Coulee Automation is a small, family-run studio in coulee country, Alberta — building AI-powered tools for the businesses around us, starting with our own.
Focused tools built around one real job in your business — not a bloated platform.
Consult
An honest look at your workflow, then a short list of what's actually worth automating.
Train
Hands-on sessions with your team, working through your real tasks — not a slideshow.
Built and running in our own business, before we ever offered it to anyone else's.
Field Report, our home inspection reporting tool, is the reason this studio exists — we needed it ourselves, so we built it. See how it works →
What we do
Three ways we help.
No package tiers, no bundled hours you don't need — most engagements are one of these three, sized to the actual problem.
Build — custom software, built around how you actually work
We design and build focused tools for a specific job in your business — not a bloated platform, not a dashboard nobody opens. Our own home inspection reporting app started as exactly this kind of project: a tool built to solve one real problem well, from photo capture through to a client-ready report.
Consult — finding where AI actually helps
Most small businesses don't need "an AI strategy" — they need to know which two or three tasks are genuinely worth automating, and which aren't worth the trouble yet. We start with an honest look at your workflow, then hand you a short, realistic list of what's worth building or buying.
Train — getting your team comfortable with the tools you already have
A new tool only pays off if people actually use it. We run hands-on sessions with your team, working through your real day-to-day tasks with the AI tools you've already got or are considering — not a generic slideshow about "the future of AI."
What we've built
Proof of work, not a pitch deck.
We'd rather show you something real and running than talk in hypotheticals.
In use · in-house
Field Report
An AI-assisted home inspection reporting tool, built first for our own inspection business. A walkthrough — photos, dictated notes, room by room — becomes a structured, reviewed finding, then a polished, client-ready report and repair checklist. Every AI-drafted finding is reviewed and approved by the inspector before it ever reaches a client; nothing goes out unchecked.
We're now looking at whether it makes sense for other independent inspectors, too.
Interested in something similar for your own business? That's exactly the kind of project we like taking on. Get in touch →
Who we are
A family business, built the way we'd want to hire one.
Coulee Automation started the way most useful tools do: out of a problem we had ourselves. Founder Ashton Zintel kept running into the same frustration with off-the-shelf software — built for everyone, and so built for no one in particular — so we started building our own instead. It worked well enough that we figured other small businesses in southern Alberta might want the same thing.
We're run out of Lethbridge, in the coulee country along the Oldman River, and it's genuinely a family operation — Ashton alongside his parents, each bringing a different part of getting a small business right.
We're small on purpose. No account managers, no handoffs between "sales" and "the people who actually build it" — the person who builds your tool is the person you talk to, from the first conversation to the last bug fix.
2026Founded
Lethbridge, ABBased in
Field notes
Notes from building small-business AI tools in the real world.
Short, occasional write-ups — no hype, just what we're actually learning.
August 2026
Why we built our own tool instead of buying one
We looked at existing home inspection software before writing a line of code, and most of it does a lot — more than a two-person crew doing walkthroughs actually needs. The features we wanted (a fast way to capture a finding, an AI draft we could review and correct, a report that looked like it came from a real business) kept getting buried under features we didn't.
So we built the smaller version instead. It's not trying to be everything — it's trying to be exactly enough, and nothing gets into a client's hands without a person checking it first.
August 2026
AI isn't magic — a practical starting point for small business owners
The most useful question we've found for a small business isn't "how do we use AI?" It's much narrower: what's one task, this week, that eats real time and follows a pattern? Writing up the same kind of report over and over. Drafting the same kind of email. Sorting through the same kind of note.
Start there, with something small enough to actually finish and check by hand. The bigger ideas can wait until the small one is working and you trust it.
Get in touch
Tell us what you're trying to solve.
A couple of sentences about the actual problem gets us further than a formal proposal ever does.