Fund your AI integration
Forecasting model, vision-based quality control, internal copilot, recommendation engine: the gap between the demo and production is exactly what Canadian programs are now looking to fund.
- Demand forecasting model
- Vision-based quality control
- Internal copilot on in-house data
- Anomaly and fraud detection
- Predictive maintenance
- Data preparation and labelling
- Access to compute power
- Embedding the model in the process
Programs for AI integration
An AI project often triggers two families at once: a tax credit on specialized salaries, and direct funding for compute or industrial integration.
CDAE-IA
Fonds d'accès au calcul pour l'IA
- Federal · Next Generation Manufacturing Canada (NGen)
NGen AI4M
Closed40% of costs, projects of $1.5M to $8M RS&DE
Planning a project like this?
How funding works for an AI project
Using an off-the-shelf artificial intelligence tool is not an AI project as programs define it: it is a software purchase, funded as such. What opens the AI-specific programs is the adaptation work — training or fine-tuning a model on your data, building the pipeline that feeds it, validating its outputs in real conditions, and integrating it into an existing process without interrupting it.
That distinction has a direct effect on how the file is built: the cost items that count are not licences but specialized salaries, access to compute, and data preparation — usually the heaviest item and the one most often overlooked. And because part of this work consists of testing approaches nobody knew would work, it frequently qualifies for the research credit — provided the experiments, including the failed ones, were documented as they happened.
- 01
Specialized salaries
Data scientists, machine learning engineers and developers assigned to the project, prorated to time actually spent.
- 02
Access to compute
Training and inference, on rented or owned infrastructure: an item that now has a dedicated federal program of its own.
- 03
Data preparation
Collection, cleaning, labelling and pipeline work: the heaviest item in an AI project, and the most under-reported.
- 04
Process integration
Connection to the production line or management systems, interfaces, real-condition validation and monitoring.
Frequently asked questions about AI integration
The CDAE-AI, administered by Revenu Québec and Investissement Québec, is a tax credit on salaries tied to e-business development, artificial intelligence stream. The AI Compute Access Fund, from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, targets the computing power needed to train models. NGen AI4M funds the integration of AI into manufacturing. Finally, SR&ED covers the portion of the work where genuine technical uncertainty had to be resolved. These programs combine, subject to stacking caps.
Not under the AI programs. Buying a subscription to an already-commercialized tool and using it as-is is a software purchase: it may fall under digital transformation programs, but not under the AI-specific ones. What opens those is the adaptation work — training or fine-tuning a model on your own data, building the pipeline that feeds it, validating its outputs and integrating it into an existing process. The line sits between using and adapting, not between large and small projects.
Partly, and the qualifying share is rarely the one people expect. Implementing a known architecture with proven tools is development, not research. What does qualify is work whose outcome was uncertain — an approach that was not guaranteed to converge on your data, a latency or compute-cost constraint with no known solution, a trade-off between accuracy and volume that had to be settled experimentally. The practical condition is documenting the experiments as they happen, including the ones that did not work: those are what demonstrate the uncertainty.
Yes, and this is a recent change worth knowing about. The computing power needed to train models now has its own federal program, the AI Compute Access Fund, precisely because that item had become the main obstacle for SMEs. Cloud costs tied to training and inference may also fall under other programs depending on how the project is structured. As always, the invoicing has to be itemized and traceable to the funded project.
Hubvention starts by drawing the line between what is a software purchase, what is adaptation, and what is research — that split determines which programs are available and for how much. The firm then puts salary, compute and data tracking in place from the start of the work, because an AI file reconstructed after the fact defends poorly. It drafts the file, files it, defends it with the agency and follows through until payment. The initial assessment is free; fees are set case by case in the engagement letter, before work begins.