Canada adds C$2.5M to help 25 more Prairie firms adopt AI with Amii

Amii, the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, will work with 25 more small businesses in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba after federal agency PrairiesCan added C$2.5M. Total federal support is now C$5.6M, and the programme has helped 30 firms since 2024.

Amii, the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, will help 25 more small businesses in Canada’s Prairie provinces build their own AI tools, the institute said on Tuesday. Federal agency PrairiesCan is adding C$2.5M, taking its total support to C$5.6M.

The programme covers Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The first new projects are already under way in energy, farming and manufacturing.

Amii places an AI expert inside each company to work with its staff on their own data. The firm owns what it builds and learns to run it alone once the project ends. Small firms often lag on AI: in the EU, only about 17% use it, against 55% of large companies.

The money will help “empower businesses across the Prairies to scale their impact,” said Amii chief executive Cam Linke.

The scheme began in 2024 with C$3M in federal money and has since worked with 30 firms. They include Croptimistic, which uses cameras on crop sprayers to tell young wheat and oats apart from weeds.

Forestry firm Carson Integrated used 20 years of field data to build a tool that classifies streams. That helps set how much land around them must be left alone.

Amii is one of Canada’s three national AI institutes, alongside Mila in Montreal and Vector in Toronto. In July, Anthropic named it among eight institutions sharing a C$10M research pledge.