Collaborating with Intelligent Machines

Dave Senior Jr. is the CEO and Project Director at Neural Edge Solutions, where he leads a team dedicated to providing Canadian companies with secure, sovereign compute power for AI workloads and intensive computing needs. With a philosophy rooted in collaborative problem-solving and experimental thinking, Dave has positioned Neural Edge as a champion of Canadian data sovereignty. In this conversation, he shares how his team leverages AI as a creative collaborator, why experimentation is essential to innovation, and his vision for keeping Canadian data—and innovation—at home.

1. What does innovation mean to you?

Innovation means solving problems with meaningful solutions and using technology to do it. But it's not just the technology that allows that to happen—it really is the people that come together with creativity in mind and a sense of camaraderie to do this problem-solving.

2. How does your team generate new ideas?

We do a lot of collaboration among our team to develop new ideas. We try to put ourselves in each other's shoes—the marketing team will act like developers, developers will act like the C-suite. We really try to have a culture where no bad ideas exist and everyone can express themselves openly.

We also do AI jam sessions to create ideas. It's an interesting way we can leverage the technology to advance our thought process. We'll give an AI an example of a subject matter they could be an expert in, and then we can push up against those ideas in ways that we might not even feel comfortable doing with another person. Sometimes you get really incredible responses through AI that you might not have come up with on your own.

3. Do you have any specific rituals for resetting your team to be creative?

Getting out of the office to reset our creativity is really important. We spend a lot of time in data centers, at our desks and in our offices, and sometimes just getting out on little field trips is extremely helpful.

Also, spending time together, coming up with silly ideas, pushing towards the chaos—really trying to experiment on where the boundaries are and how far we can take them. That seems to be something that really helps us create great ideas and solve the problems we're facing.

There's something to be said about just having a moment to almost meditate and reflect on the work that you're doing. A lot of the time I find that work gets done when I don't even notice it—when I'm sleeping or not thinking about a problem, and then all of a sudden lightning strikes and you have this opportunity to start taking it in a direction you might not have thought of before.

4. How are you leveraging AI in your innovation process? What are some unexpected benefits or challenges you've encountered with AI adoption?

I've talked a little bit about our AI jam sessions, but something that we've really found a great use for is AI avatars. We've actually built these avatars in the Unity game engine that are connected to vector databases. In this way, we can have much more interaction than you normally would with a standard chatbot, and getting to see almost emotion coming through these avatars is really interesting.

We've found they're not only helpful internally for working on problems and developing solutions, but it's a lot of fun to have other people come and experience these avatars for the first time. We're actually going to have one of these avatars at our booth here at the Trend Hunter Future Festival, so everyone can have an opportunity to come up and ask questions live and see this experience. And of course, all of this runs on Neural Edge compute power.

I definitely consider AI a collaborator, not a competitor. Working alongside AI has opened up not only possibilities, but thoughts that we might not have come to on our own. One of the things we do have to be conscious about with AI is that the answers are not just convincing, but true. We always have to take things with a grain of salt and make sure there's some human intervention at some point to ensure everything is still lining up with what we need it to be.

5. How do you identify trends? What resources does your team use to spot trends and consumer insights?

We do a lot of monitoring of signals—AI research breakthroughs, GPU hardware that's coming out that's going to revolutionize the game. We try to keep our finger to the pulse as much as we can, on our own and through our community and networks.

But there are great partners like Trend Hunter that we rely on to take a look at the macro view of things. At the end of the day, it really is about triangulating the right story, because one source never gives the full picture. You really have to come at it from different angles and make sure you're getting an unbiased view of things.

The more we have an opportunity to talk to people and find out cool things that other Canadian companies are doing, the more it sparks great ideas within our company. We're all about helping move that innovation forward.

6. What is the biggest challenge you face when innovating?

The biggest challenge we face is definitely scaling the hardware to meet the demand and this idea of Canadian compute sovereignty. We're still in a really great position with Neural Edge and what we've been able to accomplish so far—getting these compute resources up and running and connecting securely to Canadian companies.

But there is definitely something to be said about having buy-in from stakeholders. At the end of the day, there's a bit of acceptance of the unknown that people have to embrace when we're discussing technology that's as new as AI and quantum computing. There's a leap of faith that people have to take, stakeholder-wise, in order to achieve this innovation.

7. Has there ever been an instance where another industry has influenced an innovation at Neural Edge Solutions?

Absolutely. We get influenced by other industries all of the time. The video game industry was very influential in the creation of these avatars—we're using the Unity game engine to do that.

There have also been instances where finance and trading influenced us. Their focus on user trust is the bedrock where we base a lot of the foundations of our contracts and how we build trust and relationships with partners and clients who come to us to create exactly what they need as far as compute power for their work resources.

One challenge we face every day is that everyone has a completely different workload, a completely different AI, a completely different problem they're trying to solve. We pride ourselves on the flexibility and being agile enough to accommodate all of that. We love working with companies to make sure that they're getting exactly what they need out of security, storage, compute power—all that good stuff.

8. What makes an innovative culture? How do you create a culture of innovation?

I really believe in a culture of experimentation. When it comes to innovation, everyone has to be comfortable and feel safe enough to put any idea forward. It's not good enough to just say there are no bad ideas—people really need to be able to go past the line of what we think is even capable and really push ideas.

There's a "what if" mentality. You know how improv comedians have that "yes, and" approach? That's their big thing. So if someone has an idea and they come to you, it's not good enough to just nod along with them—you need to take it in a positive way and say, "Yeah, and what if we did this?"

Some of the best ideas I've ever seen in my whole career come from this collaborative environment. But that really needs to be fostered—experimentation is okay, failing quickly and learning from it is a good thing, and that should be celebrated from the top to the bottom. We really want to make sure that comes across as far as the culture we're fostering at Neural Edge.

9. Looking to the future, how will Neural Edge Solutions continue to be a leader in innovation?

We plan on continuing to expand and be a leader in innovation by bringing more compute power, the hottest hardware, and creating a safe place for Canadian companies to access that.

Something that we've heard a lot from clients coming to us is, "Where's my data being kept right now?" There are amazing solutions out there, but where are those servers located? Are they in Canada? Do you have access to that data? Do you own your own data?

We want to make sure we have an answer to that question, and we want to position ourselves as Canada's solution for secure Canadian compute.