UWCISA's 5 Tech Takeaways: Next-Gen AI at CES 2026, Changing Job Dynamics, and High-Stakes Tech Rivalries

This edition looks at AI and digital infrastructure from five angles: NVIDIA’s latest hardware platform, Anthropic’s deep dive on how AI is actually used in the economy, frontline “AI fatigue” inside EY Canada, record-breaking frustration with Canadian telecoms, and Nvidia’s chips turning into bargaining tools in U.S.–China geopolitics. Together, they sketch a picture of powerful technology racing ahead while workers, consumers, and governments scramble to keep pace.

NVIDIA’s Rubin Platform Sets the Stage for Gigascale AI at CES 2026

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang opened CES 2026 by unveiling Rubin, the company’s first extreme-codesigned, six-chip AI platform, designed to dramatically cut the cost of AI training and inference while accelerating model development. As the successor to Blackwell, Rubin tightly integrates GPUs, CPUs, networking, storage and software to reduce bottlenecks and deliver AI tokens at roughly one-tenth the previous cost. Alongside Rubin, NVIDIA expanded its open-model ecosystem across healthcare, climate science, robotics, embodied intelligence, and autonomous driving, including Alpamayo, a reasoning VLA model family aimed at Level-4 autonomy and showcased in the new Mercedes-Benz CLA. Huang also highlighted the rise of “physical AI” through robotics, simulation, and industrial partnerships with companies like Siemens, while rolling out consumer-facing news such as DLSS 4.5, RTX gaming updates, and new GeForce NOW options—all reinforcing NVIDIA’s ambition to provide a full-stack AI infrastructure from data center to desktop to car.

• Rubin slashes AI costs: Rubin promises roughly 10x cheaper token generation by co-designing GPUs, CPUs, networking, storage, and software into a single extreme-scale AI platform.
• Open models across six domains: NVIDIA’s open models now span healthcare, climate, reasoning, robotics, embodied intelligence, and autonomous driving, giving developers a broad foundation for new AI applications.
• Physical and personal AI converge: From Level-4-capable vehicles to desktop “personal agents” and RTX gaming tech, NVIDIA is pushing AI into cars, robots, and consumer devices—not just supercomputers.

(Source: NVIDIA Blog)

Inside Claude’s Global Impact: New Data Shows Productivity Gains and Shifting Job Skills

The January 2026 Anthropic Economic Index introduces “economic primitives,” a set of new metrics that describe how people and firms actually use Claude: task complexity, human and AI skill levels, autonomy, use cases, and task success. Drawing on one million anonymized conversations and API calls from late 2025, the report finds that Claude is disproportionately used for high-skill, high-education tasks and tends to deliver larger time savings on more complex work—though reliability drops as tasks become longer and harder. Adoption patterns differ sharply by geography: higher-income, higher-education regions use Claude more collaboratively and for personal or diversified work, while lower-income countries lean more on coursework and targeted technical tasks. When success rates are factored in, the report suggests AI could still add about one percentage point to annual labour-productivity growth over the next decade, but also warns that automation tends to remove the most education-intensive tasks within many jobs, potentially “deskilling” roles even as it boosts efficiency.

• New “economic primitives” map real AI use: Anthropic introduces foundational metrics to quantify how Claude is used—covering complexity, skills, autonomy, use case, and task success across millions of interactions.
• Biggest gains on complex tasks, but with reliability tradeoffs: Claude speeds up higher-skill work the most, yet success rates fall as tasks get longer or more complex, meaning realistic productivity estimates must discount for failures.
• AI reshapes job content and inequality: Usage concentrates on higher-education tasks, often automating the most skill-intensive parts of jobs and potentially deskilling roles, while regions with more education and income are better positioned to benefit.

