosystem aren’t asking to be “consulted” at the end.

We’re offering to:

  • Co-design the AI parts of Look West with a justice-forward, community-rooted lens.
  • Operate the connective tissue between government, industry, education, Indigenous governments, and everyday residents.
  • Prototype, test, and iterate real-world AI programs — in classrooms, shops, studios, clinics, and communities — and open-source the results.

Look West gives BC a big industrial skeleton.

The community AI ecosystem is ready to supply the nervous system, culture, and conscience so this thing actually lives.