The Canadian government has signed another non-binding agreement with a Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) company to “improve internal efficiency.”
“There is a multi-billion dollar [dollar] opportunity in the Canadian government…to enhance self-service through generative artificial intelligence.”
Louis Tetu, Coveo
A memorandum of understanding (MOU) jointly signed by federal AI Minister Evan Solomon and Government Transformation Minister Joël Lightbound with Quebec-based Coveo allows the government to explore how it can use the company's enterprise AI solutions in its operations. This could include generative and agent-based artificial intelligence technologies, enterprise search, personalized recommendations and improvements to the citizen experience.
Founded in 2005, Coveo's AI-powered search and recommendation platform provides search, recommendation and personalization solutions for business, service, website and workplace applications using its clients' indexed content.
In the video that Solomon sent a message to X To mark the memorandum of understanding, Coveo executive chairman Louis Tetu said its technology could be used to make more government services “self-service” or help government call center staff give accurate answers to citizens.
“There is a multi-billion dollar [dollar] opportunity for the Canadian government, from a cost and productivity perspective, to improve self-service through generative artificial intelligence,” Tetu said in the video. “Give Canadians online the information they need to solve problems, get a permit, or know about their taxes.”
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The agreement will be valid for the next five years.
This is the second Canadian artificial intelligence company that Lightbound and Solomon have signed an agreement with. In August the government made a similar deal with Toronto-based Large Language Model (LLM) developer Cohere, based on another collaboration with the company a few months earlier. Industry Minister Mélanie Joly later stated At the ALL IN conference, the government will “build Cohere” and “make it a Canadian champion.”
Solomon pointed out at that time that the government will seek to establish more partnerships with technology companies through memorandums of understanding. This mandate was enshrined in budget 2025which said Solomon would engage with industry “to identify promising new projects in the area of artificial intelligence infrastructure and enter into memorandums of understanding with these projects.”
Coveo shares, which trade publicly on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol CVO, jumped 15 percent when the Memorandum of Understanding was made public Wednesday morning, from C$6.21 per share to $7.14 per share as of this writing.
Image courtesy of Louis Tete via LinkedIn.