(Source: Anthropic)

EY Canada Confronts Rising ‘AI Fatigue’ as Workers Feel Overwhelmed by Rapid Change

EY Canada has invested heavily in AI training—400,000 hours of learning time and a $12 million internal program since 2022—but is now grappling with “AI fatigue” among parts of its workforce. After segmenting employees by both skill and willingness to use AI, the firm found that some professionals felt so overwhelmed by the pace of change they didn’t know where to start. In response, EY is tailoring its approach with bespoke learning paths, more guidance on ethical and responsible AI use, and sandbox environments where skeptical staff can experiment without risk. This reflects a wider pattern: across consulting, law, and other white-collar sectors, workers report burnout as AI tools, training requirements, and vendor pitches stack on top of already long workweeks. While some firms are tying promotions and hiring to AI proficiency, EY emphasizes human-in-the-loop oversight—especially for more fragile agentic AI systems—and insists it still plans to hire junior talent rather than replacing entry-level roles outright.

• AI fatigue is a real adoption barrier: Even after large-scale training, some EY staff feel overloaded and disengaged, forcing the firm to rethink how it introduces AI into everyday workflows.
• Personalized, empathetic training is emerging as critical: EY is segmenting employees by “skill” and “will,” using bespoke learning, ethical guidance, and safe sandboxes to engage skeptics instead of simply pushing more generic courses.
• Human oversight remains central, despite automation pressure: The firm stresses that fragile tools like agentic AI still require trained humans in the loop, and continues to recruit entry-level consultants rather than fully automating junior work.

(Source: The Logic)

Telus Sees 78% Complaint Surge as Billing and Contract Issues Rise Nationwide

Canada’s telecom watchdog, the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS), reports that consumer complaints have hit a record high, rising 17% to 23,647 accepted cases over the past year. Wireless services remain the biggest source of frustration, but billing problems—incorrect charges and missing credits—make up nearly 46% of all issues. Among the “Big 3” carriers, Rogers leads with 27% of total complaints, while Telus accounts for 21% but suffers the sharpest increase: a 78% year-over-year jump in complaint volume. Bell sits at 17% of the total. The report also flags a 121% spike in breach-of-contract complaints, including fee hikes and broken promises on features, alongside persistent service issues such as outages and installation delays. Although many Canadians still don’t know the CCTS exists, it remains a free avenue for unresolved disputes—and says it successfully resolves most cases. Still, with TV-related complaints up 44% and billing errors at a five-year high, the data paints a grim picture for customer experience in Canada’s concentrated telecom market.

• Record complaint levels across Canadian telecoms: The CCTS logged 23,647 accepted complaints—a 17% jump—driven heavily by wireless issues and billing disputes.
• Telus stands out for rapid deterioration: While Rogers still generates the most complaints overall, Telus suffered a 78% increase in cases, far outpacing Bell and indicating a sharp drop in customer satisfaction.
• Broken contracts and billing errors dominate frustration: Breach-of-contract complaints surged 121%, while billing problems hit a five-year high, underscoring systemic issues in pricing transparency and service reliability.

(Source: iPhone in Canada)

Nvidia’s H200 Becomes Geopolitical Leverage as China Restricts Purchases

China has instructed customs agents that Nvidia’s H200 AI chips are “not permitted” to enter the country and advised domestic tech firms to avoid buying them unless absolutely necessary, creating what sources describe as a de facto—if not yet formal—ban. The directive comes just as the U.S. government approved exports of the H200 to China under certain conditions, turning the chip into a focal point of U.S.–China tech tensions ahead of President Donald Trump’s planned April visit to Beijing. Analysts suggest Beijing may be using the restrictions as bargaining leverage or to push demand toward domestic AI processors like Huawei’s Ascend 910C, which still lag Nvidia’s performance for large-scale model training. The stakes are enormous: Chinese companies have reportedly ordered more than two million H200 units at around US$27,000 each, far exceeding Nvidia’s inventory, while the U.S. stands to collect a 25% fee on chip sales. Whether these moves ultimately favor China’s chip ambitions or Nvidia’s bottom line remains unclear, but the H200 has clearly become a strategic asset in a broader struggle over AI hardware dominance.

• China imposes a de facto block on H200 chips: Customs guidance and warnings to tech firms effectively halt Nvidia H200 imports for now, even though it’s unclear if this is a formal or temporary measure.
• Chips become negotiation tools in U.S.–China relations: The timing—just after U.S. export approval and ahead of high-level talks—suggests Beijing may be using access to H200s as leverage in broader tech and trade negotiations.
• Huge commercial and strategic stakes on both sides: Chinese firms have ordered millions of H200s, while the U.S. benefits from export fees and strategic influence, making the chip central to the evolving AI power balance.

