For Canadian engineering, professional and regulated firms
Your staff will ask in plain English and get answers from your own documents, each with a numbered citation, from your own server or a Canadian cloud region.
For owners, operations leads and IT managers at 10 to 250-person firms whose contracts, data-residency rules or Law 25 rule out US-hosted AI, and whose staff still dig through shared drives by hand.
Free call, then a free prototype on your documents in 5 business days. From $995 CAD.
Hop 01 · The problem
Because many AI tools process what you give them outside Canada, often by default, and your contracts say the files stay here.
So the searching stays manual. "When did the client approve that design change?" The answer is in a transmittal or an email somewhere; at the firm in example 01, somewhere in about 700 GB of company documents.
Then something forces the question: staff are already pasting client files into ChatGPT, or a client's security questionnaire asks where AI processes their data.
How documents leave Canada without anyone deciding they should
A field app we built kept its records in Azure Canada Central, but its report drafting was coded to call a model service outside Canada. Drafting had never been switched on in production, so nothing had left yet.
Switched to Canada East on 10 November 2026: example 02In Azure, the suggested Global Standard deployment "may be processed in any Azure region"; example 02 uses an in-region one.
Many Microsoft 365 firms look at Copilot Studio first. Microsoft says its generative AI for Canadian environments is hosted in the United States. What that means.
Hop 02 · Real builds
The first two are for the same client, a wireless and telecom engineering firm, so their answers stay private. The third is our own demo on public privacy law, with five real answers printed as written and checked by hand. Status labels are exact, and each page shows the steps, the data map and the limits.
Example 01 · a wireless and telecom engineering firm
Example 02 · a wireless and telecom engineering firm
Example 03 · public Canadian privacy law
Hop 03 · Who builds it
Scott Holmes, an Ontario-based AI automation builder. I build these assistants myself, and you talk to me directly, by phone or video.
I build knowledge systems that answer questions from a company's own documents. My own internal document search uses the same search method (local embeddings and pgvector): as of 6 October 2026, 23 project databases. On a 33-question benchmark for one of those projects, it found the right document first for 30 of them.
If you've had to tell your team "not with client files", that was the right call. The fix is an assistant that follows the rule, and a map that shows it does.
Hop 04 · How it works
What staff need to ask, where the files live, and the rule they must follow. By phone or video.
FreeWithin 5 business days, the assistant answers from a copy of one sample folder, on our own test machine in Ontario with a local model. The copy is deleted within 14 days of the prototype call. You keep a written summary and the full-build price.
Free · 4 a monthFrom $995, in writing before work starts. Typically live about 2 weeks later, on your server or in a Canadian cloud region.
From $995 CADHop 05 · Price
Prices in Canadian dollars. The build is fixed in writing after the free prototype.
Hop 06 · After
Q · Before we send personal information about a Quebec client outside Quebec, what does Quebec law require us to do?
Before sending personal information about a Quebec client outside Quebec, Quebec law requires the following under the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector (CQLR c P-39.1):
These requirements are explicitly stated in section 17 of the Act [1].
Our check: correct. It matches section 17 of Quebec's private-sector privacy act point by point.
Hop 07 · Questions
Close: it's AI document search where a model answers only from your files and cites them (what people call RAG). As for ChatGPT, check where your plan processes what you give it. If that is outside Canada and your contracts say the files stay here, you need an assistant that runs here: on your own server or in a Canadian cloud region.
Sometimes you should. Microsoft's pages, as updated 14 October 2026, say a Canadian environment stores data in Canada Central and Canada East, but generative AI for Canadian environments is hosted in the United States. With "Move data across regions" cleared, no data leaves the region, though some features may not work and some models may still process data outside the geography.
That can be enough when your rule is about storage. If a contract says no outside provider may process the documents, the assistant has to run on your own server.
If they're PDFs, Word or Excel files in the folder, yes; scanned ones are flagged for text recognition (OCR) first. Example 01 read PDF, Word, Excel and CSV, PowerPoint, Visio, KMZ and KML, JSON and text files, and skipped photos, DWG drawings and ZIP files.
Sometimes, yes. It is set up to answer only from the excerpts it finds in your documents, cite them like [1] or [2], quote figures and dates as written, and say plainly when the excerpts don't contain the answer. In example 03, two of five answers said so instead of guessing, but two went past their excerpts: one applied a business-sale rule to a cloud question, and one gave a 72-hour breach-reporting deadline that isn't in the law. The 72-hour answer cited a passage that says nothing about timing, which is how we caught it. That's what the citations are for.
Not yet. Example 01 reads a cloud file store; no build on this site reads SharePoint Online or a file server. It would be a read-only connector like that one, shown working in the free prototype before you commit.
No tool does that on its own. We design for data residency with PIPEDA and Quebec Law 25 in mind, and give your privacy officer a data map to check. PIPEDA doesn't forbid processing outside Canada, but you stay accountable and must tell people; Quebec's private-sector law requires a privacy impact assessment before personal information leaves Quebec. This is not legal advice.
No. We use AI coding tools, including ones whose models run outside Canada, to write code. They work only on code and made-up sample files. They are never given your documents or excerpts from them, and the desktop-assistant test connection is off in your build. The free prototype follows the same rule.
More questions on example 01, example 02 and pricing.
Next hop
Canadian sovereign AI, on your own server or in a Canadian cloud region. If it's a fit, you'll see it answer from a sample of your documents within 5 business days, free.