Intelligent automation empowers the Government of Canada to work more efficiently

When the United States announced sweeping tariffs in January 2025, the Department of Finance (FIN) anticipated a surge in public feedback—not just dozens of comments, but potentially tens of thousands. The expected volume and diversity of responses posed a serious challenge: How could FIN review and analyze thousands of unique, unstructured submissions quickly, fairly and effectively?

Enter intelligent automation (IA): a way to reduce a team’s workload by automating repetitive tasks with artificial intelligence (AI).

Intelligent automation

Intelligent automation is a combination of AI and robotic process automation (RPA). RPA uses software bots that imitate human interactions and run specific tasks that require research, data entry and more. They can automate repetitive, mundane and time-consuming business processes.

Building responsible AI at Finance Canada

SSC collaborates with Government of Canada (GC) organizations to ensure that the GC responds effectively to emerging issues and provides high-quality services to Canadians. Our joint efforts foster innovation, allowing the GC to develop and implement cutting-edge enterprise IT solutions.

Combining RPA bots with AI ensures consistent and precise work. SSC is exploring new ways to use these tools, particularly for tasks demanding sustained attention and that are prone to human error, such as data entry.

To explore whether AI could help manage the workload, FIN partnered with SSC’s Data Science and Artificial Intelligence team.

Collaborative pilot

SSC analyzed and modelled FIN’s workflow to illustrate their business process and better understand how they create their reports. SSC then used local, on-device AI (meaning no cloud servers were needed) to change the comments into a consistent format that could be fed into a database for easy analysis.

Over the course of 7 days, the pilot processed and structured more than 4,000 submissions, demonstrating what AI could make possible in the future.

“The finance project is a great example of how SSC can work with another department to quickly implement a critical viable intelligent automation solution using the people and application resources of both organizations within a short time period.”

Toward scalable AI in the GC

SSC was able to use GC large language models and test the future feasibility of RPA. This means FIN could scale down the process to run on their existing desktops, simplifying security and eliminating the need for expensive high-performance computers—all while being more cost-effective and environmentally friendly.

These open source models can be shared with any GC organization and tailored to their needs, demonstrating an ethical use of AI that also saves departments money.

“We are extremely grateful for having the opportunity to collaborate with SSC on this work. The solution provided by the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence team achieved exactly what we are hoping to achieve with AI—automated, streamlined predictive analysis while allowing our employees to interact directly with Canadians on important initiatives on behalf of Canada. We would not have been able to achieve what we aspired to do without the help of SSC.”

SSC’s work with FIN was exploratory and the final AI-generated summaries were not used for formal briefings. SSC and FIN saw it as an opportunity to test IA using real world data and to better assess if there is demonstrated business value in using this solution.

Overall, this collaboration proved that even modest AI investments can yield scalable, ethical and environmentally responsible tools across departments. By piloting AI in a low-risk setting, FIN and SSC have taken a meaningful first step toward broader adoption of responsible automation in the GC.

AI isn’t used to replace GC employees, but to empower them to work more efficiently and to better serve Canadians.

Endless possibilities

SSC guides GC organizations to improve their workflows with automation, hosting a community of automators on GCXchange (accessible only on GC networks) that is open to participants from the entire GC.

Want to read more about other innovative projects that SSC is driving to enable the government? Check out other articles in our Innovation Stories series.

Related links

• Artificial intelligence at SSC
• Artificial Intelligence Program (Serving Government) (accessible only on GC networks)