Castlegar’s AI automation agency.

Castlegar is the Crossroads of the Kootenays, sitting where the Columbia and Kootenay rivers meet in the Selkirk Mountains. With 8,338 residents (2021 Census), it is the West Kootenay's second-largest city and its commercial, transport, and education hub. The economy runs on forestry and pulp, hydroelectric power, and post-secondary education, and the city is home to Selkirk College, the West Kootenay Regional Airport, the Mercer Celgar kraft pulp mill, and several sawmills.

Mercer Celgar anchors the private economy. The mill produces roughly 520,000 tonnes of northern bleached softwood kraft pulp a year and generates about 100 MW of electricity, selling surplus green power to the provincial grid. Kalesnikoff opened North America's first integrated modular mass-timber facility on the airport lands in 2025, and Interfor runs area sawmilling. These resource operations run on equipment uptime, batch documentation, shift coordination, and quality records, all work that AI and automation can lift off overstretched teams.

The advantage in Castlegar is proximity and concentration. Selkirk College's main campus supplies a local technical talent base, the Columbia and Kootenay hydro corridor (the Hugh Keenleyside, Brilliant, and Waneta dams) puts major utilities and Crown operators within minutes, and the West Kootenay Regional Airport gives the region its only scheduled air link. A single automation provider on Pacific Time can serve Castlegar, Trail, Nelson, and the wider Boundary without a time-zone gap.

Castlegar firms that automate document-heavy back offices, equipment monitoring, and after-hours customer response are pulling ahead of peers still doing it all by hand. Every deployment is built for British Columbia's privacy regime, PIPA BC for private business and FIPPA for public bodies like the City of Castlegar, Selkirk College, and Interior Health, with Canadian data residency and full audit logs.