Rob Butler 🇨🇦

Harvard Data Science Agentic AI
ProSci Change Management
Government of Canada | #GCDigital | Views are mine.

[Rob Butler 🇨🇦 @RobButler]

@BuffaloBills Ugh!! Also, Go Bills!!!

[Canada Border Services Agency @CanBorder]

On Nov 1, the #CBSA is adjusting service hours at 9 BC land ports of entry for the change to permanent daylight saving time and to keep hours aligned with neighbouring U.S. ports of entry. Learn more: https://t.co/WSVHthN1jg

[CSIS Canada @csiscanada]

Foreign interference is more sophisticated and agile than ever before. Instead of just targeting elections, adversaries exploit everyday news trends to fuel social divides and weaken democratic values. Verify your info before sharing or making arrangements.https://t.co/FyKzznwvzW

[Rob Butler 🇨🇦 @RobButler]

@grok @TeslaCharging ^^^ Super Intelligence!! :)

[CSIS Canada @csiscanada]

🚫📠 CSIS is embracing the future and has officially started retiring some fax machines!

For all public inquiries, see our website for the best ways to contact us, and please stop sending faxes, unless it’s a top-secret cookie recipe... 🍪 https://t.co/aHrOefdAMm

[Rob Butler 🇨🇦 @RobButler]

@jamesvgingerich I was going to say, of course, and then number 19!

[Rob Butler 🇨🇦 @RobButler]

The @awscloud AWS summit begins in Ottawa.

[Rob Butler 🇨🇦 @RobButler]

@deeJkatz @dylanblackradio My first fear - unlocked 👀

[Rob Butler 🇨🇦 @RobButler]

This week I spent the week working with James and David to move the https://t.co/BTFe87HqSc site to it’s new Wordpress server. I am happy to report most of the move is complete. #OneTeamGov

[Emily McLaughlin @EmilyMcLaw]

The #AmbassadorForADay program is one of the highlights of my job, and this year was no exception.

Thank you so much to Veronika for an inspiring day and for throwing herself into it with so much energy and enthusiasm.

And thank you to everyone who helped make it happen! 🇨🇦👏

[Rob Butler 🇨🇦 @RobButler]

@dylanblackradio @IKEACanada Yum!

[Rob Butler 🇨🇦 @RobButler]

Reducing red tape is not the same as reducing governance

TBS is running a reset of the Policy on Service and Digital. One of its four stated aims is better outcomes by reducing red tape and focusing on results.

I want to sit with that phrase for a minute, because it does a lot of work and it can be read two ways.

The first reading is subtraction. Fewer requirements, fewer gates, fewer forms. Faster by definition.

The second is harder. Most of the process we experience as red tape was written in response to something going wrong. Remove the requirement without replacing the assurance it was providing, and you haven't reduced burden — you've moved risk somewhere it isn't being watched.

The distinction that seems to matter is between process that produces assurance and process that produces paperwork. Both feel identical from inside a delivery team. Both eat the same weeks. But only one of them is doing a job.

Sorting those apart is slow, unglamorous work. It needs people who understand why a given control exists, which is often not written down anywhere and lives with someone two reorganisations away.

The engagement numbers suggest they're taking that seriously: just under 70 sessions across departments, all provinces and territories, and 11 governance committees since July 2025. Drafting is underway.

If you sat in one of those sessions — I'd be interested in what you argued should stay.

Modernizing the Policy on Service and Digital, TBS: https://t.co/F5iQmezvgr

Views my own.
#GCDigital #PublicService

[Rob Butler 🇨🇦 @RobButler]

Welcome, John. My dream is to work for Apple. I am many devices deep, embedded in the echo system and love everything about the experience of my devices. I am looking to see the Home Experience elevated into my already smart-enabled home.

Cheers to apple sticking to its roots and reinventing what the home will look like in the future, today. :)

[Rob Butler 🇨🇦 @RobButler]

The one sentence that changes the AI conversation

TBS published the Guide on the Use of Agentic Artificial Intelligence in May. Buried in the overview is a sentence that should reframe how we all talk about this:

Generative AI may describe what should be done. Agentic AI can attempt to do it.

That is not a technical footnote. It is a governance dividing line.
Here is the part I think gets missed. Agentic AI does not swap one set of risks for another. It inherits every generative concern — accuracy, privacy, fairness, security — and then adds a second set on top.

The new set is about actions rather than content. What did it touch? What permissions did it have? Can we see what it did? Can we undo it? Most of us are far less practised at these, because until recently we did not need to be.

So the honest framing is not "agentic AI is the next thing to assess." It is "agentic AI is everything we were already assessing, plus a category we have barely started on."

The guide's answer is two principles layered on top of FASTER. Bounded autonomy, meaning tight explicit limits on data, tools and scope, with read-only as the default. And recoverability, meaning the thing can be paused, stopped and returned to a safe state, with every action logged somewhere the agent cannot edit.

Both of those are design decisions, not procurement decisions. They have to be made before anyone builds anything, by people who understand the program. Which means the governance conversation cannot wait until there is a tool to assess.

If your department is planning agentic pilots this year, the question is not whether the AI is good. It is whether you can explain, in one sentence, what it is allowed to do and what happens when it does something you did not expect.

Can you?

Guide on the Use of Agentic Artificial Intelligence, TBS: https://t.co/NKHLrHqiFP

Views my own.
#GCDigital #AIGovernance #PublicService

[Rob Butler 🇨🇦 @RobButler]

@EvanKirstel agreed

[Rob Butler 🇨🇦 @RobButler]

end of an era and cool that’s was you!

[Rob Butler 🇨🇦 @RobButler]

@envisionwithj That’s amazing. Wow, what a throwback!

[Rob Butler 🇨🇦 @RobButler]

@StuntmanStu Who you calling old, Stu??? :)

[Rob Butler 🇨🇦 @RobButler]

Great news!

[Financial Post @financialpost]

BREAKING# Canada's economy posts fastest growth in three years https://t.co/MgKfnxEBSH