(Source: Reuters)

Author: Malik D. CPA, CA, CISA. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent UWCISA, UW,  or anyone else. This post was written with the assistance of an AI language model. 

Lessons Learned: Flashback to Summer’s Great Rogers Outage (Part 2)

In our last post, we looked at the Great Rogers Outage of 2022.

Millions of Canadians experienced life without mobile and Internet service – a necessity in our pandemic life. The cause was traced back to a system-change gone wrong. It appears that though Rogers had tested some parts of the planned change, it was insufficient to identify all the issues. The result was that the network got flooded with traffic and then the systems went down.

 

What are some lessons we can learn from this outage?

Major Controls Frameworks, like COBIT and ISO27001, and audit standards, like SOC2, require that management implement change management controls. Consequently, the outage presents a unique opportunity to understand what can go wrong when it comes to change management. Moreover, it highlights what types of controls are relevant from a real-live scenario - as Rogers documented in its submission to the CRTC. 

With that in mind, let’s look at four lessons from the Great Rogers Outage of 2022. 

Lesson #1: The Importance of Redundancy

When commenting on the impact of the outage on governments within Canada, Rogers noted: “It is important to note that in most of the cases, we provide a portion of the telecommunications solution, but not all underlying services. Many institutional customers have redundant services” [emphasis added].

Also, as previously noted that they had “established reciprocal agreements between Rogers and Bell, and between Rogers and TELUS, to exchange alternate carrier SIM cards in support of Business Continuity.”

The implication of this lesson is that we should try to diversify the telecom providers within our professional and personal lives. For example, my personal device is provisioned through Fido (a Rogers sub-brand), while my work cell is provisioned through Bell.  

Lesson #2: Test, Test, Test

They say in real-estate it’s about location, location, location. In change management it’s test, test, test. In the aftermath of the outage, Rogers doesn’t deny that they need to review their change implementation process:

“Most importantly, Rogers is examining its “change, planning and implementation” process to identify improvements to eliminate risk of further service interruptions.”

To be fair, it’s not like there was no testing done. Instead, Rogers had used a phased approach to rolling out the change:

“Concerning the July 8^th outage, the proposed activities were very carefully reviewed, as we normally do with all network changes. We validated all aspects of this change.  In fact, we had begun introducing this change weeks ago, on February 8^th and had already implemented successfully the first five (5) phases in our core network.” [emphasis added]

It’s a good reminder that in the world of IT General Controls, and IT Risk Management more broadly, it’s not about what goes right but what goes wrong. Consequently, companies should ensure that the scenarios tested are comprehensive enough to identify hidden assumptions or dependencies. For example, Rogers had a procedure that relied on “alternate carrier SIM Cards”. Hypothetically, testing whether this worked ahead of time could help identify whether the employee could find their SIM cards or how they activated such SIM cards when they have no Internet.

Lesson #3: Planning Crisis Communications from Content to Channels

According to the Rogers submission, the company conducted the following communications:

“During the outage, Rogers communicated with customers across several different channels, including social media, media outlets, Rogers Sports & Media properties, website banners, virtual assistants, interactive voice responses (“IVR”), public service announcements and community forums. In addition, Rogers’ CEO conducted broadcast interviews with CP24, Global News, CTV News, BNN, and CityNews. Rogers SVP of Access Networks & Operations also conducted broadcast interviews on CBC and CityNews.”

The following CBC news clip illustrates what was communicated and how:

As can be seen, the reporter was a little surprised that they got message from the IT team – instead of Rogers themselves. However, Rogers did admit that they “will be updating [their] plans and procedures”. Specifically, they plan to:

• Equip the communications team with “back-up devices on [an] alternate network”
• Be more timely “in posting details to customer care channels, web properties, social media, as well as public service announcements (“PSAs”) across media properties”
• Provide more frequent updates “even if there is limited or no additional information to share”
• Determine an alternative way for the communications team to authenticate themselves, when the second-factor registered with the social media service is reliant on “a device on the Rogers network”
• Provide specific “status of critical services (such as 9-1-1), how they may be impacted by the outage, and advice for customers”

The outage is a good illustration of how critical crisis communications can be. Maintaining effective communications with customers or other stakeholders is key to minimizing the reputational damage that such incidents can potentially have.

