I had done everything right. I found a firm through a YouTube channel I trusted - the consultant had built real credibility online, years of content, thousands of subscribers. The videos were detailed, knowledgeable, genuinely helpful. When I decided to hire them for my Canadian Permanent Residency application, I chose their most expensive tier: "Complete Handling." The one where they were supposed to manage everything.
I paid. I uploaded my documents. I waited.
Days passed. Then weeks. I'd send a message - I'd get a response, but nothing concrete. Reassurances. "We're working on your file." "No worries, you have time." I believed them. I had paid for Complete Handling, after all.
Then, with less than two weeks remaining in my 60-day window, I started receiving feedback. Real feedback. Issues I didn't know existed. My employment letter had a date inconsistency. A field on one of the IRCC forms didn't match my uploaded documents. My bank statement needed to be more recent. Items that could have been identified - and resolved - in week one.
I got my PR. It worked out. But the experience left me genuinely shaken - not because anything had gone catastrophically wrong, but because of how easily it could have. And because I had paid a premium price precisely to avoid that kind of experience.
I started asking around. Talking to other immigrants who had used similar services. The stories were consistent: late feedback, last-minute scrambles, document issues discovered close to deadlines, expensive fees for services that felt manual, opaque, and slow.
I'm a technologist. I understand what AI can do. And I looked at the immigration process and saw it clearly: the vast majority of consultant time is spent on work that doesn't require human expertise. Scanning documents. Checking dates. Cross-referencing names. Filling forms. Chasing clients for missing items. All of this can be automated - instantly, accurately, at scale. That frees the consultant to do what actually requires expertise: judgment, strategy, advice, review.