What is OEX, and what can I do with it?

OEX is economic intelligence infrastructure: a way to understand and work with businesses, places, industries, workforce, demand, supply, and how all of it connects.

What makes it different from a directory or a dashboard is that it keeps the relationships. A business isn’t just a row — it sits in an industry, in a place, with people who work there, customers it sells to and suppliers it depends on. Most of the questions worth asking are about those connections rather than about any one record.

It’s built to be used two ways from the same evidence: by people, through this website, and by software, through an open machine interface.

Explore the mapWhat is on the platform

Because most real economic questions need several sources at once, and stitching them together is the part that eats your week.

If you run a business, OEX can tell you what the public record says about you, what’s missing from it, and what to do about that. If you’re sizing up a market, it can show you what’s in a place — industries, wages, housing costs, businesses, trade — with the source attached to every number. If you work for a city or a regional development office, it’s a way to see your local economy as a structure instead of a stack of PDFs.

And if you’d rather just ask a question in plain language, point the AI assistant you already use at it.

Start exploring

No. Saskatchewan is where the evidence is deepest right now — it isn’t what OEX is.

The structure underneath is national: Canadian occupational classification, census geography, industry classification. Wage and vacancy evidence covers every province and Canada as a whole, and rent evidence covers surveyed centres across the country. What’s Saskatchewan-specific today is the detailed municipal work — business directories, community economic profiles, modelled community GDP — because that’s where the fieldwork and the data agreements started.

So treat geography as a coverage question rather than an identity. Where the evidence for a place is thin, OEX is built to say so rather than fill in the gap.

Where evidence exists today

Nearly everything public. Browse businesses, communities, sectors, wages, rents, trade and labour-demand evidence. Follow any published number back to where it came from. Compare places. Run a free health check on a real business by giving its name and website.

There’s no paywall on public data and no API key. The machine interfaces are open on the same terms, so an assistant can use OEX without anyone signing in anywhere.

Accounts exist for the things that are actually about you: managing a business record, granting or withdrawing permissions, and your own profile.

Find a businessBrowse communities

No. An OEX account lets you use account-based features, but it doesn’t prove that you represent a particular business.

Those are two different things on purpose, because anyone can create an account. Speaking for a business means showing a connection to it, and that’s a separate step.

How authority is established

Not in the sense of a chatbot you subscribe to. OEX is the evidence layer, not the model.

You bring whichever assistant you already use, and OEX hands it structured economic context with the sources attached. There’s no separate AI subscription. And when you ask OEX a question through its own interfaces, it doesn’t quietly run that question through a hosted model — it plans, retrieves governed evidence, and gives back what it found along with what it couldn’t answer.

Use OEX with AI

Yes, in two ways.

The quick way is to just ask. Hand your assistant OEX’s public guide for AI and it’ll follow the evidence from there — nothing to install, nothing to set up.

The better way, if your plan supports it, is to connect OEX once. After that ChatGPT can call OEX directly instead of reading pages, which means it’s querying evidence rather than interpreting a website.

Connect an assistant

Yes. Claude connects the same way ChatGPT does, and Gemini, Perplexity or anything else that can browse can read OEX directly — every covered page is also published as plain text built for machines rather than for browsers.

None of this is specific to one AI company. The connection standard is open, it needs no key, and published data is read-only.

Setup for each assistantThe guide agents read

Using it directly means you’re reading and clicking — pages, tables, evidence links. Using it through an AI means you ask in your own words and the assistant does the fetching and joining. Both reach the same public evidence.

There’s a third case worth naming on its own, because it’s the only one that touches anything private: letting an assistant reach information about your own business that isn’t public. That needs you to have established authority over the record and to have granted a permission for that purpose. It never happens by default, and it isn’t what the public tools do.

Only what you’ve explicitly permitted, and only after you’ve established authority over the record.

