Durham Region is looking for student help to build an artificial intelligence tool that would automatically track council agendas from all eight of its local municipalities — Ajax included — and feed the results into briefing notes for Regional Council.
The Region's Government Relations team currently reviews council agendas by hand to spot items that matter to its advocacy priorities, according to a Region of Durham posting. The new project would explore whether AI can take over that monitoring work, alongside agendas from provincial, federal and sector sources.
Two projects, one semester
The invitation lays out two complementary initiatives for a small group of students working on a capstone project or an unpaid practicum placement hosted at the Region.
The first is the AI-enabled monitoring and briefing tool, which would watch council agendas across Durham's eight local area municipalities and help staff prepare briefing notes for Regional Council. The second is an internal interactive dashboard that would visualize the team's advocacy activities, engagement, communications and funding outcomes using metrics that are currently kept in Excel spreadsheets.
If only one project can be finished within the semester, the posting identifies the AI monitoring and briefing tool as the priority.
Who can take part
The project is hosted by the Office of the CAO, Corporate Communication. Students would need access to Copilot Studio and Power BI through their school, along with the ability to export their finished work, the posting states.
The anticipated outcome, as the Region describes it, is a set of prototype tools that reduce manual monitoring and briefing preparation — freeing staff to focus on strategic analysis, relationship-building and advocacy. The dashboard, in turn, would give the department a clearer view of its activities and outcomes to support data-informed decisions.
For Ajax residents, the project points to a Regional bureaucracy looking to modernize how it keeps tabs on what local councils — including Ajax's own — are debating, and how it measures the success of its lobbying efforts at Queen's Park and in Ottawa.
The Region has posted a collaboration form for students and partner institutions interested in taking part.
