If you have questions about what we are doing with AI, start here
What we are doing
The Southeast TechHub (SETH) is applying for funding from senior levels of government to hire one person: a Rural AI Coordinator for Southeast Saskatchewan, for 3 years. That person’s job is to help people in this region understand AI and automation well enough to make their own decisions about it. Councils, businesses, farms, schools, and ordinary residents.
That is the whole program. One local person, based here, whose job is to explain, to test claims, and to say plainly when something is not worth your money.
What we are not doing
We are not selling AI. Nobody in this program sells anything. The program bans it.
We are not telling anyone they have to use it.
We are not building data centres . In fact, we see the giant hyperscale data centres being built today as future white elephants, likely to be left abandoned. We have been here before. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, hype drove a massive overbuild of fibre optic cable across North America. Far more was laid than anyone needed, the companies that laid it went bust, and much of it sat dark and abandoned for years. If a data centre proposal ever comes here, the point of this program is that there will be someone local who remembers that lesson and can help the community weigh the offer, instead of taking the company’s word.
To read an opt ed article about data center hype written by our Executive Director, go here: The 300 Megawatt Question
We are not replacing anyone’s job with software. We are trying to make sure the people who hold those jobs are the ones who understand what is coming, not the last to find out.
Why this is happening now
The honest reason is that AI is already here, and has been for a long time.
Most of what people call AI today is machine learning: software that learns patterns from data instead of being programmed step by step. The term was coined in 1959. Your bank has used it to catch credit-card fraud since the early 1990s. The post office has used it to read handwritten postal codes for about as long. Your spam filter, Google Translate, the recommendations on Netflix, the robotic milkers on Canadian dairy farms since the late 1990s. All of it is AI.
Then came the phone in your pocket. Since 2011, the feed you scroll, the next video that lines up, the traffic your map routes you around, the autocorrect that changes your words, the photo app that groups your kids’ faces. Every one of those is AI. For 15 years, every person in Estevan with a smartphone has been living inside AI systems every day. Nobody asked us. It just arrived.
What changed 3 years ago is that the software started talking back in plain English. That is why it suddenly feels new. It is not.
Why it matters more here than in the city
The national conversation about AI and jobs is about office work in big cities. Ours is not.
Statistics Canada measured which jobs face the highest risk from automation. The highest exposure in the country is in manufacturing, at 26.6% of workers at high risk. Then the industrial, electrical and construction trades. Certified journeypersons face 20.3% high risk, against 12.8% for other workers. Workers without post-secondary education face 33.4%, against 3.6% for degree holders.
Those are our jobs. The AI that reaches this region first is not a chatbot. It is a machine that does part of what a tradesperson, an operator, or a plant worker does today. A community that gets ahead of that shapes how it lands: which tasks get automated, which workers get retrained toward the new work, which local businesses capture the gains. A community that waits inherits somebody else’s decisions.
Why it has to be run from here
This is the part that has nothing to do with AI. It is about who gets the money.
Canada has announced a lot of AI funding. None of it is set aside for rural communities. Cities over half a million people get about $491 per person in federal research and development grants. Rural Canada gets between $60 and $127. When money like this does reach a place like Estevan, it usually arrives the same way: an urban institution wins the grant, sends someone down the highway for a 2-hour workshop, and leaves. The knowledge goes home with them.
SETH exists so that does not happen here. It is one of the only community-built technology hubs in rural Canada, created in Estevan by the people who live here. If this program is funded through SETH, the coordinator lives here, the training runs here, and 3 years from now the knowledge is still here, in people who can guide the rest of the community.
What it costs you
Nothing. The funding request goes to the federal and provincial governments. The City of Estevan has been asked for a letter of support, not money. Community programs run through the program are free.
Who is behind it
SETH is a non-profit governed by a community board. It won the Saskatchewan Economic Development Alliance’s Community Project Award in 2025. In May 2026, Innovation Saskatchewan invested $149,000 over 3 years directly in SETH to expand rural tech capability. The program design has been reviewed and endorsed in writing by Shorefast, the charity behind Fogo Island’s economic revival, and by the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health.
Every year of the program ends with a public report on what ran, what changed, what failed, and what it cost. Year 3 includes an independent evaluation. If it does not work, that will be on the record.
Still not convinced?
Good. Doubt is welcome here.
If you want to read the full case, here is the policy paper Rural Canada and the AI Moment and the coordinator proposal are links. If you would rather talk to a person, email Gordon More, Executive Director, at info@sethub.ca.
We would rather hear from you angry than not hear from you at all.