AI Automation · Canada
AI Automation for Canadian Small Businesses
Not a chatbot bolted onto your homepage. We automate the specific handoffs that lose you money — the lead nobody answered, the quote that took three days, the form that went to an inbox nobody watches.
Built on your data, not a generic bot
PIPEDA-aware by design
Two-week pilot before any commitment
Recent pilot result
- Average first response to a new lead
6h 20m45s - Quotes issued per week
1439 - Admin hours per week on intake
112
Results observed for a Metro Vancouver services client following a two-week workflow automation pilot.
Scope
What we actually automate
Six workflows, each chosen because it has a measurable cost today: instant lead response, quote and intake handling, CRM hygiene, document processing, internal knowledge search, and reporting. We start with one, prove it, then add.
Instant lead response
Every enquiry answered within a minute, qualified with the questions your sales team would ask anyway, and routed to the right person with context attached. Response speed is the highest-return automation available to most businesses.
Target: under 60 seconds
Quote and intake handling
Structured intake that collects what you need the first time, pre-fills your quote template, and flags the jobs that need a human to price. The goal is fewer back-and-forth emails, not a robot pretending to quote.
Human approval before anything is sent
CRM hygiene
Records created and updated from email, calls and forms automatically, duplicates merged, and stale deals surfaced. Most CRM failures are data-entry failures, and data entry is the thing automation is genuinely good at.
No manual entry for inbound
Document processing
Invoices, purchase orders, timesheets and supplier documents read, extracted and filed into your existing system. Retrieval-based extraction against your own templates, with a confidence threshold that routes anything uncertain to a person.
Low-confidence items go to a human
Internal knowledge search
Your own documents, quotes, SOPs and past jobs made searchable in plain language, so the answer to what did we charge them last time takes ten seconds rather than twenty minutes of digging.
Your documents only, not the open web
Reporting that assembles itself
The weekly numbers your team currently rebuilds by hand, pulled from source and delivered on a schedule. Unglamorous, and usually the automation people are most grateful for six months later.
Scheduled, sourced, no manual step
How we work
How this differs from installing a chatbot
A generic chatbot answers questions about your business from your website’s text. That is a narrow and often frustrating slice of what automation can do, and it is the slice least connected to revenue.
| What gets done | Off-the-shelf chatbot | SBS process automation |
|---|---|---|
| What it knows | Your public website text | Your CRM, documents and past jobs |
| What it does | Answers questions | Completes a workflow end to end |
| Where it runs | A widget on your site | Wherever the work happens — email, CRM, forms |
| Failure mode | Confidently wrong to a customer | Low-confidence items routed to a person |
| Data handling | Vendor default, often offshore | Reviewed against PIPEDA before build |
| Measured on | Conversations handled | Response time, quotes issued, hours saved |
Timeline
Two-week pilot, then expand
We automate one workflow first and measure it against what it replaced. If the pilot does not pay for itself, there is no reason to continue and we will say so.
Process review
We map where work actually gets stuck — usually a handoff between two people or two systems — and put a cost against each. The candidates are ranked by hours or revenue lost, not by how interesting they are to automate.
Week 1
Pick one and build it
The single highest-cost workflow, built against your real data with a human approval step wherever a mistake would reach a customer.
Weeks 2–3
Run it in parallel
The automation runs alongside your existing process for two weeks so you can compare outputs directly before trusting it. Nothing is switched off until the comparison is done.
Weeks 4–5
Measure, then add the next
Hours saved and revenue affected, measured against the baseline. Then the second workflow, using everything the first one established about your data.
Week 6 onward
Local
Automation for Canadian businesses
We work with Canadian businesses under Canadian privacy expectations, on Canadian business hours. Data residency and retention are decided before anything is built, not after.
Any automation that touches customer information in Canada has to work under PIPEDA, and that shapes real build decisions: what gets sent to a third-party model, what stays inside your systems, how long anything is retained, and what you would say to a customer who asks. We settle those questions in the process review, before code, because retrofitting them afterwards usually means rebuilding.
The other thing worth saying plainly: automation is worth doing where a process is repetitive and well-defined, and it is a poor investment where the work is genuinely judgement-heavy. We will tell you when the honest answer is that the process needs fixing before it needs automating. Automating a broken workflow just produces broken outputs faster.
- Business
- SBS Digitals
- Service area
- Surrey & Metro Vancouver, BC
- Phone
- +1 (438) 728-8507
- [email protected]
- Hours
- Mon–Sat, 9:00–18:00 ET
Questions
AI automation: common questions
The questions Canadian owners ask before letting software touch their customer data.
What happens to our customer data?
That is decided before we build. Where the workflow allows it, processing stays inside your own systems and no customer data reaches a third-party model at all. Where a model is genuinely needed, we document what is sent, what is retained, and for how long, so you can answer a customer or a privacy officer honestly. This is settled in the process review, not discovered later.
Will this replace my staff?
In the work we do, it replaces tasks rather than people — data entry, copying between systems, chasing a status, rebuilding the same weekly report. Every workflow we build has a human approval step wherever an error would reach a customer. Businesses that automate intake usually end up handling more work with the same team, not less work with fewer people.
How much does AI automation cost?
A two-week pilot on a single workflow is CAD $1,500 to $3,500 depending on how many systems it has to touch. Ongoing workflows are quoted individually, typically CAD $400 to $1,200 per month including the model and platform costs. We quote the pilot first deliberately, so you can judge the return before committing to more.
What if it gets something wrong?
Every workflow has a confidence threshold and anything below it routes to a person instead of proceeding. During the pilot the automation runs in parallel with your existing process so you can compare outputs directly before trusting it. Nothing is switched off until that comparison is done and you are satisfied with it.
Find the workflow that is costing you most
Tell us where your team loses the most time or the most leads. We will tell you whether automation is the right answer for it, and roughly what it would return.