AI Access Is Not AI Capability: How do departments build the capacity to identify and pursue AI opportunities within their business processes?

AI is increasingly being positioned as a necessary response to the pressures facing the public sector. But AI is not another technology domain. It is an organizational capability that depends on data, governance, architecture and service design working together.

So, rather than ask "How do we implement AI?", this session reframes the conversation to ask the harder question: how do departments build the capacity to identify where AI can actually create value and pursue those opportunities repeatedly?

Using the Government of Canada's Digital C-Suite (CDSO) model, participants will explore how business architecture, service design, data governance and technology all need to come together to turn AI opportunities into outcomes. The session examines the complementary roles of the Chief Service Architect (CSA), Chief Data Officer (CDO), and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in enabling that capacity.
The session will first establish the GC’s practical Chief Digital Service Officer organizational design model for building AI capacity organisational capacity that systematically.

The session then brings the model and narrative to life via a Transport Canada case story, showing how these ideas translate into practice and what it takes to move from organizational design and opportunity identification toward real-world AI-enabled outcomes.

You will leave with a clearer understanding of how to build AI opportunity capacity - not simply AI access.

Specifically, you will be better equipped to:
1. See how executive digital functions work together to turn opportunities into outcomes
2. Understand the organizational conditions required to pursue them responsibly;
3. Identify AI opportunities within existing business processes and services; and
4. Connect the theory to a real departmental experience through the Transport Canada case story.