AI Agent Development Company in Halifax

Agent cost is driven by how many tools the agent has to touch and how expensive a wrong answer is, not by how many users it serves, so we quote fixed fee against a signed statement of work rather than publishing a rate card. A scoped proof of concept, meaning a use case map, a working agent against one or two tools and an evaluation suite built from your real historical cases, is typically a five to eight week engagement. A production multi-tool agent adds observability, guardrails, spend limits, a human review gate and a documented data flow, and it is usually two to three times the proof of concept. A full agentic system with several specialised agents, durable memory and back-office integration is a different order of programme again and should be phased rather than bought in one piece. Atlantic Canadian delivery sits below Toronto and Montreal, and because we deliver from Edmonton and Chandigarh you are not paying for downtown Halifax overhead. Model and inference costs are separate, they scale with usage rather than with the build, and we model them in the proposal so the running cost is not a surprise in month four.

Yes. Ocean Supercluster projects are co-funded consortium work rather than a tax credit, which changes what the engineering has to produce. Project agreements typically carry Atlantic Canadian content expectations, an intellectual property framework agreed across the consortium members, and reporting obligations against defined technical milestones, so the deliverables have to be legible to a project officer and not only to a developer. We scope agent work that reads vessel tracking feeds, observer and logbook data and weather forecasts to support routing, quota compliance and inspection report drafting, and we document model versions, data provenance, the tool registry and the evaluation results as sprint outputs rather than assembling them in a panic before a reporting deadline. Where a project needs genuine oceanographic or perception research depth rather than applied engineering, we say so and scope a collaboration with a research group instead of overselling in-house capability, because a consortium project that stalls on a modelling problem we cannot solve is worse for everyone than an honest scoping conversation at the start.

Every Halifax engagement opens with a data flow workshop that classifies each field the agent will touch and maps it to the statute that governs it. For commercial personal information that is PIPEDA, because Nova Scotia has no substantially similar private-sector privacy law of its own, unlike Quebec, British Columbia and Alberta. For a provincial public body it is the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, and the Personal Information International Disclosure Protection Act on top of it, which requires personal information in a public body's custody or control to be stored and accessed only in Canada subject to narrow exceptions. For a health custodian it is the Personal Health Information Act, which imposes specific safeguards on electronic information systems. Agent memory, prompts and tool logs sit in AWS ca-central-1 or Azure Canada Central, prompts and outputs pass through a redaction layer before reaching any hosted endpoint, and cross-border calls are documented in a privacy impact assessment before deployment rather than after. You get a residency diagram, a retention schedule and a breach notification runbook your privacy officer can rely on.

Yes, and the governance work is most of the job. Typical scopes are underwriting document intake, claim adjudication triage, explanation of benefits parsing and broker support copilots. Each ships with a model card, a tool inventory, a human review gate on any decision affecting payment or coverage, and a logging pipeline that feeds the security and model risk platforms the organisation already runs, because OSFI Guideline E-23 sets expectations for enterprise-wide model risk management and an agent that cannot be explained to a model risk function will not clear review. Where personal health information is in scope, it is separated from marketing and sales data behind a service boundary with its own access model and record-level access logging, so an agent sees the minimum necessary rather than the whole record. We keep an agent in shadow mode until the evaluation results on the client's own historical cases are signed off, and we will not contract into an enterprise without going through its procurement process, which is worth planning for because it usually takes longer than the build.

Yes, on the unclassified side, for supply chain, scheduling and document workflow agents supporting the River-class destroyer programme and the Arctic and Offshore Patrol Ship fleet. We work within Controlled Goods Program registration under the Defence Production Act, which requires registration before a person may examine, possess or transfer controlled goods, and we account for United States export control rules where American-origin technical data is involved, because those restrict access by nationality rather than by employment. The practical effect on an agent is architectural: controlled technical data cannot sit in a store that unvetted staff or an offshore support console can reach, so access control operates at record level and the agent's tool surface is documented precisely enough that a security officer can audit it. On these engagements our Chandigarh team receives no access to controlled data or to production, the work is performed by Canadian-resident staff in Canadian regions, and the limitation is written into the statement of work. We do not take classified work, and we will say so during discovery if the use case crosses that line.

Ten to eighteen weeks from kickoff to general availability for a typical production agent, assuming the data is in reasonable shape and the escalation path is already decided. Weeks one to three are discovery, the use case map and the privacy and residency review. Weeks four to nine are build, evaluation suite construction and guardrail wiring. Weeks ten to fourteen are shadow mode, where the agent runs against live traffic and produces recommendations nobody acts on, which is the phase that actually reveals whether the thing works and the phase clients most often try to skip. Weeks fifteen onward are gradual rollout behind a flag, starting with the lowest-consequence queue. The two things that reliably add months are data quality nobody profiled before kickoff and an escalation path that turns out not to exist, so we surface both in discovery rather than in month four. Where grant reporting is involved, the documentation is produced as sprint output. Atlantic Time coverage means standups fall inside your working day, not after it.