Lesson #4: Monitoring

The final takeaway is the importance of having resources and tools to monitor the restoration efforts. That is, the fixes deployed may not resolve all the issues. Rogers reported the following results with respect to bringing things back online:

“Once the technology team confirmed stability of our core network, and that traffic volumes were returning to normal level across the network, we proceeded to inform customers that our network and systems were returning to fully operational service for the vast majority of our customers. We also notified them that some customers may experience intermittent issues, and that our technology teams are monitoring and would work to resolve any issue as quickly as possible.” [emphasis added]

As can be seen, Rogers was able to restore the service for the vast majority of customers. However, there were a few that still experienced lingering issues. Consequently, it’s important to have continuous monitoring in place to ensure that the service is restored fully before returning to business as usual.

 

Closing thoughts

The incident highlights how dependent society has become on the wireless carriers for the day-to-day transactions and functioning of society. Vass Bednar (also interviewed in the above CBC newsclip) summarized the situation in an op-ed in the Globe and Mail as follows: 

“Enormous advances in mobile tech have made Canada's telecoms enormously powerful, and that power has consolidated in just five major players. That number threatens to get smaller, too, with the proposed Rogers-Shaw merger currently under review by Canada's Competition Bureau. If the deal goes through, the company that caused so many Canadians to lose connection with each other would serve roughly 40 per cent of all households in English Canada… it reinforced the idea that our telecommunication networks are vital public infrastructure that is controlled by private corporations. We've lost sight of that balance, despite the ways we rely on those networks.”

As discussed in the first takeaway, the issue of redundancy is paramount when it comes to ensuring ongoing access. Ironically, the lack of sufficient alternatives in the mobile carrier space amplifies the availability risk for us all.

Author: Malik Datardina, CPA, CA, CISA. Malik works at Auvenir as a GRC Strategist that is working to transform the engagement experience for accounting firms and their clients. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent UWCISA, UW, Auvenir (or its affiliates), CPA Canada or anyone else.

Fiona’s Fury: Flashback to Summer’s Great Rogers Outage (Part 1)

Canadians continue to pick up the pieces after tropical storm Fiona battered the maritime provinces. Although estimates of the damage are yet to be calculated, the “Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston announced over C$40 million ($29.1 million) in support to help those who were impacted by Fiona” (link). In terms of cellphone outages, CBC reported that “there are still areas of the province without cellphone service Monday although companies declined to say exactly  how many customers have been affected.”

 

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has asked for estimates on how many people were affected by the outage, but the telecom companies are reticent to share this information. As CBC reported: “Bell and Telus asked for some of their submissions to be redacted, while Eastlink and Rogers demanded their entire reports be kept confidential.”

Photo by Pixabay: link

 

Rogers Outage in Review: What happened last summer?

When looking at the outage that hit the Maritimes, it reminds us of the situation that unfolded over the summer. In July 2022, the Rogers outage was not limited to the East Coast. Instead, it affected the entire country. When Rogers was requested to explain what happened, it appears that they had a more conciliatory tone:

“Rogers Communications Canada Inc. (“Rogers”) is in receipt of a letter containing Requests for Information (“RFIs”) from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (“CRTC” or the “Commission”), dated July 12, 2022, concerning the above-mentioned subject. Attached, please find our Response to that letter… At the outset, Rogers appreciates the opportunity to explain to the Commission, the Government of Canada and all Canadians what transpired on July 8^th, 2022.  The network outage experienced by Rogers was simply not acceptable. We failed in our commitment to be Canada’s most reliable network. We know how much our customers rely on our networks and we sincerely apologize.” [Emphasis added]

 

Though the documented was redacted, it did provide some background as to what happened. For this post, we will take a look at the outage itself. For the next post, we will look at the lessons learned.  

