Public sector · Ottawa, ON

Private AI for public bodies in Ottawa

Ottawa municipalities, agencies and public bodies work inside Ontario’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.

Start chatting AI for Canadian public bodies

What Ontario asks of a public body

Ontario public bodies work under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, or the municipal equivalent, which sets the access right and the protection duty in parallel.

Large bodies answer a high volume of routine requests for information they already hold. The bottleneck is rarely the decision; it is finding the records.

How Digby describes its own limits AI for Canadian public bodies — the national page

Ottawa’s public-sector reality

As the federal capital, Ottawa concentrates federal departments and agencies alongside the city and its boards — and with them the expectation that records are findable and answerable in both official languages.

An AI tool introduced here has to handle French as capably as English, not as a translated afterthought.

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.

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 Ottawa 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.

Where Digby’s inference and storage actually are Run Digby on your own servers What private AI means at Digby

A sensible first month for a Ottawa 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.

Other Canadian cities

Ottawa 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:

Public Sector · Montréal Public Sector · Québec City Public Sector · Halifax AI for every Canadian industry

Frequently asked questions

Can a Toronto agency use an AI tool under MFIPPA?

MFIPPA sets the access right and the protection duty for municipal bodies, and adopting a tool is a records-management decision as much as a technology one. Digby keeps stored data in Canada and can be self-hosted on infrastructure the body controls.

Does Digby help answer access requests automatically?

It helps staff find and summarise records. It does not decide what is released or what is severed — that decision stays with the delegated officer.

What does Digby cost for a Ottawa 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.