Caseway at CADSI's Cyber and Digital Outlooks 2026

Sean Midwood and I spent October 1 in Ottawa at CADSI’s Cyber and Digital Outlooks 2026, presented by Accenture.

Most of Caseway’s defence work comes through large prime contractors. We work with those companies, but the end customer decides what needs to be built. That’s why we went: to hear directly from the people setting DND’s digital priorities, then talk with the companies responsible for delivering on them.
The morning started with Vidya ShankarNarayan, MGen Cayle Oberwarth, MGen Justin Thibert and Janhabi Nandy, speaking from their leadership roles in DND’s digital organization. Then the focus moved to operations, with LGen Darcy Molstad, Commander of CJFC, and MGen Dave Yarker, the Cyber Force Commander.

I liked that sequence. Before the coffee break, we had heard from the people responsible for the department’s digital systems and the commanders who rely on them. As a subcontractor, you don’t always get to hear both perspectives together. It helps put the work in context.

The breakouts gave us more to dig into, followed by a lunchtime keynote from Jason Choueiri, ADM Digital Services and Chief Digital Officer.

Where Caseway fits:

A lot of the work we do starts with a fairly ordinary frustration. Someone has to copy information from one form into another. An approval sits in an inbox because nobody knows it’s waiting there. Records are scattered across systems, and reconciling them becomes a job in itself.

These problems aren’t glamorous, but they take up time that people could spend doing the work they were hired for.

Caseway builds sovereign AI to help with that. OmniFill fills forms using records a team already holds. Greenlight, our decision-control service, puts a review and approval checkpoint around decisions so the person signing off has the information they need.

Both run where the data needs to stay, under the customer’s control.

In defence, “sovereign” needs to mean something specific. Can the software run inside a controlled environment? Who can access the data? Can the supplier get through a prime contractor’s security review? Buyers should be asking those questions before they get excited about a demo.

We’ve spent much of the past year getting our own paperwork in order.

Caseway is registered under the Controlled Goods Program and qualified at Band 1 on PSPC’s Artificial Intelligence Source List. We’re IWSCC-certified, listed on CanadaBuys and the BC Defence Supplier Directory, registered on SAM.gov, and have an NCAGE code. We also belong to the Alliance of Canadian Defence Companies, and all 15 members of our team are based in Canada.

I know that’s a long list of registrations and acronyms. But when a prime is deciding whether to bring a small company onto a bid, those details matter. We would rather have the answers ready than hold up the process.

Why I was glad Sean came:

Sean sits on Caseway’s advisory board. He served as a combat systems engineer in the Royal Canadian Navy, worked as a NATO civil servant, and now chairs Tribune Defence Corp.

Much of his work involves helping technology companies navigate NATO and EU procurement. We spend a lot of time figuring out how a smaller Canadian company can contribute to a much larger defence program. Sean brings experience from the buying side, as well as an understanding of how those opportunities extend beyond Canada.

That’s a useful perspective to have beside you at an event like this.

The conversations we’re looking for:

Caseway works with large companies in two ways. We build products together and share the revenue, or we help their existing teams get through their work with less manual effort.

For a team spending too much of its week filling out forms, chasing approvals or piecing together records, the starting point doesn’t need to be a big discussion about AI. I’d rather understand what’s taking up their time and whether we can help.

If you run a program at DND or lead a team at a prime contractor, I’d welcome that conversation.

-Al Vigier is the CEO of Caseway