Alma’s AI automation agency.

Alma sits at the outlet of Lac Saint-Jean, where the lake drains into the Grande-Decharge, and is the seat of the Lac-Saint-Jean-Est MRC and the region's second-largest city after Saguenay. Its economy was built in the 1920s on three assets that all still run today: the Isle-Maligne hydroelectric station, an aluminium smelter, and a paper mill. Rio Tinto operates the Alma smelter, an AP-technology primary smelter with capacity above 400,000 tonnes a year and roughly 770 jobs, and owns the 448 MW Isle-Maligne power station that feeds it.

Forest products form the second pillar. The Alma specialty-paper mill, operated by Resolute Forest Products under the Paper Excellence Group, employs around 340 people and runs roughly 350,000 tonnes a year of specialty papers. Around it, Lac-Saint-Jean-Est is a dairy and wild-blueberry belt: Nutrinor, an agri-food cooperative with more than 900 members, runs the most northerly dairy plant in Quebec from Alma, and the wider region is the largest wild-blueberry producer in the province.

Public services and regional commerce anchor the rest. The Hopital d'Alma, part of the CIUSSS du Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, and the College d'Alma, a Cegep with more than 1,200 students, give Alma a healthcare and education base, and the city is the retail and administrative centre for the MRC. Industrial-services and fabrication firms such as Constructions Proco and Groupe Laval Fortin turn around the smelter, the mill, and the dams.

Alma organisations that automate plant shift coordination, regulated document processing, dairy and food-traceability records, healthcare scheduling, and bilingual customer service are pulling ahead. Every deployment is built to Quebec Law 25, overseen by the Commission d'acces a l'information (CAI), and to the Charter of the French Language administered by the OQLF, with French-first delivery and Canadian data residency.