~/ai-consultant/ca/ottawa · azgard where you are
ai consultant in ottawa.
Azgard is a remote AI consultant for Ottawa and National Capital Region businesses, built around the very small firms that make up almost the entire city.
delivery: remote-first from sydney · afternoon sessions, widest window out west
the local picture
the ottawa picture.
Ottawa is a city of very small businesses. Around ninety two per cent of its roughly thirty thousand active businesses employ fewer than a hundred people, and close to six in ten are micro firms of one to four. Even the manufacturing base follows the pattern: over a thousand manufacturing establishments, seven in ten of them with fewer than ten employees. The city also has the highest share of knowledge based occupations in the country, which cuts both ways. There is no shortage of capable people here. There is a serious shortage of anyone with a spare week to work out which AI tool a five person firm should be using. Businesses describe themselves by the National Capital Region rather than Ottawa alone, and the region genuinely works in two languages across the river into Gatineau.
The Ottawa Board of Trade went and asked. Its roundtables with small and medium firms found that change management and a lack of know-how, not cost, are the main barriers to adopting AI, and that owners simply do not have the bandwidth to evaluate tools or train their people. The same sessions named the underlying problem plainly: institutional knowledge is not written down anywhere. That is the exact problem this work solves. Azgard builds a Company Brain on your real files, so what the business knows stops living in three people's heads, then hands it over documented well enough that a four person firm keeps it running without a consultant on standby.
what azgard does
one system, three ways in.
the receipts
real customers, named.
common questions
asked from ottawa.
- You are in Sydney. Realistically, when do we talk?
- Mid to late afternoon, Eastern time. The gap is fourteen to sixteen hours depending on the season, so four o'clock here lands in Sydney's early morning. That is the whole live window and it is better known now than in week three: outside it, an Ottawa working day and a Sydney one do not touch at all. It suits small firms better than it sounds, because late afternoon is usually when the phone finally stops.
- Nobody here has time to work out which tools we should use. Is that what you do?
- That is most of the first session, yes. The Fundamentals two hours exists precisely because owners keep being told to adopt AI without being told what it does or where it fails, and reading twenty vendor pages is not a good use of anyone's week. You come out able to tell a useful claim from a marketing one, with a short list of where this would help in your business specifically. Whether you then build anything, with Azgard or with someone else, is a separate decision made later.
- We work in both English and French. Does that break anything?
- Not for the tools, possibly for the review. Current models handle French competently, so a system can read French documents and draft French replies. What Azgard cannot do is confirm the French is right: Angus works in English and will say so rather than pretend otherwise. In practice that means anything client facing in French needs someone on your side to check it before it goes out, which is worth planning for at the start rather than discovering when a client points it out.
- We hold federal contracts. Does that rule this out?
- It might, and finding out belongs before any spending. Firms working for government often carry security and privacy conditions limiting which tools can touch which material, and those conditions come from your contract and your security officer, not from Azgard. Where they apply, the sensible first build stays well clear of contract material: internal process, proposal boilerplate, the standard answers you write over and over. If your obligations rule out even that, you will be told so rather than sold a design that quietly ignores a rule Azgard does not have to live with.
- We are four people. Is a consultant not overkill at that size?
- Sometimes. The honest test is whether the same information passes through your hands again and again, similar proposals, similar client questions, similar reporting, and whether losing one person would take a chunk of the business out the door with them. If both are true, four people is a fine size for this, and the payoff usually arrives faster than in a large firm because nobody needs convincing. If what you actually need is more clients rather than more capacity, put the money there instead and come back afterwards.
elsewhere
nearby, and everywhere else.
a working system beats another strategy deck.
30 minutes, free, no chase sequence afterwards. we’ll tell you if we’re not the right fit for a ottawa business like yours.
$ book call →