Government Innovation Showcase Alberta

As Alberta’s health system continues to modernize, AI presents significant opportunities to improve access, strengthen service delivery, and support frontline teams. Realizing that potential requires more than adopting AI—it requires a trusted foundation that protects sensitive health information, supports strong governance, and gives health organizations greater control over how AI is deployed.

This session will explore how Health Shared Services Alberta is advancing Sovereign AI capabilities and how AVA, an in-house AI ecosystem, Adaptive Virtual Assistant, demonstrates these capabilities in practice. Attendees will learn how a secure, reusable AI foundation can enable practical AI solutions today while creating the foundation to responsibly scale AI across Alberta’s health system.

• Protect sensitive health information by keeping AI workloads, data, and access within a secure, governed environment.
• Enable trusted AI adoption through strong governance, security, oversight, and responsible AI practices.
• Improve frontline service delivery by applying AI to high-volume workflows and connecting teams with the right information faster.
• Maintain clinical trust by keeping people in the decision-making process and making AI-generated information easy to review and validate.
• Scale AI across the health system through reusable Sovereign AI capabilities that can support multiple use cases, services, and health agencies.

This session aims to ground the audiences understanding of AI in the Alberta context - understanding where Albertans, and the GOA are choosing to engage and leverage in this "emerging" technology. Everyone is talking about AI models, computing power, and infrastructure — but the provinces and nations that will actually win the AI era are the ones applying it to the industries they already own. Alberta has world-class strength in energy, agri-tech, aerospace and defence, health, and manufacturing. The question is not whether to engage with AI. It’s whether Alberta will direct that engagement toward applied outcomes in its core sectors — or watch others do it first.

• Understand what AI actually does at a provincial scale
• Separate the AI myths as organizations redesign themselves around higher-value work
• Learn the seven pillars of an applied AI ecosystem - data, domain expertise, talent, research, infrastructure, access to capital, and access to market, and understand why any ecosystem that is missing one of these will stall, regardless of how strong the others are

As organizations move beyond the hype of generative AI, the practical goal is clear: building a digital partner that meaningfully lightens the load and improves decision quality.

This session dives into an AI‑Empowered Chief of Staff (CoS) - a systems‑thinking partner that learns how you work, connects the dots across priorities, and helps surface blind spots. The decision still rests with us, but an AI‑CoS can provide informed options, recommendations, and execution support. What was once a capability reserved for senior leaders can now be made accessible across the workforce with the right design, guardrails, and adoption approach.

AI can only deliver value when it is powered by reliable, connected, and well-governed data. This session will explore how public-sector organizations can strengthen their data foundations across legacy and cloud environments, giving teams the trusted context they need to scale AI, automation, and faster decision-making.

• Connect fragmented systems and data sources to create a clearer enterprise view
• Strengthen data quality, governance, and visibility to support trusted AI adoption
• Modernize across legacy and cloud environments without replacing every existing system
• Improve service delivery, operational efficiency, and decision-making through better data foundations

Technology debt is often viewed as a "tomorrow problem," but in the context of AI integration, it is an immediate barrier to entry. Legacy systems, unorganized data sets, and fragmented architectures act as a tax on innovation, slowing down the deployment of AI tools and increasing the cost of every new integration. Mitigating this debt isn't just about cleaning up old code; it’s about ensuring the provincial foundation is stable enough to support the weight of generative AI and automated systems. This session explores the practical strategies for identifying "high-interest" debt and modernizing infrastructure to create a sustainable environment for future technology.

• Explore how to move from "patchwork" fixes to modular, scalable architecture that allows for the rapid swapping of AI models and tools as the technology evolves.
• Discuss the leadership challenge of maintaining service delivery while simultaneously decommissioning outdated systems to make room for modern, AI-enabled workflows.
• Define the governance and coding standards required today to ensure the AI solutions we build now don't become the unmanageable technology debt of 2030.

AI adoption depends on people who understand the technology, can apply it ethically, and know when to rely on human judgment. This panel will showcase upskilling the Alberta Public Service through masterclasses and hands-on practice so you can build AI capability at scale without waiting for formal training programs.

We used to talk about bringing the user into the room. Now a new kind of team member, the AI agent, is finding its way into the design and delivery process. This panel is about what that actually looks like for teams delivering public sector services today: where human-centered design is evolving, where AI is earning its seat, and where we still need to hold the line for the people these services serve. The conversation sits at the intersection of human-centered design, AI-enabled ways of working, and public service delivery. It is focused on how teams are using AI today, and what AI-enabled work looks like in the future.

Launching in 2027, the Compassionate Intervention Program delivered by the Ministry for Mental Health and Addiction is blending program design, policy, and digital delivery from day one. The initiative and its supporting technology is being stood up in parallel, pushing the boundaries of cross-government collaboration, agile decision-making, and privacy-first service design.

In this session, you’ll discover how the team is modernizing systems to make human-centered delivery a reality — and what that means for the future of public sector innovation.

