Behind the technology Canadians interact with are decades of policy decisions and institutional knowledge. And behind those systems are public servants who understand not only how they work, but why they work the way they do.

This matters. Government does not have the luxury of stopping while it modernizes. Benefits still need to reach families. Taxes still need to be processed. Borders still need to function. Canadians still need answers.

For those of us who work alongside public-sector organizations, that reality should inspire some admiration. Governments have been modernizing for decades, often while managing aging technology, competing priorities, fiscal pressures, security requirements, and an obligation to maintain public trust.

What feels different today is the momentum building around the next stage of our journey. It is a convergent moment: we now have the policy direction, leadership, and the technology capabilities to turn those ambitions into practical outcomes. 

Canada now has a dedicated Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, an AI Strategy for the Federal Public Service, and a Digital Ambition that puts people at the centre of modernized service delivery. The launch of Digital Transformation Canada, led by Patrick Pichette as CEO, adds a new execution engine to equip public servants with better tools to accomplish the task.

The challenge for industry is not to tell government it needs to transform (public servants know the pressures better than anyone). We need to come to the table with new ideas and approaches that demonstrate how a new generation of sovereign cloud, data, and artificial intelligence capabilities can make that transformation more manageable. Moreover, we need to show how government can make services better for the people who deliver them and the Canadians who depend on them.

Modernization is sometimes described as a technology journey: moving applications to the cloud, recoding a legacy system in a new language, or introducing AI. But technology alone does not transform a service. I believe we can by focusing on the service rather than the technology.  Modernization succeeds when leaders are willing to rethink how work gets done, challenge long-standing assumptions, and bring organizations through the changes needed to realize the full value of new capabilities.[ST1] 

Moving a complicated process onto a modern platform can simply make complexity run faster. The opportunity is to look at the service from the citizen and employee perspective. Where are the unnecessary handoffs? Where is information being entered twice? Where are public servants spending time on administration that could instead be spent applying judgment or helping people obtain the benefits they need?

The United Kingdom’s HM Revenue & Customs transformation journey offers a useful example. HMRC is succeeding. In its July 2026 update, they reported that 78 per cent of interactions take place digitally, with digital service satisfaction consistently above 80 per cent. HMRC’s main lesson is the transformation’s discipline: government remains accountable, modernization is deliberately sequenced, outcomes are measurable, and technology and delivery partners contribute specialized capabilities while the public mandate stays firmly with government. The program is increasingly using AI to better understand gaps and opportunities and applying AI solutions to rapidly accelerate their software delivery lifecycle.

That same opportunity exists today in Canada. I believe that AI’s real value to government will initially be found in practical improvements: an application reaching the right caseworker sooner, documents being summarized rather than manually reviewed multiple times, or a public servant spending less time on repetitive administration and more time helping a Canadian solve a complex problem. 

By starting with the small tasks, government can gain practical digital skills and citizens get to see incremental improvements that make sense to them. Moving from isolated pilots to broad adoption requires trusted data, governance, workforce readiness, and clear accountability. Human judgment and accountability remain essential. So do privacy, security, sovereignty, and public trust. This is an intimidating list, and if we don’t start small it will remain a roadblock to adoption. 

I am pleased to share these ideas at this week’s AWS Public Sector AI Symposium in Ottawa. Modernization at this scale requires public servants, government leaders, technology providers, academic institutions and delivery partners to combine their strengths around a shared mission, learning from both what works and what does not.

My message at the Symposium is simple: start with one service. Understand what citizens and employees need, involve the public servants who know it best and establish a measurable – and meaningful – outcome, and then we can together determine how process, data, cloud, and AI can help cross that finish line. 

Rod Kelly, Managing Director, Master Technology Architect, Accenture Canada

Rod Kelly is Accenture Canada’s most senior architect with over 28 years of experience across multiple industries. He’s spent the last 10+ years leading Accenture’s Software Engineering practice, and now focuses on federal government reinvention, building sovereign AI and cloud solutions through their Digital Core organization.