GovLab 2025–2026: Accelerating Government Impact with AI

Governments today are being asked to deliver more with less: greater service demands, growing complexity, and mounting workforce pressures, all against a backdrop of constrained budgets. This is not a new tension, but it is reaching a tipping point.

At the same time, the tools available to address these challenges have never been more capable. AI is no longer an emerging technology; it is actively reshaping how public institutions operate and serve citizens. GovLab was built to help governments navigate this moment by identifying where AI can make a real difference and turning it into action. The 2025–2026 GovLab Impact Report captures a year of exactly that.

Building on What We Started

Co-founded by AltaML, the Government of Alberta, and Mitacs, GovLab brings together government, industry, and emerging talent to tackle real public sector challenges. By combining public sector expertise with private sector speed and innovation, GovLab practical AI that improves services and drives real impact. That means helping government organizations stop talking about AI and start using it.

Results Worth Noting

This year’s projects spanned everything from legislative research to school construction planning, each one targeting a real bottleneck faced by government teams.

Government of Alberta: AI to Automate Manual Processes

The GoA’s partnership with GovLab encapsulates some of the most complex and high-stakes challenges in public administration, from managing billions in capital investment to protecting sensitive legal documents. This year, six projects went into production across different ministries, each one built to fit into existing workflows and deliver results that teams can see.

A new Research Assistant now searches thousands of pages of legislation and policy manuals, delivering citation-backed answers in seconds and reducing the need to escalate to senior staff. It is deployed across five business units and earns a 9/10 customer success rating. On the financial integrity side, the Program Pattern Analyzer scores 100% of monthly childcare claims to flag high-risk cases, strengthening oversight of approximately $110 million in payments each month. A step forward in scaling oversight without slowing down delivery.

In cybersecurity, analysts were spending up to two days a week manually sorting through 500,000 daily threat events. GovLab’s clustering solution now handles that volume in seconds. This shifts cybersecurity work from manual sorting to real-time insight and response at scale.

The Redaction AI Agent is projected to save Alberta Crown Prosecution Service up to 13,000 hours a year by automating the detection of sensitive information in disclosure documents, with humans reviewing every final decision. And with $8.6 billion approved for school construction, a new capital planning tool cut per-scenario analysis time by 81%, supporting data-driven decisions across 17 Alberta communities.

City of Calgary: AI for Infrastructure Inspections

Calgary’s partnership with GovLab tackled a straightforward but persistent infrastructure problem. Manual inspections covered only 10 to 20 percent of the city’s road sign inventory each year. GovLab’s computer vision system now validates signs automatically from existing video imagery, no separate inspection process required.

University of Alberta: Faster Admissions Through AI

The U of A brought GovLab in to address a growing bottleneck in international student admissions. Document volumes were outpacing manual review capacity, slowing decisions and leaving applicants waiting. GovLab’s Application Screening Tool reduced processing time for complex applications by approximately six days and cut incomplete-document notification time by 5.6 times. Staff adoption reached 63.5% in Stage 1, exceeding the program’s target.

Associates in Action

The impact of GovLab extends beyond the projects themselves. Since 2022, the program has received more than 8,000 applications from students and recent graduates eager to work on meaningful public sector challenges. This year, 112 interns participated, 12 moved into full-time roles at AltaML, and 26 returned for additional terms.

One graduate, Ameen Yarkhan, went on to join the GoA’s Technology and Innovation team, where he continues to work on the kind of problems GovLab is built for. His capital planning model for the Ministry of Education and Childcare achieves high predictive accuracy, and every 1% improvement in officer decision-making saves the government approximately $19 million annually. As Ameen puts it: “Investing in people and providing them with the right environment to grow delivers results far beyond the individual.”

A Message from GovLab Leadership

“Four years ago, GovLab was founded on the belief that the public sector, with the right partnerships and approach, can keep pace with industry,” said Cory Janssen, Co-Founder and CEO of AltaML. “That conviction has proven true. Solutions that once took months can be prototyped in days, and insights buried in decades of government documents can be surfaced in seconds.”

The Future of Government is Agentic

As strong as this year’s results are, the report also points to what comes next. Generative AI expanded what was possible. Agentic AI, which can plan and act across complex workflows, pushes the frontier even further. Built on a foundation in classical machine learning, AltaML, through GovLab, is leading the shift from informing to acting AI in government.

We are proud of the progress captured in this report and grateful to the public servants and leaders who made it possible. To learn more or explore how GovLab can support your organization, visit govlab.ai or reach out at govlab@altaml.com.

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