 

Cause of the outage

Rogers explained the cause of the outage as follows:

“Given the magnitude of the outage, it appears that Rogers had to be more forthcoming with what happened and were “Maintenance and update windows always take place in the very early morning hours when network traffic is at its quietest. At 4:43AM EDT, a specific coding was introduced in our Distribution Routers which triggered the failure of the Rogers IP core network starting at 4:45AM… The configuration change deleted a routing filter and allowed for all possible routes to the Internet to pass through the routers. As a result, the routers immediately began propagating abnormally high volumes of routes throughout the core network. Certain network routing equipment became flooded, exceeded their capacity levels and were then unable to route traffic, causing the common core network to stop processing traffic. As a result, the Rogers network lost connectivity to the Internet for all incoming and outgoing traffic for both the wireless and wireline networks for our consumer and business customers.” [Emphasis added]

In other words, the change inadvertently resulted in an attack pattern similar to a denial-of-service attack – where the network shutdown because it became overwhelmed with traffic.

They also go on to explain that the company “uses a common core network, essentially one IP network infrastructure, that supports all wireless, wireline and enterprise services. The common core is the brain of the network that receives, processes, transmits and connects all Internet, voice, data and TV traffic for our customers… Certain network routing equipment became flooded, exceeded their memory and processing capacity and were then unable to route and process traffic, causing the common core network to shut down.” The implication being that the common core network became a single point of failure.

 

What was and was not impacted

With respect to Rogers Bank (yes, Rogers operates a bank):

“The impact to the Bank’s customers was minimal as the Bank services were available and the Bank’s customers were able to transact on their Rogers Bank credit cards. There was no interruption in the Bank’s core systems (credit card processing, Interactive Voice Response (“IVR”), Call Centre and customer self-serve mobile application) and these core systems remained available to the Bank’s customers. No critical Bank systems were impacted, and all daily processing was completed as required, including by the Bank’s statement printing vendor and its card personalization bureau which received their daily files and were processing them per standard service level agreements and procedures.”

 

This was a different story for those that relied on Rogers phone lines to process payments at their businesses with Interac tweeting:

“There is a nationwide Rogers outage that encompasses all their business and consumer network services. This is impacting INTERAC Debit and INTERAC eTransfer. INTERAC Debit is currently unavailable online and at checkout..”

 

Beyond the millions who had no service, emergency communications were also impacted:

• “Unfortunately, the outage of July 8^th did impact 9-1-1 service across Rogers’ service area, to both wireline and wireless services.
• Wireline impact:  There were approximately [REDACTED] 9-1-1 calls placed successfully across Rogers’ network on July 8th.  The typical daily average of total wireline 9-1-1 calls is [REDACTED] per day. Data is unavailable for unsuccessful wireline 9-1-1 calls.  On July 9^th, there were approximately [REDACTED] 9-1-1 calls placed successfully across Rogers’ network.
• Wireless impact: As can be seen in table below, the outage similarly affected wireless 9-1-1. Total successful calls were [REDACTED] the average daily amount of about [REDACTED] 9-1-1 calls made from Rogers wireless devices.”
•  

Rogers offered service outage credits

The key remedy offered was service credits, but this was not due to breaches in service agreements:

“There was no breach of our service agreements with our retail customers. However, in order to address our customers’ disappointment with the outage, Rogers has already announced it will be crediting 5 days of service fees to its customers. This will be applied automatically to their next invoice.”

 

Cooperation with Bell and Telus

Regardless of the highly-competitive nature of the business, it does appear the Rogers, Bell and Telus were coordinating with each other:

• “On July 17th, 2015, the Canadian Telecom Resiliency Working Group (“CTRWG”), formerly called Canadian Telecom Emergency Preparedness Association, established reciprocal agreements between Rogers and Bell, and between Rogers and TELUS, to exchange alternate carrier SIM cards in support of Business Continuity.”
• “As we stated in Rogers(CRTC)11July2022-1.xviii above, our Chief Technology and Information Officer reached out to his counterparts at Bell and TELUS early on July 8th. Assistance was offered by both Bell and TELUS. However, given the nature of the issue, Rogers rapidly assessed and concluded that it was not possible to make the necessary network changes to enable our wireless customers to move to their wireless networks.”
• “Rogers, Bell and TELUS are presently assessing potential options and will report further findings and potential solutions per the creation of the Memorandum of Understanding that will be delivered in September 2022 to the Minister of ISED by CSTAC.”

