Tom Corr

These affiliates are standalone organizations, typically reasonably focused, like I said, doing maybe half a million to 10 million a year.

But they're not paying you, they're not customers.

We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that.

Well, back in the day when our organization was first formed, it was companies like BlackBerry.

I think most people remember for many, many years ago.

And there's been a lot more since.

Our mandate was basically to get and fund early stage companies, mostly that were commercializing IP coming out of academic institutions and help them move along.

And so that's what we did.

So they ranged in application areas from all over the place.

But some of the ones that you'd recall are people like even BlackBerry and even Nortel back in the day that we were involved with their founding.

So AIP was formed basically to set up a series of affiliates initially around North America

Affiliates being companies that are maybe doing half a million to 10 million a year.

They have some amount of SaaS business.

Some of them may or may not be in the AI business, but what we're doing is allowing them to augment their offerings

with the AI as a SaaS offerings that we provide.

So we have data scientists, engineers, access to AI platforms, access to AI enabled software that we will enable these companies to provide to these end customers.

So basically what we're allowing them to do is generate a new source of business.

allowing them to get the support they need to get into the AI business, which can be a little complicated, especially for these smaller companies that we're setting up as affiliates.

Then the longer term goal is to acquire the bulk of these affiliates that are looking for an exit and want to be part of an acquisition and consolidation play, which is what AI partnerships is formed to do.

So in the interim, it's an arm's length.