Public sector · Edmonton, AB
Private AI for public bodies in Edmonton
Edmonton municipalities, agencies and public bodies work inside Alberta’s own rules. Digby answers from your documents with the passage attached, keeps stored data in Canada, and runs the models on Canadian-located hardware — so the answer is checkable and the question “where does it go” has a short reply.
01
What Alberta asks of a public body
Alberta’s public bodies work under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, which requires personal information to be collected directly where practicable and protected with reasonable safeguards.
For a municipality or agency, adopting a tool means adding it to the privacy impact assessment it already runs — not starting a parallel process beside it.
02
Edmonton’s public-sector reality
The capital region concentrates ministries, boards and agencies, and with them the province’s access-and-privacy machinery in practice rather than theory.
A public body’s honest question about any AI tool is not “is it impressive” but “where does the information sit, and what do we tell a requester”.
03
What Digby does — and what we do not claim
Digby does not decide access requests, does not apply severances, and does not replace the records schedule. It helps staff find and read; the statutory decision stays with the public body and its delegated officer.
- 01
Policy and bylaw Q&A
staff ask in plain language and get the section that answers it, from the current text rather than a memory of it.
- 02
Access-request support
find the records that respond to a request, and summarise them, with a person deciding what is released and what is severed.
- 03
Briefing preparation
turn a bundle of reports into a short briefing note with the sources attached.
- 04
Plain-language service
rewrite a form or a notice so a resident can understand it, in English or in French.
04
Where the data lives, and where the models run
Stored data — accounts, conversations, memory and files — sits in Canada, in AWS Canada Central (Montréal). The models that write answers run on NVIDIA GPU hardware located in Canada and operated from Canada. That second part is the one most vendors gloss: storage residency is not the same claim as inference residency, and for a Edmonton public body the difference is exactly the one a privacy review will ask about.
If the requirement is that nothing leaves infrastructure you control, Digby can be self-hosted with Docker Compose against any OpenAI-compatible model server. That is a different trade — you run it — and it is documented rather than implied.
05
A sensible first month for a Edmonton public body
- 01
Published documents first
start with material that is already public, so nobody debates whether it was allowed.
- 02
One team, one question set
prove it on the five questions a front counter actually gets asked.
- 03
Bring records management in early
the people who own the schedule should shape what goes into a project.
06
Other Canadian cities
Edmonton firms and organisations often work across provincial lines, and the statute changes at the border. The same public sector material, set up for the next province over:
Frequently asked questions
Does a privacy impact assessment cover an Alberta public body using AI?
Typically yes — a tool that handles personal information in a new way belongs inside the existing assessment process, not beside it. Digby’s architecture information (storage residency, inference location, self-hosting option) is on the infrastructure page for exactly that exercise.
Can an Alberta public body self-host Digby?
Yes. Self-hosted Digby runs on the body’s own infrastructure with any OpenAI-compatible model server, which keeps both storage and inference under its control.
What does Digby cost for a Edmonton public body?
Free to start, billed in Canadian dollars: the entry point is CAD $0 and no account is needed to begin. For larger engagements — more seats, more volume or a dedicated deployment — pricing is set with you rather than listed here, so contact us and a person replies with a written number. Heavier features such as deep research have daily limits.
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No account needed. Models and data stay in Canada.