Trois-Rivières’s AI automation agency.

Trois-Rivieres is the economic and cultural hub of the Mauricie, a city of 139,163 (161,489 across the metropolitan area) sitting where the Saint-Maurice River meets the St. Lawrence, midway between Montreal and Quebec City. It is Canada's oldest industrial city, home to the 1738 Forges du Saint-Maurice ironworks, and from the late 1920s to the early 1960s it was the world capital of paper. Pulp and paper remains a defining anchor: Kruger Inc. runs the Trois-Rivieres Mill (newsprint, specialty construction paper, recycled linerboard) and the Wayagamack coated-paper mill.

The wider economy is broader than paper alone. Manufacturing is the single largest slice of the regional economy at about 14.1%, concentrated in paper, metal products, and food. Marmen, founded in Trois-Rivieres in 1972 with around 1,000 employees, is one of North America's largest wind-tower and precision-machining manufacturers. The Port of Trois-Rivieres moved 3.5 million tonnes in 2024 across more than 240 ships, with operators including Alcoa, G3 Canada, Groupe Somavrac, Logistec, and QSL handling aluminum, forest products, and grain.

Knowledge work runs deep here too. The Universite du Quebec a Trois-Rivieres anchors the region, with its Institut de recherche sur l'hydrogene (one of Canada's leading hydrogen-research centres) and Quebec's only forensic-science degree programs. The CIUSSS de la Mauricie-et-du-Centre-du-Quebec employs roughly 21,000 people and runs the CHAUR regional teaching hospital. Every one of these organisations carries documents, scheduling, and back-office coordination that consume staff hours by the thousand.

For Trois-Rivieres businesses, the fastest payback comes from French-language customer service that runs after hours, document automation across manufacturing and port paperwork, and back-office workflow that connects the systems teams already use. The Vallee de la transition energetique, Quebec's third innovation zone spanning Becancour, Trois-Rivieres, and Shawinigan, is pulling battery, hydrogen, and decarbonization investment into the region, and the firms that build automation in now are the ones competing on speed without adding headcount or surrendering Law 25 discipline.