‘Every government is stuck with the same aging systems we were’
Alberta's government says it plans to replace 185 aging systems within one ministry with 16 modern applications it will own outright – part of a broader technology overhaul that HR professionals should note for how quickly AI-driven restructuring can compress workforce retraining timelines inside large organizations.
AI agents have shown potential to speed such replacement work by up to 20 times while cutting modernization timelines by up to 95 per cent, the province says. The agents were built using Anthropic's Claude models as part of an 18-month effort to rebuild the technology behind Alberta's public services.
The same AI tools are reinforcing cyber security protections that block more than 189 million attempted connections daily, along with fraud attempts against social programs occurring on average every minute, the province said.
Brian Peters, head of North America Government Affairs at Anthropic, says the project provides a documented model for addressing technical debt at scale. "What Alberta built demonstrates something governments have long needed: a practical, documented approach to tackling the technical debt and security exposure that accumulates in decades of legacy code," Peters says.
Business leaders predict that in the next two to three years, AI agents will either be leading project management for teams (39 per cent) or working alongside humans as peers to complete tasks (31 per cent), according to a previous report.
Province reports rapid technology overhaul
The Ministry of Technology and Innovation says the AI agents reviewed more than 466 million lines of the province's decades-old computer code in about 20 hours, work it says would otherwise have taken years. The province says the effort has made it a leader in public service AI adoption in North America.
Alberta has also published 21 technical papers – called the Velocity White Papers – outlining its methodology so other governments can follow the same approach, available at no cost at thevelocitywhitepapers.com.
“Alberta spent decades building technology that worked for government. Now we are rebuilding it to work better for Albertans and doing it faster and for far less,” says Nate Glubish, Minister of Technology and Innovation. “The tools our team built are world-class, and we are sharing them openly because every government is stuck with the same aging systems we were. Alberta is not waiting to solve this problem.
“We are solving it, and we are showing others how.”
The Ministry of Technology and Innovation oversees more than 1,280 applications and 3,400 collections of computer code across Alberta's 27 ministries. The government said modernizing this technology conventionally would cost roughly $2 billion and take more than a century, versus a targeted 95 per cent cut in time and cost using AI.
The province did not say when remaining replacements will be complete, nor how many jobs, if any, may be affected.
AI academy
The province’s rebuild has been paired with the Alberta AI Academy, a free training resource launched in September 2025 to help public servants learn AI tools.
The Academy has trained more than 2,000 public servants since launch, and more than 15,000 people across Canada have used the platform overall, the government says.
Cole Cioran, managing partner for the Canadian Public Sector at Info-Tech Research Group, says the significance lies in what the project demonstrates about organizations with limited resources.
"Their deeper lesson is that scarcity drives the result: a resource-constrained government reached the same order-of-magnitude gain in software delivery that the world's best-funded technology companies achieve," Cioran says.
Canada “ranks near the bottom of countries in AI training, literacy and trust," Prime Minister Mark Carney previously said.
