Heidi Adams has one thing on her mind these days: AI.
In her work as head of global marketing, IP and data centre networks with Nokia, Adams spends a lot of time thinking about artificial intelligence, its implications and what infrastructure is needed to support its rapid proliferation.
Heidi Adams has one thing on her mind these days: AI.
In her work as head of global marketing, IP and data centre networks with Nokia, Adams spends a lot of time thinking about artificial intelligence, its implications and what infrastructure is needed to support its rapid proliferation.
In her view, Nokia and Ottawa are well-positioned to rise to the challenge.
“(Nokia) is a ($32 billion business) and we’ve got a lot of things going on and a great presence in Ottawa,” she told OBJ in an interview last week.
In this instalment of Top of Mind in Tech, Adams discusses her perspective on the meteoric rise of AI, how Ottawa can support the growing need for AI infrastructure, and whether AI is just another bubble waiting to pop.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
What stands out to you most about AI?
One thing that just really catches me is AI and the crazy pace of technology evolution. AI is new, it's all we're talking about today, but AI has been around for over 50 years. In the ‘90s, we were talking about machine learning and in 2010 we talked about deep learning. It was really only with the advent of generative AI that things changed overnight. I can’t think of a time where I've seen technology become mainstream so quickly. If you think back on mobile phones, it took 16 years to get to 100 million customers. Netflix, 10 years to get to 100 million customers. ChatGPT? Two months. Wow. So this is incredible.
Now we're starting to wrap our heads around this whole generative AI thing and its power in generating all kinds of content, from writing essays to writing software code, meeting summaries, social media content — it just continues to evolve. We're just getting on top of that, but already AI is evolving. We're starting to hear about something called agentic AI. It's where AI is used to do more complex tasks that need multiple steps. Then we're going to go to physical AI — robots and stuff like that. So keeping up isn't easy, but to me what's really amazing is this vast opportunity for people in leadership to use tools to solve problems in new ways.
What is Ottawa’s role as AI evolves?
If you think of AI infrastructure, you typically think of Nvidia. That's in the news everywhere and for good reason. This month, they reached a market cap of over $4 trillion, so they're one of the world's most valuable companies, but they're not the only player in the market. There's a lot more behind the scenes that's required to develop and train these AI, the large language models that are underpinning everything we're doing in AI these days.
When you think of AI, a lot of that capability goes into the data centre and we're building new data centres to support demand for AI workload. Those data centres need power and cooling and security. A large AI data centre might consume a gigawatt of power and that's enough to deploy electricity to over 500,000 homes. To get that much electricity, you would actually need to build a small nuclear power plant. You don't get that everywhere. What we're starting to see is more data centres are being built and they're being built in different places. As a requirement, you actually need to be able to connect them and this comes back to the Ottawa tech community.
You need higher speeds to connect the data centre to AI servers, you need high speed and secure connections between those new data centres, and you need fast and secure and low-latency connections to get end users to the AI applications. So all this to say: networking is critical. Data centre network infrastructure for AI is a big area of investment for Nokia. And in Canada we have a team of over 2,200 engineers and staff that are working on data centre switching, IP routing, optical transport, network automation, all the things that support, in the background, the AI ecosystem. Ottawa is going to have a big role to play in AI from a networking point.
What is the current state of the AI business?
The business of AI: is it sustainable? Are we in a bubble? Hyper-scalers like Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta are going to be spending in the range of $300 billion this year on AI technology and infrastructure. Huge. On top of that, governments and consortium enterprises are spending more on the applications and stuff that runs on top of it. But at some point, especially for businesses, you need to transition to ROI. With all this investment, at some point, you have to get a business benefit out of it.
There was a recently published article by MIT that found that 95 per cent of enterprise AI projects failed to return rapid revenue acceleration. So everyone's investing, but it's not necessarily doing any returns. But there were people who purchased AI tools to help them do stuff in their business and they were much more likely to succeed versus trying to develop something new in-house. What that tells me is there is a good opportunity out there for companies to identify the right AI use cases and implement them really well.
Not everything's going to succeed, but the potential is really limitless. So are we in a bubble? It feels bubbly but I still think fundamentally there's a ton of opportunity here. I don't think that's going to change overnight.
What about AI makes you most excited?
AI is an example of why a career in tech is so rewarding and why I'm really glad I ended up here. I would say life in tech is never boring and there are always new things to learn, new technology cycles. Just when you think things are getting quiet, new things pop up again. In my career in the networking and tech area, I’ve seen the internet go from a science project to part of daily life. Mobile phones went from giant bricks to modern smartphones, video streaming, social media and now the AI era. Underneath each of these technology shifts has been an evolution in the underlying networks and that's been my focus for over 30 years. It's been amazing to be a part of the industry and see how it's evolved and really how it impacts how we work and learn, how we play and how we stay in touch with each other. So I'm excited about AI. It's yet another cool technology transition and inflection point and it just keeps you learning and excited about what's coming. 
