Intelligent Automation

Intelligent automation consulting in Toronto and across Ontario: a two-week diagnostic that returns a prioritised list, then agents, document intelligence, decision support and custom models built inside the systems you already run — with explicit guardrails, human checkpoints and audit trails — and operated after go-live by the team that built them.

years of software delivery, since 1995: 30+ years of software delivery, since 1995
AI-built tooling shipping today: In market AI-built tooling shipping today
from diagnostic to operated: Plan → Ops from diagnostic to operated
Ontario Vendor of Record: VoR Ontario Vendor of Record

Strategy you can run

A typical consultancy hands you a deck. We hand you a working system: designed, built and operated inside the tools your team already uses, with the boundaries written down and a person in the loop where it matters. Intelligent automation that earns its keep — measured against the metrics agreed before the first line of code, and run by the people who built it after go-live.

Guardrails are the product

The hard part of production AI is not capability; it is restraint. An agent that can act on your ERP needs to know precisely what it may not do, fail safely when it meets the case nobody anticipated, hand the consequential decisions to a person, and leave an audit trail your board and your regulator can read. We design those constraints first and the capability inside them, which is why the organizations that hire us are the ones that have to answer for what their systems do: operators with a licence to protect, public bodies with a privacy officer, finance teams with an auditor.

Built on the systems you already run

Automation that lives beside the operation becomes another silo. Ours reads and writes the systems you have — the ERP, the CRM, the warehouse and the dashboards over it — through integrations we write in Python and own with you, so the Monday briefing, the routed request and the reconciled ledger are the same data your team already trusts. It is the same engineering practice that builds our pipelines and our custom modules; the model is the newest tool in it, not the only one.

A typical operation

Every line is a delay. Every node, a decision.

Forty-three of them, give or take. Hover any one to see where we reduce the lag between data and action.

The full map, in text: every role and where we land

Every role and function in a typical operation, and where Cantan Group helps
Role	What they own	Where we land
Executive
CEO	Sets strategy, allocates capital, owns the outcome.	Decision Support An executive briefing agent that synthesises the week's signals across every system you run — Monday-morning ready.
CFO	Owns the books, the close, and the forecast.	Document Intelligence Automated invoice extraction, reconciliation, and anomaly flagging — the close compresses from weeks to days.
COO	Operations leadership, capacity, throughput.	Agent Workflows Cross-system routing and triage so nothing falls between functional seams.
Strategy	Synthesises signals into direction.	Decision Support Cross-functional signal aggregation surfaces emerging themes before they hit a board pack.
Finance
Accounts Receivable	Invoicing, collections, dunning.	Document Intelligence Invoice data extracted, matched, and posted automatically — DSO improves measurably.
Accounts Payable	Vendor invoices, approvals, payments.	Document Intelligence Three-way matching automated end-to-end; exception handling routed to the right approver in seconds.
General Ledger	Books of record; month-end close.	Custom Models & Operations Reconciliation models flag breaks the moment they appear, not the day before close.
FP&A	Forecasts, variance, scenario plans.	Decision Support Augmented analytics flag forecast drift, surface drivers, and draft the variance narrative for you.
Treasury	Cash, banking, working capital.	Decision Support Live cash visibility across accounts with predictive runway and covenant alerts.
Operations
Production	Manufacturing, throughput, capacity.	Custom Models & Operations Demand forecasting and quality-failure prediction trained on your own production data.
Supply Chain	Procurement, inventory, suppliers.	Agent Workflows Reorder triage, supplier comms, and inventory exception handling run by an agent layer.
Logistics	Distribution, fleet, last-mile.	Decision Support Route optimisation and disruption alerts driven by live data, not weekly reports.
Quality	Inspections, incidents, audits.	Document Intelligence Incident reports parsed, classified, and trended — root-cause patterns surface without manual coding.
Sales
Sales Ops	Pipeline hygiene, forecasting, comp.	Decision Support Pipeline anomalies, forecast confidence intervals, and rep-level coaching flags.
Inside Sales	Inbound qualification, SDR.	Agent Workflows Lead routing, enrichment, and first-touch drafted by an agent — humans handle the conversation.
Field Sales	Named accounts, territory.	Decision Support Territory and account signals (news, intent, expansion) summarised before each call.
Account Mgmt	Renewals, expansion, contracts.	Document Intelligence Contract clauses extracted and tracked; renewal risk surfaced 90 days out.
Marketing
Brand	Identity, positioning, comms.	Document Intelligence Content audits across every channel — accessibility, tone, compliance, in one pass.
Demand Gen	Paid, SEO, lifecycle.	Decision Support Attribution and cohort modelling that survive the cookieless transition.
Content	Editorial, social, video.	Agent Workflows Brief-to-draft pipelines with brand-aligned editors-in-the-loop.
Events	Field events, webinars, partners.	Agent Workflows Event ops orchestrated across CRM, ticketing, and follow-up sequences.
Customer Success
Onboarding	First-90-days customer activation.	Agent Workflows Personalised onboarding flows that adapt to usage signals in real time.
Support	Tickets, SLAs, escalations.	Agent Workflows Triage, summarisation, and knowledge-base lookup before a human ever sees the ticket.
Retention	Health scores, intervention.	Decision Support Churn signals 60–90 days before they're visible in a renewal forecast.
Renewals	Expansion, upsell, renewal.	Custom Models & Operations Renewal-likelihood models tuned to your product usage and engagement data.
People & HR
Recruiting	Sourcing, screening, offers.	Document Intelligence Resume screening calibrated to your roles, with bias controls and audit trail.
Payroll	Compensation, benefits, time.	Document Intelligence Timesheet parsing, exception flagging, and reconciliation across systems.
Performance	Reviews, calibration, comp.	Decision Support Review-cycle analytics — bias detection, calibration scoring, manager coaching insights.
Learning & Dev	Training, skills, succession.	Agent Workflows Skill-gap detection and personalised learning paths assigned automatically.
IT & Infra
Applications	ERP, CRM, BI, line-of-business.	Custom Models & Operations Integration layer and MLOps — models in production with monitoring, drift, and retraining.
Security	Identity, posture, response.	Decision Support Anomaly detection on access patterns, log volumes, and user behaviour.
Helpdesk	Internal IT support, devices.	Agent Workflows First-line triage and resolution agents — humans escalated to only when needed.
Data Platform	Warehouse, pipelines, governance.	Opportunity Mapping The substrate that makes all of this possible. We map the readiness honestly.

