The Alberta government says it has become a North American leader in the use of artificial intelligence after using AI tools to modernize decades-old government technology, claiming the approach could cut the time and cost of replacing legacy systems by as much as 95%.Technology and Innovation Minister Nate Glubish announced Monday that Alberta has spent the past 18 months developing its own suite of AI-powered tools to analyze and modernize government software. The province is also making its methods publicly available through 21 open-source technical papers intended to help other governments overhaul aging technology.According to the province, AI agents built using Anthropic's Claude models reviewed more than 466 million lines of government computer code in approximately 20 hours, work officials say would have taken years to complete manually. The review provided what the government describes as its first comprehensive assessment of the health and security of its software systems."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," Glubish said.The province says one ministry is already using AI as part of a plan to replace 185 aging computer systems with 16 modern applications that will be owned outright by the government. Officials say AI agents have demonstrated the potential to accelerate software development by up to 20 times while dramatically reducing modernization timelines.The government also says the AI tools strengthen cybersecurity, complementing existing systems that blocked an average of 189 million attempted network connections each day during the 2024-25 fiscal year. Officials added that fraud attempts against government social programs are detected and blocked, on average, every minute..Alberta's Ministry of Technology and Innovation oversees more than 1,280 applications and 3,400 collections of computer code across 27 provincial ministries. The province estimates replacing the systems using traditional methods would cost roughly $2 billion and take more than a century. By using AI, officials say they are targeting a 95% reduction in both cost and completion time.The province has published its modernization framework through what it calls the Velocity White Papers, along with software tools, simulations and implementation guides, free of charge.The initiative builds on Alberta's AI Academy, launched in September 2025 to train public servants on the use of artificial intelligence. The government says more than 2,000 Alberta public servants have completed the training, while more than 15,000 people across Canada, including employees from other provincial governments and the federal government, have used the open-source platform.The announcement drew praise from industry partners involved in the project.Brian Peters, head of North America Government Affairs at Anthropic, said Alberta's approach provides governments with a practical method of addressing decades of accumulated technical debt while improving security and lowering costs for taxpayers.Google Cloud Canada managing director Farsad Nasseri described Alberta as "the North Star in Canada's government transformation," while Cole Cioran of Info-Tech Research Group called the published framework the first production-ready blueprint for an AI-driven public service.
