Ways to build an internal AI chatbot over your own data, compared — including PIPEDA and Quebec Law 25 considerations.
dgm is an independent osFoundry integration partner — not affiliated with osFoundry’s maker (OS LLC), and dgm has no completed client integrations yet.
An internal AI chatbot over your own knowledge is one of the most common first AI projects. There are several ways to build one in Canada, with different control and residency trade-offs.
The options
You can use a hosted assistant with a knowledge feature (fast, least control), a managed enterprise-search product like Glean or Coveo (polished, vendor-managed), or compose your own retrieval on a model-agnostic platform (most control over models and data).
The Canadian considerations
Internal chatbots ingest company and sometimes personal data, so PIPEDA and (in Quebec) Law 25 apply, and ‘keep data in Canada’ is common. That favours options you can self-host or run in a Canadian region.
A practical recommendation
For sensitive internal knowledge, composing retrieval on osFoundry with self-host or local-first gives the most control. osFoundry’s managed cloud pins data to US, EU or Japan — it does not currently offer a Canadian managed region. For data that must stay in Canada, the honest path is self-hosting osFoundry (BYO Cloud) inside a Canadian cloud region such as AWS Canada (Montréal/Calgary), Azure (Toronto/Quebec City) or Google Cloud (Montréal), or running models locally on-device.
Where dgm fits
dgm is an independent integration partner that helps Canadian businesses adopt osFoundry — scoping a first use case, handling the build, and connecting AI to the systems you already run. dgm is independent of osFoundry’s maker (OS LLC) and has no completed client integrations yet, so everything described here is a service offered, not a past result. If you want to scope a practical first project, dgm can help you map it out.