The news seemed to arrive all at once, even though Canada has long been at the forefront of technology, from Vancouver's film studios to Montreal's world-class animation talent. But in the past few months, things were different. Everyone seemed to come together (a rarity) and as a group, all parties were thinking ahead (another rarity): academia, government, non-profit organizations and businesses all came out in strong support of artificial intelligence research and development. The announcements were made in relatively quick succession: A new federal budget would provide $125 million to improve Canada's competitive and strategic advantage in AI. The University of Toronto's Vector Institute would hire roughly 25 new faculty and research scientists devoted to the field of artificial intelligence.

When Jimoh Ovbiagele was ten years old, his parents decided to get a divorce. But as the couple got deeper into the process, the legal fees grew more and more expensive, until they ended up abandoning the whole plan. "It had a negative impact on my family," Ovbiagele says. In high school and beyond, when Ovbiagele was looking into various career options, he discovered that most of a lawyer's time is actually spent researching cases. Ovbiagele ended up studying computer science rather than law, but when he had the opportunity to pursue an artificial intelligence project at the University of Toronto, he had a pretty good idea of what he wanted to work on.

M erely twenty years ago, artificial intelligence (AI) was the plot line in movies, books, and short stories. While it loomed on the horizon, it is only now getting the attention of world, and business leaders. A few days into 2016, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook announced that he plans to spend 2016 developing an AI system to help run his life. He stated in his Facebook post: "My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man."

Lauded as the world's first AI lawyer the story of "ROSS" began with a divorce When Jimoh Ovbiagele was 10 years old, his parents decided to separate. His mother started seeking out divorce lawyers, but was quickly halted by the astronomical hourly rates. "As a single mother with two very young kids, she couldn't pay for even a couple hours of this this divorce lawyer's time," says Ovbiagele. Years later, law seemed like a natural path for Ovbiagele – a way to help ensure others would not have to go through what his mother did--but while the University of Texas computer science major considered applying to law school in 2011, he was turned off by the amount of time he'd be expected to devote to research, rather than the practice, in the profession. The seed, however, had been planted.

Last month, law firm Baker & Hostetler announced that it would employ IBM's artificially intelligent lawyer, Ross, to help ease its tedious workload. In a statement, the firm's chief technology officer said, "we believe that emerging technologies like cognitive computing and other forms of machine learning can help enhance the services we deliver to our clients." Ross, a system built on the back of IBM's Watson, claims to be able to interpret questions lawyers ask it, and read "through the entire body of law and returns a cited answer and topical readings from legislation, case law and secondary sources to get you up-to-speed quickly." But the first thing I noticed about Ross wasn't how many legal documents it can search at once, or how accurate it claims to be. It was the name: Ross.