The Government of Canada has signed another non-binding agreement with a Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) company to “increase internal efficiency.”
“There is a multi-billion [dollar] opportunity in the Canadian government … to drive more self-service through generative AI.”
Louis Têtu, Coveo
The memorandum of understanding (MOU), jointly signed by federal AI minister Evan Solomon and government transformation minister Joël Lightbound, with Québec City-based Coveo, allows the government to explore how it can deploy the company’s AI-powered enterprise solutions in its operations. This can include generative and agentic AI technologies, enterprise search, personalized recommendations, and citizen service improvements.
Founded in 2005, Coveo’s AI-powered search and recommendation platform offers search, recommendation, and personalization solutions for commerce, service, website, and workplace applications using the indexed content from its clients.
In a video that Solomon posted to X to commemorate MOU, Coveo executive chairman Louis Têtu said its tech could be used to make more government services “self-serve,” or help government call centre employees provide accurate answers to citizens.
“There is a multi-billion [dollar] opportunity in the Canadian government, from a cost and productivity improvement perspective, to drive more self-service through generative AI,” Têtu said in the video. “To provide Canadians, online, with the information that they need to solve problems, get a permit, or find out about their taxes.”
RELATED: The feds are picking Canadian tech winners through MOUs
The agreement will remain valid for the next five years.
This is the second Canadian AI company that Lightbound and Solomon have signed an agreement with. In August, the government struck a similar deal with Toronto-based large language model (LLM) developer Cohere, building on another collaboration with the company a few months prior. Industry minister Mélanie Joly later declared at the ALL IN conference that the government “will build Cohere” and “make it a Canadian champion.”
Solomon indicated at the time that the government would look to establish more partnerships with technology companies through MOUs. That mandate was solidified in the 2025 budget, which said Solomon would engage with industry “to identify new promising AI infrastructure projects and enter into Memoranda of Understanding with those projects.”
Coveo’s stock, which is publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol CVO, jumped 15 percent when the MOU was revealed on Wednesday morning, from $6.21 CAD per share to $7.14 per share as of this writing.
Feature image courtesy Louis Têtu via LinkedIn.