Make Room for Growth: AI Feauture
What Ottawa's AI Conversation Means for Small Business Owners
In late April, the Ottawa Board of Trade brought its directors and partners together with the Hon. Evan Solomon — the federal Minister responsible for artificial intelligence and digital innovation — for a discussion ahead of the 2026 City Building Summit. The headline was Ottawa's place in Canada's AI strategy. But underneath the big-picture talk about innovation ecosystems and national competitiveness, there were a few takeaways that matter for the owner of a small or mid-sized business right here in town.
Here's how we read it from where we sit.
Ottawa is better positioned than most owners realize
Much of the conversation centred on Ottawa as a genuine hub of innovation — a city that sits at the meeting point of strong research institutions, deep public-sector expertise, and a growing technology sector. That's usually framed as a story about big tech firms and government. But it's also context for local business owners: you're operating in an economy with real momentum behind digital and AI adoption. The talent, the infrastructure, and the policy attention are increasingly here. That's a tailwind worth using.
The real value of AI is practical, not flashy
One theme stood out: the value of AI isn't in dramatic, headline-grabbing transformation — it's in practical, real-world applications that demonstrably improve productivity. The discussion emphasized tools that support workers rather than replace them.
For a small business, that's the right lens. You don't need a research lab or a data science team to benefit. The wins are usually quieter: automating repetitive data entry, speeding up reconciliations, drafting first-pass documents, summarizing reports, cleaning up messy spreadsheets. Each one gives you back hours — and those hours compound.
Trust and adoption are the real bottlenecks
The Minister was candid that trust in AI remains low and adoption is uneven across sectors. We see the same thing in our own field. Plenty of business owners are curious but hesitant — unsure what's safe to hand off, where the data goes, or whether the output can be relied on.
That caution is healthy. The answer isn't to avoid these tools or to adopt them blindly; it's to start small, in low-risk areas, with a person reviewing the output. Confidence is built one practical, verifiable result at a time. That's true for a national AI strategy, and it's true for your back office.
Innovation has to scale here
A recurring concern in the discussion was Canada's habit of nurturing innovation only to watch it scale somewhere else. The call was to retain and grow what we build at home.
There's a smaller-scale version of that idea for local owners: keep the value in your own business. When you adopt a tool that makes you more efficient, capture that gain — reinvest the saved time into serving clients, winning work, or improving your margins, rather than letting it leak away in busywork.
Our take
We work with this firsthand. As an Ottawa practice, we've been steadily building AI and automation into how we handle bookkeeping, reconciliations, document preparation, and reporting — always with professional review on the output, never as a replacement for judgment. The lesson lines up with what came out of this discussion: the businesses that win won't be the ones chasing the flashiest technology, but the ones that adopt sensible tools early, build confidence through small wins, and keep the productivity gains for themselves.
Ottawa is having the right conversation at the leadership level. The opportunity for business owners is to have the same conversation at the practical level — and to start before everyone else does.
If you're wondering where AI and automation could realistically save your business time, we're happy to talk through what's worth trying and what isn't.