• Learn how to co-design programs and digital services simultaneously to accelerate delivery and alignment.
• See strategies for embedding privacy, security, and legal compliance within innovation-driven projects.
• Gain insights into managing complex governance structures across ministries and commissioners without losing agility.
• Explore ways to build trust and responsiveness through user-centered digital systems.
• Take away a model for digital transformation that balances compassion, compliance, and modernization.

This session explores how AI is being used to accelerate the public sector’s data journey - not as a destination, but as an enabler. Drawing from real work underway in the Government of Alberta, it walks through three movements of an AI‑enabled data pathway.

• First, discovery: using AI to understand complex data landscapes at scale - surfacing structure, sensitivity, lineage, and business meaning across systems that were previously opaque, without accessing personal or row‑level data.
• Second, building at pace: applying AI to compress delivery by generating ingestion patterns, transformation logic, masking rules, and documentation aligned to existing standards, allowing teams to move faster without compromising governance.
• Finally, grounding AI in data and context: once data is discoverable and governed, AI can support deterministic, traceable answers to real public‑sector questions - linking outcomes back to known data assets rather than opaque training data.
• The session highlights what’s working, where friction remains, and what this means for building data and AI capability.

Public sector transformation efforts often stall when policy intent, operating models, and delivery realities drift apart—creating “modernization” programs that can’t be implemented, funded, or governed effectively.

This session will show you how to connect policy reform to service modernization work so you can design feasible reforms, prioritize the right delivery moves, and prove outcomes in real services.

• Assess where policy objectives, legislative constraints, and service delivery realities currently misalign—and what that misalignment is costing your users and teams.
• Translate policy intent into a delivery-ready modernization roadmap that links rules, funding, processes, data, and platforms to measurable outcomes.
• Design governance and decision rights that connect policy owners and delivery teams so modernization can move quickly without breaking compliance or accountability.
• Reduce implementation risk by embedding policy considerations early (privacy, inclusion, procurement, interoperability) rather than retrofitting them after build.
• Transform how you define “modernization” by using service journeys and operational metrics to validate which policy changes will actually shift outcomes.

Ministry of Mental Health and Addiction needs trusted data to evaluate Alberta’s Recovery Oriented System of Care. This session will show how you how you can build a secure, privacy-first data environment that enables cross-ministry insights and supports better program evaluation.

• Achieve secure data integration across ministries using cloud platforms
• Strengthen privacy with tokenization and unique identifier design
• Improve trust through early engagement with privacy regulators
• Optimize data governance to enable scalable analytics and evaluation
• Prepare for future AI adoption to enhance population health insights

The most costly decisions in complex government projects are rarely the technical ones — they are the governance conversations that should have happened in month one and didn’t happen until month eighteen. Getting ahead of those conversations requires a planning discipline that most teams skip: mapping the decisions that will be required, who needs to be in the room for each of them, and whether the capacity exists to act when the moment arrives. This session will show how to front-load your planning on complex projects so you can protect delivery timelines, reduce decision bottlenecks, and build the team capability needed to move with confidence.

• Identify the decisions that will make or break your project before the pressure is on
• Design your governance structure around real decision-making rather than reporting rhythms
• Build team capacity early and deliberately by identifying the skills, knowledge, and relationships your project will demand at each stage
• Map the stakeholder landscape before it maps you
• Distinguish between decisions that need consensus and decisions that need a decision-maker
• Leave with a practical planning framework you can apply to your next complex initiative

AI can transform how citizens interact with government, but poorly designed automation can frustrate users and damage trust. This panel will showcase real examples of AI in citizen-facing services and the safeguards that make them work so you can apply responsible innovation patterns in your own agency.

- Explore AI use cases such as intelligent chatbots, form pre-fill, document verification, and eligibility screening that reduce friction without removing human support.

- Advance trust-by-design by publishing model cards, explainability summaries, and clear redress paths for every AI-powered touchpoint.

- Reduce bias by testing AI systems with diverse user groups and running continuous audits for unintended impacts across demographics.

- Improve outcomes by pairing AI automation with human escalation paths that keep people in control of high-stakes decisions.

Governments need trusted data to improve mental health and addiction outcomes at scale. This session will show how you can apply new approaches on how you can build a secure, privacy-first data environment that enables cross-ministry insights and supports better program evaluation.

• Achieve secure data integration across ministries using cloud platforms
• Strengthen privacy with tokenization and unique identifier design
• Improve trust through early engagement with privacy regulators
• Optimize data governance to enable scalable analytics and evaluation
• Prepare for future AI adoption to enhance population health insights

Pilot results are easy to celebrate. Sustained productivity gains are harder to earn — and harder still to spread across a team. This panel brings together practitioners who have moved past the proof-of-concept stage and are seeing measurable, real-world returns from integrating AI tools into their day-to-day work. This is not a conversation about potential — it is a conversation about what is already working inside government, and what it actually took to make it stick.

• Learn how to identify and eliminate the low-value work that quietly drains capacity
• Understand what GitHub Copilot and similar tools have changed for TI teams
• Get honest about the adoption curve: the panelists will share what they expected versus what they found
• The panel will address the team culture, management support, and skill-building that kept pilots progressing
• Leave with a framework for identifying where AI tools will produce real returns in your own team