Calgary’s Candidly AI is using voice agents to help organizations conduct more of the conversations that inform business decisions.
Founded by Noah McDonough, who leads the company with siblings Jackson McDonough, Head of Business Development, and Kennedy McDonough, Head of Client Success, the startup targets a familiar research constraint: in-depth interviews take time to arrange, conduct and analyze, limiting how many people can participate.
Candidly AI’s platform lets organizations configure an AI interviewer, assign it a phone number and invite stakeholders to call when convenient. The agent asks questions and follows up on responses. Each engagement ends with a findings report built on verbatim quotes, which the company calls the Ground Truth Report. A person reads every transcript, and every participant is quoted at least once.
The company is targeting municipalities, consulting firms, human resources teams and market researchers. Potential applications include resident engagement, employee feedback, customer discovery, onboarding conversations and consultation around organizational change.
Candidly AI also works with municipalities. The Town of Bashaw is its founding municipal client, with residents calling in between September 29 and October 6 to share what they want for the town’s future through Every Voice in Bashaw.
Its proposition centres on collecting detailed responses from more participants without requiring a human interviewer for every call. Organizations can review individual conversations and group transcripts for broader analysis.
Canadian data residency is also central to its positioning. Candidly AI says stakeholder information is stored and processed in Canadian data centres using self-hosted AI models. The company is SOC 2 Audited and ISO 27001 Certified.
Noah McDonough’s consulting experience informed the product’s design, particularly the pressure to gather meaningful input within a project’s budget and schedule.
The result is a Calgary-built platform aimed at making qualitative research easier to organize and scale while retaining access to the human perspectives behind the findings.
Candidly AI is among Platform Calgary’s 2026 Launch Party Top 10. Launch Party, presented by Float, takes place November 5 at the Platform Innovation Centre.
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