Gnowit

Gnowit (pronounced "know it") is a Canadian software company that provides automated, near-real-time monitoring of legislative, regulatory, and political activity across Canada. Its platform uses natural-language processing and other artificial-intelligence (AI) methods to ingest and filter material from millions of web sources—including parliamentary debates, committee proceedings, and government publications—and delivers structured, searchable alerts and briefings to clients; the company reports that new publication documents are captured and millions of items are added to its repository daily.^[1][2]

Gnowit was co-founded in Ottawa in 2010 by Shahzad Khan and Mohammad Al-Azzouni; Khan serves as chief executive officer. Khan holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, has more than two decades of experience in AI/ML and computational linguistics, and has authored or co-authored 37 peer-reviewed publications and five patents.

Traditionally, companies performed this analysis manually; Gnowit has delivered efficiencies achieved through AI innovations.^[3] The Ottawa-based company is a graduate of Carleton University's Lead To Win and the University of Ottawa's Startup Garage, as well as the Invest Ottawa incubator program, and more recently, the League of Innovators.

As part of a Canada's Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks (CENGN) project, Gnowit validated a containerized version of its web-intelligence software on Kubernetes. Within CENGN's infrastructure, the deployment used a cloud-hosted master virtual machine (VM) with worker nodes on bare-metal servers; CENGN applied platform optimizations and completed scale testing of selected microservices. The project confirmed that the software functioned as intended in a Kubernetes environment and supported migration from a monolithic to a containerized architecture in preparation for 2020 growth goals. Reported outcomes included a 45% reduction in hardware requirements, development of auto-scaling policies for resource allocation, the ability to deploy in any cloud or cluster, and improved security for the platform.^[4]

Gnowit's goal is to help organizations make timely decisions by delivering relevant updates as soon as they are published on monitored web sources. The platform applies AI and machine-learning (ML) techniques to monitor, capture, clean, analyze, filter, and organize text, and to generate concise, actionable briefs. The company frames its roadmap around a belief–desire–intention (BDI) "intelligent agent on the web," while currently combining Boolean queries, shallow language technologies, and on-the-fly machine-learning classifiers in a self-service interface.^[5]

Gnowit markets several modules for public-affairs, compliance, and market-intelligence teams.^[6][2]

1. Legislative & Regulatory Monitoring (vAnalyst). Tracks Canadian federal, provincial, and territorial activity, including bills and committees, with full-text search, alerts, and reporting.^[6] The product monitors more than two million web sources to surface relevant items quickly.^[5] Why it matters: reduces manual tracking across dispersed government sites, shortens time to identify changes, and concentrates results on issues of interest rather than requiring broad, repeated searches.^[6]
2. Parliamentary Live (vAnalyst). Monitors live video feeds from parliamentary sessions and committees with same-day transcripts, AI-generated summaries, witness summaries, and motion detection; municipal coverage is offered as an option. Gnowit can avail transcripts up to two weeks before official releases.^[2] Why it matters: helps users follow proceedings without watching full sittings, supports rapid extraction of key exchanges, and provides earlier access to text for analysis and briefing.^[2]
3. Municipal Monitoring (vAnalyst). Provides monitoring of Canadian municipalities; public pricing materials reference the ability to "monitor 700 municipalities across Canada."^[7] Why it matters: consolidates local decisions and notices across jurisdictions into one feed, reducing time spent checking individual municipal portals and improving visibility into local impacts.^[7]
4. Curation Edge (analyst service). Curation Edge is an add-on service in which expert analysts work and collaborate with clients to develop a tailored curation guide and deliver daily newsletters or briefs on legislation and media. These reports provide concise summaries, relevant links, and optional metadata, prioritizing the most important updates with added context and analysis. Fully customizable—including branding—and formatted for executive audiences, Curation Edge is designed to reduce information overload, save time, support decision-making, and reinforce thought leadership.^[8] Why it matters: reduces information overload by filtering to high-priority items, adds context for decision-makers, and saves staff time on daily synthesis and distribution.^[8]

Gnowit monitored sources span Canadian government materials across federal, provincial, and territorial jurisdictions—Hansard transcripts (All Jurisdictions, including committees), order papers, committee transcripts, gazettes, bills, acts and regulations, consultations, regulatory-agency publications, and global news media—as well as press releases and council-meeting materials from more than 700 municipalities.^[9]

Gnowit reports collaborations with Canadian academic and ecosystem partners, including:

• Algonquin College
• Carleton University
• McGill University
• University of Ottawa
• Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO)
• Queen's University

The company is a graduate of the Invest Ottawa accelerator and has acknowledged support from Canadian funding bodies and programs, including:

• NRC Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP)
• Mitacs
• Ontario Centre of Innovation (OCI) (formerly OCE)

Gnowit has also referenced membership in the Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform (for context on the consortium - Government of Canada profile: FedDev Ontario – SOSCIP overview).

Gnowit and its founder are listed as inventors/assignees on patents concerning multi-document clustering, salient-content extraction, and sentiment analysis methods that are consistent with these features:

• US 9,600,470 – Method and system relating to re-labelling multi-document clusters (assignee: Whyz Technologies Ltd.).^[10]
• US 9,336,202 – Method and system relating to salient content extraction for information retrieval (assignee: Whyz Technologies Ltd.).^[11]
• CA 2,865,184 C – Method and system relating to re-labelling multi-document clusters.^[12]
• CA 2,865,186 C – Procédé et système concernant l'analyse de sentiment d'un contenu (sentiment analysis; French record).^[13]
• CA 2,865,187 C – Method and system relating to salient content extraction for information retrieval.^[14]

In January 2025, Gnowit personnel contributed to regulatory NLP by co-authoring a peer-reviewed paper at the 1st Regulatory NLP Workshop (RegNLP 2025), co-located with COLING in Abu Dhabi. Titled Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Efficient Regulatory Information Retrieval and Answer Generation, the work introduces PolicyInsight, a framework that joins a dynamic policy data model and knowledge graph with LLMs to monitor policy texts, detect changes, and support retrieval and answer generation; the author list includes Shahzad Khan (CEO, Gnowit Inc.).^[15] (ACL Anthology, aclweb.org). Most organizations use this technology as a tool for competitive intelligence, threat analysis, and brand management.^[16]

Gnowit has published a practical guide, Automated Government Information Monitoring, which outlines how GR and regulatory teams can design a monitoring and briefing workflow and describes Gnowit's automation features and export options (PDF, email, dashboards, CSV/JSON/XML/API).^[5]

• Parliamentary informatics

• Official Website
• About Gnowit
• Whitepaper: Automated Government Information Monitoring
• White paper (PDF): Automated Government Information Monitoring
• CENGN case study (PDF)