OTTAWA — The Alberta government turned 1,100 tech enthusiasts loose on a massive set of public federal data Wednesday, tasking them with uncovering signs of fraud and government waste to show how Al can improve accountability.

Roughly 200 people turned up for the nearly five-hour hackathon in Ottawa in person, huddling in teams over their laptops in Shopify’s former headquarters in Ottawa with hundreds more taking part online. The provincial government challenged them to find examples of duplicative funding, “zombie” recipients that take public money and disappear, and sole-sourced contracts that balloon over time, with a prize on offer for the best work.

Matthew Kirubakaran, an Ottawa local, found 73 potential shell companies that collectively received $2.4 billion in government grants. He presented his findings as an interactive role-playing video game. 

Another team, headed by Ryan Hanley, CEO of Ottawa startup Taskd, uncovered a web of funding circulating among a group of charities connected by a single executive. 

The winner, Lemonbrand CEO Simon Bergeron, took home a $2,000 prize for creating a team of AI agents to help auditors parse massive government datasets and find patterns worthy of further investigation.

None of their findings have been verified, and there’s no evidence of any wrongdoing. Alberta Innovation Minister Nate Glubish, who travelled to Ottawa to oversee the event, said the idea wasn’t to uncover federal scandals but to show what the technology can do.

“There’s nothing cheeky about it,” Glubish told The Logic. His deputy minister, Janak Alford, plans to present findings from the hackathon at a Thursday meeting of federal and provincial officials involved in digital trust, cybersecurity and AI in a bid to foster more AI adoption. “Our goal is to create a culture of innovation,” Glubish said.

Despite his earnest intention, more than one participant laughed at the implicit jab at Ottawa—a familiar dynamic in Canadian politics. “It is funny that this is being done by Alberta on Ottawa soil,” said Hanley, whose team joined the hackathon to show off some of their business’ capabilities. 

The Alberta government has been vocal about its ambitions to be a vanguard of AI adoption for its own operations, and Glubish said he wants to encourage other jurisdictions to take the leap.

“What we’ve decided to do in Alberta is to lead by example,” said Glubish, a former venture capitalist who said he prefers to take a portfolio-based approach to AI. “We shouldn’t be afraid to try 10 things and have eight things not work. If those two things completely transform how we accomplish things for the benefit of Albertans and of Canadians, then we should recognise that as a big win.”

That’s not to say Alberta takes a Wild-West approach to AI adoption; the province has guardrails to protect privacy and critical data, Glubish said. 

His approach runs counter to traditional thinking in risk-averse Ottawa, where decisions face harsh scrutiny from the public and the opposition.

For the hackers crowded into the cafeteria of the old Shopify building, the Ottawa instinct looks less like prudence and more like paralysis given how quickly AI is evolving, and they relished the idea of shaking things up.

Nilufer Erdebil, CEO of an Ottawa consultancy firm called Spring2Innovation, teamed up with her son Ethan, who has just finished the second year of his software engineering degree at Carleton University. They tracked housing money that flows from the federal government to provinces, cities and non-profits.  

She said having so many people tackling problems in a new way helps demonstrate what’s possible. 

Even a few years ago, Mohan Madhuv, a freelance user-experience designer, said he wouldn’t have been able to do what Alberta asked of the hackers. Now, digging up misspent money is “table stakes” at an event like this, said Will Coffey, the CEO of U.S. AI governance firm Pythagorithm, who travelled from Washington, D.C., for the event. 

“Now you’ve found that there are funding loops, now you’ve found that there’s vendor concentration, now what?” he said, half hidden behind his laptop, with three extra screens perched on top. “What do you do to either improve your processes or improve your governance to ensure that those things don’t happen?”

Alberta has started to answer that question by deploying AI instead of costly consultants, said Glubish. The government recently set out to update two Ministry of Infrastructure databases that track government properties and construction budgets. The leading bidder on the contract proposed a $54-million, four-year project, he said. Instead, the government did the work internally using AI for $2.6 million in a fraction of the time. 

“Every government department in Alberta and, I would argue, every government department and every government in this country, has use cases like that,” Glubish said.