The problem: surveying is a wide field
Practising as a land surveyor in Québec means holding several fields of expertise in mind at once. It is hard to keep an overall view of everything a surveyor covers: the certificate of location, staking, boundary determination, the cadastre, geodesy, photogrammetry, lidar, hydrography and much more.
On top of that, surveying technology and the regulatory framework keep evolving. Just think of how much drone use has grown for mapping. On the regulatory side, take the change to the normative framework for flood zones.
The practice is also governed by a multitude of statutes and regulations, such as the Land Surveyors Act and the Code of ethics of land surveyors. I counted at least 23 statutes and regulations framing the practice of the land surveyor.
The "digital second brain" solution
A digital second brain centralizes every document in a vault, then makes that vault accessible to AI agents.
Instead of reading through every regulation over and over during the year, you can now simply ask an AI agent a question: it consults that finite set of documents and provides a concise, factual answer, with the references.
I call my system AG Brain — the second-brain principle applied to land surveying.
Extending the digital second brain with MCP servers
CanLII, for instance, gives access to its database of legal documents through an API.
The open source community built an MCP server that makes it easier for an AI agent to interact with CanLII. Second cerveau pour arpentage, intégration de serveur MCP CANLII (in French).
Document vaults in surveying look promising
This approach now makes it possible to work with every statute, regulation and judgment published in Canada, through the CanLII MCP server.
The digital second brain could supply the references that feed AI agents inside the business processes of a surveying firm.
The same principle could be used to work through the vast body of municipal regulation.