As governments wrestle with how to keep pace with innovation, two Alberta firms are testing whether artificial intelligence can become part of the machinery of policymaking itself.
Later this week, Diplomat Consulting and Punchcard Systems will announce the launch of LegEngine, a tool that combines compliance checks, intelligent search, and drafting support to make legislative work faster and more reliable.
The two Edmonton-based firms describe the tool as a response to a growing problem: governments at all levels are struggling to match the pace of new industries and technological change.
LegEngine will be piloted in Alberta, with a focus on transportation and trade corridors, including Alberta-Northwest Territories. These corridors were chosen because they cut across multiple ministries and governments, making them a natural test case for AI in policymaking.
In an interview ahead of the launch, Digital Journal sat down with Diplomat Consulting and Punchcard Systems to discuss why they built the tool, why they are partnering, and what LegEngine could mean for governments and citizens across Canada.
How LegEngine is designed to change the work of government
LegEngine is built to help governments manage the scale and complexity of policymaking. The tool brings together three core features: automated compliance checks, AI-powered search across legislative data, and drafting support that links rules from multiple jurisdictions.
“We’re bringing a kind of new employee to the table to help government tackle a problem, which is to be agile, to be responsive, and of course to build legislation that is going to meet the needs of their citizens,” says Sam Jenkins, managing partner of Punchcard Systems.
Instead of replacing human expertise, the tool expands capacity, helping teams handle more complexity with the same resources.The system is designed to widen the field of information available to decision makers.
Jenkins likens it to giving governments a much larger “context window,” similar to how law offices rely on precedent to build stronger cases. By pulling together more data points from across ministries, jurisdictions, and past legislative efforts, LegEngine aims to ensure that policies are drafted with greater depth and foresight.
“Our tool is building a context window that is enormous for people who are in government, people who are in the opposition, people who are in policy and certainly people who are in the operating side of government as well,” says Jenkins. “It comes back to building better legislation but legislation that has more thoughtfulness.”
Nathan Mison, president and founder of Diplomat Consulting, stresses how often policy touches more than one department.
“Many bills touch up to five ministries,” says Mison. “Having a single source that comes out and understands that interplay, compartmentalizes it, correlates it and concisely writes how that interplay will be done will create opportunities for nuance that will be incredibly advantageous for entrepreneurs who are looking to push the envelope of what can be.”
He says the tool gives businesses in fast-moving sectors a way to anticipate how rules might apply. It allows them to plan their operations with more certainty or advocate for policy changes with better evidence.
Why governments are struggling to keep up with change
For Mison, the case for LegEngine comes from watching governments fall behind as sectors evolve faster than policies can adapt.
“With the emerging technologies and the speed of entrepreneurship and the speed of technological development, government is just not able to keep up,” he says. “Our institutions are trying to evolve as fast as they can but they can’t keep up with the pace of society around them.”
Mison argues that governments need tools that provide stability and predictability at the same pace that new industries emerge.
“The faster that you can help provide those things, the greater opportunity it is for Edmonton, Alberta, and Canada, to be an investable jurisdiction to set up these new emerging sectors,” says Mison.
He adds that the Alberta pilot is designed to prove that capability.
“Sometimes you have to find a project that fits the moment in time to unlock the opportunity ahead,” says Mison. “Interprovincial trade barriers and economic corridors are so large in their opportunity and so nuanced in their scalability that the government’s decision to really lean into this gives us the momentum. If we are able to do this as well as we know that we can, it creates an opportunity for us to be relevant from coast to coast to coast.”
Jenkins says the pilot could set a foundation for broader adoption.
“If we can build a tool that empowers more effective regulation on a province-to-province basis, we see huge opportunity to stretch what we’re doing across Canada and into other ecosystems as well. Better legislation means more opportunity. More opportunity means more entrepreneurs, more organizations, more economic growth.”
Building innovation into government systems
Adopting artificial intelligence in government is as much about trust as it is about speed. Tools like LegEngine are built to support, not replace, the work of public servants, with final judgment always in the hands of elected officials and staff.
Jenkins describes LegEngine as “an operating system for which legislation can be crafted more carefully, more quickly and certainly with a higher degree of care.”
Mison says the strength of the tool lies in using the government’s own published material as the foundation.
“Almost all of the materials are publicly accessible because the government must publish legislation, regulation, and working documents. Our source material is the underpinning of what the government already utilizes,” he says.
He adds that the tool is designed to take a draft most of the way, leaving human oversight essential.
“We built a model that fills out the opportunity of speed and execution but still is built with a human element,” Mison says. “That is, take something to 85-90% and leave that 10% of humanistic, sober second thought as a key component.”
Jenkins says transparency will ultimately determine whether governments adopt AI tools in meaningful ways.
“We’re here to make sure we are surfacing as much credible data, knowledge, and information that can be used to build the most effective regulatory tools into the future,” he says.
Mison sees the larger opportunity in shrinking the productivity gap while giving governments, citizens, and entrepreneurs more confidence in the rules they rely on.
“Our aspiration for LegEngine is to actually help governments, citizens and entrepreneurs create rules that allow investability, predictability and productivity,” he says. “We believe that can happen, and we will continue to build at the pace of scientific development that is not slowing down.”
