Jumping Elephants Qualifies for the Government of Canada’s AI Source List
Jumping Elephants is now a pre-qualified supplier on the Government of Canada’s Artificial Intelligence Source List, at Band 3.
The qualification came through Public Services and Procurement Canada following our response to the Invitation to Qualify (Solicitation EN578-180001/B). It means federal departments and agencies can engage us for AI-related services, solutions, and products through a streamlined procurement process, without building a new solicitation from scratch.
What the AI Source List is
The Source List is a standing pool of vetted AI suppliers, established by PSPC and TBS so that federal departments can procure AI services through a streamlined process. Suppliers qualify into one of three bands based on their demonstrated AI capability and track record:
• Band 1: contracts up to $1 million before taxes
• Band 2: contracts up to $4 million before taxes
• Band 3: contracts up to $37.5 million before taxes
Once qualified, suppliers are invited to bid on opportunities solicited through the list. The full roster of pre-qualified suppliers is published on Canada.ca.
What this means for government buyers
If you work in a federal department or agency and you need AI-related services, the practical effect is straightforward: Jumping Elephants is now reachable through a purpose-built AI procurement vehicle, alongside the vehicles we have been on for years.
Our AI work centres on a problem that most departments are only beginning to grapple with: AI content accuracy and providence. As government information increasingly surfaces through AI-powered search, large language models, chatbots, and retrieval-augmented generation systems, departments need to know whether the AI responses for which they have jurisdiction is sourced from the department’s content and is accurate, and what to do when it is not.
That is what our platform, AeoGov, does. AeoGov measures if a department’s content is used to answer the most important questions users are likely to ask about policies and procedures in the department’s jurisdiction while completing the most critical tasks. We use AeoGov to expose the specific gaps. The most common situation we have encountered is that the content usually exists on the organization’s site, but that it is bypassed in favour of non-government content. Another emerging common issue is when content from decision tools is not visible to the AI search engines. We provide actionable guidance on content remediation: what to fix, and in what order, so that the information Canadians receive is what government organizations intend to communicate.
This is not a theoretical concern. Canadians are already asking AI tools about their taxes, their benefits, their immigration status, and their rights. If the answers those tools return are sourced from non-authoritative sources, wrong, or subtly incomplete, the consequences are real. Departments that publish authoritative content have a responsibility to understand how that content performs when it is mediated by AI, and to take steps to improve it when necessary.
AI runs on user experience
AeoGov is innovative platform and one of the first of its kind, but it is just one part of our AI practice. We have conducted usability testing, service design research, and design thinking workshops on AI-powered tools built by federal and provincial government clients, from chatbots and AI-assisted decision-making systems to generative AI applications in education and regulatory services.
That fieldwork is what earned our Band 3 qualification. To reach Band 3, a supplier must demonstrate at least five successfully delivered AI projects with client references. Ours span insights and predictive modelling, machine interactions, and cognitive automation, the three AI categories the Source List covers.
We know what works and what fails in government AI because we have sat with the people who use these tools and watched what happens. That research perspective, human-centred, evidence-based, and grounded in what real users actually do, is what we bring to every AI engagement.
Why this matters to us
Jumping Elephants is an Ottawa-based, Canadian-owned consultancy. We have been doing human-centred design, user research, service design, information architecture, and accessibility work for federal and provincial government clients for thirteen years, in both official languages.
The AI Source List includes some of the largest technology and consulting firms in the world, headquartered in Seattle, New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo. We believe that AI work involving Canadian public content, Canadian government workflows, and Canadian service delivery is well served by suppliers who understand that context from the inside, not from a satellite office.
Our Band 3 qualification reflects the scope and maturity of our AI practice. But most government AI needs are not $37.5-million transformation programmes. They are specific, well-scoped engagements: assess how our content performs in AI search, test whether this chatbot gives accurate answers, help us understand the user experience implications of deploying this tool. That is what we do, and the Source List gives departments a clear procurement path to engage us for it.
AI content optimization is a service design problem
We came to AI work through service design, not through software engineering. Our starting question was not “how do we build an AI tool?” It was: “what happens to the user experience when AI mediates the relationship between a government department and the public it serves?”
The answers AI engines provide are often mostly factually correct but sometimes are not sourced from the published authoritative site. In responding, AI engines will sometimes reach for social media sources such as Facebook or Reddit over the government site content. When AI engines do cite official sources, content that was carefully written, reviewed, and structured by government organizations sometimes gets compressed, recontextualized, or distorted when it is summarized and synthesized. The user gets a confident-sounding answer that may or may not be what was originally published.
AeoGov exists because we believe this is a user experience and service design problem, not just a technology problem. The tool can give us insight into the black box so that we can “see” and assess the responses provided by AI engines. We can then determine the gaps and prescribe an optimization strategy to improve the chances that the AI engines will cite the authoritative source accurately. The objective is to help ensure that even though there is now a third-party intermediary in the conversation, that the user ultimately receives the intended information that they need o complete their task.
How to engage us
The AI Source List is our newest procurement vehicle, but not our only one. Federal departments can also engage Jumping Elephants through:
• ProServices — task-based professional services up to $100K
• TBIPS — IT professional services up to $3.75M
• SBIPS — Solution-Based Informatics Professional Services, Business Transformation stream ($3.75M+)
• TSPS — Task and Solutions Professional Services (above $100K)
• Directed/sole source — up to $40K
We also work with provincial and municipal governments across Canada.
Full details on all procurement vehicles are at jumpingelephants.ca/procurement.
If your department publishes content that Canadians rely on, and you want to understand how AI systems are representing it, we will welcome the conversation.