About the center
Where research meets the real economy.
CCAIE bridges the gap between the AI research being done in universities and the businesses that need it — right here in York Region.
CCAIE bridges the gap between the AI research being done in universities and the businesses that need it — right here in York Region.
Canada trains world-class AI talent and produces leading research — yet most small and mid-sized businesses still struggle to adopt it. CCAIE exists to close that gap: helping companies apply AI, training the people who will lead it, and building the ventures that will define the region's next decade.
We work at the intersection of academia and industry, so the businesses we serve get the rigour of research with the pragmatism of a working consultancy.
CCAIE pairs an academic mission with commercial discipline — two complementary arms working toward one goal.
Our not-for-profit arm holds academic partnerships and research funding, anchoring the center's mission in education, applied research, and public benefit.
Our commercial arm delivers consulting, training, and implementation to businesses — generating the revenue that keeps the center independent and sustainable.
The boundary between the two arms is deliberate. CCAIE Services delivers consulting, training, and implementation. CCAIE Foundation holds academic partnerships, applied research, and published frameworks, and takes no commercial engagements. Where a framework published by the Foundation is implemented by a commercial supplier — including suppliers in which the Foundation's director has an interest — that relationship is disclosed on the face of the document.
CCAIE is built alongside the institutions and partners that make York Region one of Canada's most promising innovation corridors.
Founding Director, Canadian Center for AI Entrepreneurship
Mitt Kabir has spent three decades on the same question from three different sides: how organisations actually absorb new technology, rather than how they say they will.
As a researcher, his work sits in knowledge management, innovation systems, and industrial digital transformation, including the book Knowledge-Based Social Entrepreneurship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). His recent chapter Cognitive Industry 4.0 Reimagined proposes co-adaptive intelligence — real-time mutual learning between people and machines — as the mechanism by which organisational resilience emerges, and is the scholarly foundation of the governance work CCAIE now publishes. He previously taught AI and digital transformation at a business school, and holds a PhD in information technology and a DBA in management.
As an operator, he designs and delivers applied AI programmes for enterprises and institutions. In August 2026 he designed and led a ten-day executive programme for thirty leaders of an industrial holding, which produced five pilot projects at investment-decision quality — and a published finding about why organisations stall after training that has since shaped CCAIE's entire service model.
As an entrepreneur, he has founded and scaled technology ventures including a global B2B marketplace and an AI-enabled commerce platform — working on recommendation engines and semantic search well before those became standard.
He chairs and speaks at international conferences on artificial intelligence and robotics, has advised governments on digital innovation and e-government policy, and mentors and invests in early-stage AI ventures. His 2026 keynote The Symbiotic Age: AGI, ASI, and the Bottleneck Inversion was delivered at TAKE 2026 in Lisbon; his forthcoming book is The Octopus Protocol: The Architecture of the Symbiotic Age.
CCAIE's governance design pairs a Research Director with the CEO and a board spanning academia, industry, municipal government, and youth representation — the structure the center is built to operate under as its academic partnership formalizes.
Based in King Township — 20 minutes from Vaughan's ventureLAB and 45 from downtown Toronto — CCAIE sits at the heart of the GTA North innovation corridor.
Proximity is a feature, not a footnote: we work on-site with the businesses we serve, embedded in the region's healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, energy, and logistics economies.
Whether you're a business, a partner institution, or a founder — we'd like to hear from you.