Countless businesses and organizations in the city are putting AI to work in unique — and sometimes surprising — ways. Nita Tandon runs Dalcini Stainless, an Ottawa company that makes stainless steel food storage containers without plastic or chemical resins. She said she came to AI the way many small business owners do: reluctantly and […]
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Countless businesses and organizations in the city are putting AI to work in unique — and sometimes surprising — ways.
Nita Tandon runs Dalcini Stainless, an Ottawa company that makes stainless steel food storage containers without plastic or chemical resins. She said she came to AI the way many small business owners do: reluctantly and then all at once.
"I've been using AI probably for the past two years, but I would say as a part of my everyday business I would say over the last year," Tandon said.
She now uses AI tools such as Intuit QuickBooks's intelligence feature, and the shift in her finances alone has changed how she runs the company.
"I'm in my books every day now," Tandon said. "We've found quite a number of mistakes and I now look back and I say, how many mistakes did I miss over the years that I'm finally just catching up?"
But Tandon said the biggest change is in how Dalcini enters new markets. The company now exports to Germany, Finland and Denmark and is working toward Australia.
"To be able to work at that pace is something that we couldn't anticipate," she said, adding that AI has replaced what used to be months of student research projects. "We used to hire students at university to say, can you put together an export plan for us?” Tandon said. “We'd review it. It would take months. We can now just move quicker and with more accuracy.
"Everyone, every single business, I think, can benefit from AI, no matter what," Tandon said.
Ottawa startup Booked would agree. It has built an AI voice agent platform, currently in beta testing, for trades businesses including plumbers, roofers, electricians and HVAC contractors.
Founder and CEO Gustavo Sanchez said the idea came from a problem small trades businesses deal with across the industry: missed calls because the owner/operator is busy.
“The phone is the storefront for trades businesses,” said Sanchez, who has worked at Shopify and Dropbox. “If they don’t pick up, the customer moves on to the next company on Google.”
A missed call can mean losing a job worth thousands of dollars, he explained, yet many small operators cannot afford dedicated reception staff. He said he focused on trades businesses because the pain point is immediate and personal.
“The owner answers the phone at 7 a.m., at 11 p.m. sometimes,” he explained. “They feel the pain of missed calls acutely. They know if they miss the call, they might lose a $20,000 job.”
Booked demonstrated the platform earlier this year at the Ottawa Home and Garden Show. Contractors watched the system build functioning personalized voice agents for their businesses within minutes, using information pulled from their websites and online reviews.
“We’re able to create an agent for them right away,” Sanchez said. “The agent answers the call and detects emotional cues and responds empathetically when customers describe stressful situations. If you say, ‘I have water all over my basement,’ it says, ‘Oh no, I’m sorry to hear that.’”
The software will create a booking in the calendar, take the customer information and even provide quotes in some cases. Most businesses inform the customer that they are speaking to an AI agent before they begin, although Sanchez says this is optional and up to the individual businesses.
The AI now supports both English and French and operates around the clock. It can handle multiple calls all at once.
“It feels more like a teammate,” Sanchez said. “We’re not replacing humans. We’re using AI for something truly useful that helps small trades businesses.”
Other Ottawa companies are deploying AI in less visible ways. Financial software company MindBridge uses it to continuously analyze entire sets of financial transactions instead of relying on the small samples traditionally reviewed by hand during audits.
Ottawa-based Growcer recently received a Governor General’s innovation award for its remotely managed modular farming systems used in northern and remote communities. Machine learning and AI keep conditions inside the containers optimized for growing fresh fruits and vegetables.
Making a difference in medicine
At The Ottawa Hospital, Haroun Zayed used to spend an hour or two after his emergency shifts, working through patient notes and updating files. Now, he usually finishes on time.
“The biggest highlight for me was, for some shifts, I was getting out on time,” Zayed, deputy head at the hospital’s General campus, told OBJ. “I’ve seen more patients. I’ve spent more time with patients.”
The change can be credited to an ambient artificial intelligence tool called Dragon Copilot, which listens to a doctor’s conversation with a patient and drafts medical notes in real time.
Jim Yang, another emergency physician at the hospital who leads digital innovation for the department, said Dragon Copilot marks the latest stage in how doctors record their work.
“It records our encounter and with the help of AI it pulls out the important things that you’ve told me as well as the important things that I’ve told you,” Yang said.
The move to electronic records that started years ago actually piled more work onto physicians than the old paperwork systems, Zayed said.
“Administrative burden for physicians went way up. It’s one of the reasons family docs and a lot of doctors burn out,” he explained.
Dragon Copilot has been rolled out across the emergency department over the past 12 to 24 months, and Zayed said the time it saves on documentation lets doctors reach more people.
“Some physicians are seeing two, three, even four more patients per shift,” he said. “More than half our doctors have signed up for the next year.”
Both Zayed and Yang said the tool changes how they interact with patients.
“We all got into medicine because we want to treat people,” Yang said. “Now I can just sit down and talk. You’re spending more time in the room, yet you’re also seeing more patients.”
The hospital asks each patient for consent before recording. Zayed said it does not make a difference in the treatment a patient receives.
Dragon Copilot is not the only AI running at the hospital. The facility was the first in Canada to install AIMS, a system from Canadian firm Lumenix that uses 3D infrared sensors instead of cameras to check hand-hygiene compliance, signalling a clean technique with a blue light and flagging a miss with a yellow light and a soft chime. The hospital is also working with Deloitte Canada to build the Digital Teammate, a lifelike avatar that answers patient and visitor questions around the clock in English and French.
