For these public sector CIOs, technology is the easy part

Police officers in Calgary are writing their own AI agents, a Victoria-based institutional investor is working to make its systems quantum-safe, and the City of Burnaby has AI cameras watching the mountainside above it for smoke. 

Each of those took the right person in the technology seat to make it happen.

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Chris Hogg, CEO and executive editor of Digital Journal, sat down with this year’s nominees for the CIO Association of Canada‘s public sector CIO of the Year. 

The nominees were joined by Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist at Zoho, sponsors of the public sector award.

Payne runs technology at BCI, a Canadian institutional investor, with $313.7 billion in gross assets as of March 31, 2026. It manages that money for 33 public sector clients. Payne says BCI competes with global investment firms for the same deals, so it moves at their pace. 

“What we’ve done from day one is we gave every employee a license to AI”, says Payne. “We also put a team together to go around the organization, teach people early days. What’s a prompt? How do you do prompt engineering?”

At the Calgary Police Service, Dyer has street officers building their own agents.

“I cannot write agents for a police officer,” says Dyer. “The people closest to the problems have the most vested interest.”

Officers use one agent to pull evidence out of cell phone records they used to comb through by hand. Dyer says it saves months on some investigations. 

“If we can solve a case faster for citizens, we earn their trust,” says Dyer.

For Khawaja, the technology is the smaller part of the job. He puts the number at 80% communication, and most of that time goes to translating what his team does into terms a mayor and council can act on.

“Our job is to make sure that we translate complex problems, complex technology problems, into a language that our council, mayor, and our leadership team can understand,” says Khawaja.

He compares the work to infrastructure nobody thinks about until it fails.

“Nobody cares about a water pipe until it basically bursts open, and it’s the same thing with technology,” says Khawaja.

Vegesna sees the same thing across the public sector organizations Zoho works with, where trust comes down to security, privacy and where data lives. Technology, he argues, should take a step back once it works.

“People are the priority,” says Vegesna. “Technology hides in the background.”

All three rely on trust. 

They give the tools and training to the people closest to a problem and let them build. Khawaja works through council and residents, Dyer through officers, Payne through a workforce that now reaches for AI on its own. The technology worries them least.

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This article is part of a series profiling the finalists for the 2026 CanadianCIO of the Year Awards, public sector category, presented by the CIO Association of Canada. The winner will be announced Oct. 1 in Toronto. Digital Journal is the national media partner for the CIO Association of Canada.