What we deliver

Six engagements, sequenced from diagnostic to in-production — the last one is the part most consultancies skip

Opportunity Mapping

A focused two-week diagnostic. We sit with your operations team, find the automation candidates with the highest return, and deliver a prioritised matrix with effort, impact and timeline for each. It is the engagement that opens every other conversation, and you can stop after it.

Document Intelligence

Extract, classify, summarise and generate structured value from unstructured content — contracts, correspondence, reports, statements, PDF archives. We have shipped AI-built document tooling that is in market today, through ACHECKS.

Decision Support

Augmented analytics layered on the reporting and dashboards your team already runs: anomalies surfaced before they become losses, questions asked in plain language, the week-over-week narrative written for the meeting. Your data starts answering back.

Agent Workflows

Agents that read your operational systems and act on them, within the rules you set. The executive briefing written every Monday morning. Routing and triage that run in the background. Reconciliation across systems without manual stitching.

Guardrails & Assurance

Production AI needs constraint, not just capability. We write explicit boundaries on what the system may do, build modular components that fail safely, put a person in the loop where a decision has consequences, and keep an audit trail leadership can defend. Capability without restraint is a liability we will not ship.

Custom Models & Operations

When off-the-shelf models do not fit, we build them. When they do, we run them: production deployment, drift monitoring, retraining, lifecycle ownership. Tool-agnostic by design — we integrate with the ERP, CRM, warehouse, document store, ticketing and BI you already run — for one outcome: less friction between data and action.

How we work

Phased engagements that prove value before they ask you to commit further

Assess
A paid two-week diagnostic. We map your operations, identify the highest-leverage opportunities, and return a prioritised matrix. You decide whether to continue.
Pilot
The smallest meaningful build, typically four to eight weeks: a working system handling real workload, measured against the metrics agreed in the assessment.
Scale
Production integration with your existing systems, broader rollout, training for your team, and documentation that outlives the engagement.
Operate
Monitoring, drift detection, retraining, iteration. We stay accountable for performance, not just for delivery.

Who this is for

Operations leaders who already have the data and want it to do more — mid-market operators and public bodies who cannot hire their way out of the work

For the COO

Operations that scale with the business rather than with headcount: repeatable workflows, less manual stitching, fewer late-night fires.

For the CFO

Reconciliation, forecasting and reporting that close faster and need less human review, with anomalies surfaced before they become losses.

For the head of strategy

Signals from across the operation summarised, ranked and explained, so leadership meetings start from insight rather than from spreadsheets.

For the CEO

A partner that delivers what other firms only diagram, with outcomes measured in operational change rather than in slide decks — and a public-sector procurement route through the Ontario Vendor of Record.

Questions we're asked

Is this generative AI, or automation?

Both, chosen per task. Much of the value is deterministic automation — routing, reconciliation, scheduled work — that needs no model at all. Language models earn their place where the input is unstructured: documents, correspondence, the narrative around the numbers. We use the smallest thing that works, and we say when a model is not the answer.

Does our data leave our systems?

That is a design decision we make with you, explicitly, before anything is built. Models can run where your data lives; hosted models can be used with data boundaries written down and enforced; some data never reaches a model at all. The answer has to be defensible to your board, your privacy officer and the obligations you carry — FIPPA, PHIPA or PIPEDA — and the guardrails engagement exists to make it so.

What do guardrails mean in practice?

Written boundaries on what the system may and may not do; modular parts that fail safely rather than improvise; a person in the loop wherever a decision has consequences; and an audit trail of every action, so leadership can answer for it. Capability without those is a liability we will not ship.

Which tools and models do you use?

Whatever fits: the platforms you already run — ERP, CRM, warehouse, document store, ticketing, BI — and the model that suits the task, hosted or self-run. We are tool-agnostic by design, we build in Python, and the code and the models are yours.

How is it priced?

A fixed fee for the two-week diagnostic, a fixed fee for the pilot scoped against the metrics the diagnostic set, then production and an operating retainer if you want us accountable after go-live. Each step is a decision point; nothing commits you to the next.

Will this replace people?

It takes the repetitive work off their plates — the stitching, the re-keying, the Monday briefing assembled by hand — and leaves the judgment where it belongs. Our clients are operators and public bodies who cannot hire their way out of the work; the goal is capacity, measured, not headcount.

Is the output accessible?

Yes, and we have the proof: the AI-built InDesign-to-accessible-PDF tool we ship through ACHECKS exists because accessibility is our practice. Anything an automation puts in front of people — a report, a portal, a notification — is built to the same standard.

In market · AI-built tooling

An accessibility AI shipping to designers today.

Through our ACHECKS platform we have shipped an AI-developed tool that converts InDesign documents into accessible PDFs: a real production deliverable solving a genuinely hard document-intelligence problem. The same engineering discipline powers the intelligent automation engagements we deliver for operations leaders.

See the tool in action