In closing, the outage comes down to change management. The error was exacerbated by the industry-standard approach to using a single platform to provide the various telecommunication services. Rogers did offer service credits, but were careful to note that this was not due to breach of agreements. Finally, the industry does come together during crisis situation, putting their competitive differences aside. 

In our next post, we’ll take a look at the lessons learned from this outage. Stay tuned!

Author: Malik Datardina, CPA, CA, CISA. Malik works at Auvenir as a GRC Strategist that is working to transform the engagement experience for accounting firms and their clients. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent UWCISA, UW, Auvenir (or its affiliates), CPA Canada or anyone else.

Verizon Mobile Push into Canada Evaporates: The Data Privacy Angle

Canadians had been anxiously awaiting the entrance of American telecom giant into the Canadian mobile market. For years, Canadians have lived under the domination of a few giant players, which has resulted in Canadians paying one of the highest - if not the highest - cell phone rates in the world.

The government of Canada actually dedicated a website, which actually illustrates the level of concentration in the market. Apparently, to address the issue "Ottawa rolled out the red carpet to attract the U.S. mobile giant in the hopes of establishing a fourth mobile competitor in all provinces - not only in Quebec, where Quebecor’s Vidéotron is giving the Big Three a run for their money. "(see the Globe & Mail article for the full context of the quote). As this Globe & Mail article, suggests the hope was that Verizon would have entered the market and forced the incumbents to offer better prices.

However, Verizon announced that it has cancelled any plans to enter into the Canadian market and thus dashing these hopes.

An interesting point to note, however, is the data security and privacy angle that the incumbents took to bolster their case to the Canadian public. As per the FairForCanada website (which is supported by the Big 3 Telecoms), they claim:
"Who do you want to own your private data? 

Across the country, Canadians use their wireless devices to make calls, send text messages and emails, and browse the internet every day. That information should be safe, secure, and private. 

Will American companies say no to requests from U.S. government agencies, for customers’ personal data? 

Canadian wireless providers have a solid track record of protecting your data in compliance with Canadian laws. But what will happen with regard to the data of Canadians in the hands of foreign-owned wireless carriers? What laws will regulate the protection of your information? This is not a trivial issue. It is one that should be of concern to all Canadians."

It seems that the advocacy group was riding the fear of Canadians that the US will have access to their data.

It seems they have done their research.

As noted in this ZDNet article, "Since being signed into law in 2001, the Patriot Act has been cited as a viable reason for Canadian companies, government departments and universities to avoid the cloud due to the close proximity to the United States". In other words, fear of US surveillance has led to low demand for US-based cloud services. Applying the same logic, the incumbents were playing on this same fear that Canadians would stick to them.

However, this is only part of the truth. The reality is that Canadian companies have had to comply with similar legislation that requires them to divulge data to Canadian law enforcement. As noted by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada:

" In the national security and anti-terrorism context, Canadian organizations are subject to similar types of orders to disclose personal information held in Canada to Canadian authorities. Despite the objections of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act has been amended since the events of September 11th, 2001, so as to permit organizations to collect and use personal information without consent for the purpose of disclosing this information to government institutions, if the information relates to national security, the defence of Canada or the conduct of international affairs."

This is on top of the recent CSEC scandal (where the secretive agency is alleged to have illegally spied on Canadians), but one could argue that such surveillance was actually illegal. Ultimately, I had hoped Verizon would have entered into the market, but only to push down the rates. I would have ended sticking with the Canadian mobile carriers because the data is one way or another in one jurisdiction.

However, all is not lost in terms of lower rates in the cell phone market.

It seems the government is hoping to entice voters by tackling a problem, which does impact the productivity of Canadians (see this post which compares Canadian mobile access to access in India/China). For example, the CRTC has mandated a number of changes to the cell phone contracts that the wireless industry can legally offer, such as restricting the minimum contract length to two years.

But from a data privacy perspective, it seems the only way to get privacy these days is to live a technology-free lifestyle of yesteryear!