The public tools reach public evidence. They can’t reach a real business’s private context — that’s enforced in the code, not by convention. The business-workflow tools an agent can call freely operate on synthetic practice records that appear in no OEX dataset, search result or count, so the whole workflow can be walked end to end without touching anyone real.

Businesses, places, industries, workforce, demand and supply — and the joins between them.

In practice people ask things like: which industries are concentrated in this community; what this occupation pays here compared with elsewhere; what housing costs against that wage; which businesses in this sector operate in this area; how exposed this region’s trade is to a single destination; what training capacity exists for a given role; and what the public record currently says about my own business.

Industry, workforce, demand and supply are best treated as four lenses on one economy rather than four separate datasets. A question usually starts in one and ends up in another.

What people look at most

Yes, and you don’t need an account to start. Give OEX a name and a website and it’ll run a health check: what’s missing or inconsistent in how that business shows up in public data, why each finding matters, what to do about it, and how you’ll know the fix worked.

The check stores nothing and creates no record. It’s a diagnosis of what’s already public, not a signup.

Check a business

Yes. Communities have economic profiles — population, industry structure, business evidence, wages, rents, modelled GDP — each carrying its source and its reference period.

Coverage is uneven, and OEX marks what it doesn’t have rather than papering over it. A thin profile is a statement about the evidence, not about the place.

CommunitiesCoverage by community

Partly, and it’s worth being exact about how.

You can search the business record by what a business does and where it operates, which is how supplier discovery usually starts. What OEX won’t do is invent a relationship — it never concludes that one business supplies another because their industries look compatible. A supply relationship has to be evidenced before it’s stated.

There’s no bidding, no matching fee and no paid placement. A purchased position in results isn’t something the system can express.

Search businesses

Yes, with one distinction that matters more than any other here.

OEX carries advertised hiring activity as dated evidence, and separately carries statistical vacancy estimates, which measure a market rather than list jobs. Those are different kinds of thing, and OEX keeps them apart.

A hiring record is evidence that a role was advertised on a date. It isn’t proof the position is still unfilled, and it isn’t somewhere to apply — there’s no application route here at all.

Labour demand evidence

It can show you the evidence people argue about shortages with: wages and vacancy estimates by occupation and geography, advertised hiring activity, training capacity and credential requirements, and the pipeline coming through education and apprenticeship.

What it won’t give you is a single shortage score. Shortage is a conclusion, the inputs disagree often enough to matter, and flattening them into one number would hide exactly the disagreement you needed to see.

Wages and vacanciesTraining capacity

Yes — and comparability is treated as a result rather than an assumption. OEX marks a comparison comparable only when the concepts, units, geography and reference periods actually line up.

When they don’t, you get told. That’s less satisfying than a clean ranking and a lot more useful when the decision is real.

Compare places

Search for it by name. There’s a good chance it’s already there — records come from authorized public sources like municipal licensing, not from anyone having signed up.

If it isn’t there, that’s a gap in the evidence rather than a judgement about the business.

Search for a business

Not by asking. A claim has to demonstrate a connection to the business that OEX can actually check.

The routes are things like receiving mail at the business’s own domain, proving control of that domain by publishing a DNS record or a file, using a contact the business itself published, or a referral from an institution that knows it. Once a claim is decided the decision is frozen — it can’t be quietly edited later, because everything authorized afterwards rests on it.

It doesn’t take your word for it. It checks something you could only do if you were genuinely connected to the business.

The strongest route is proving control of the business’s domain — publishing a DNS record or a file that only an administrator could put there. Receiving mail at that domain comes next. There’s also a route through a contact the business already published, and one through an institution that can vouch for it.

Whichever route was used gets recorded alongside anything you later authorize, so it stays clear what a given permission was resting on.

Yes, once you’ve claimed the record. Corrections go through a governed submission rather than straight into the public record, so there’s a trail of what changed and on whose authority.

Two things tend to surprise people. A lot of the findings are about your own website rather than about OEX, and you can fix those today without claiming anything. And telling OEX you’ve fixed something doesn’t close it — OEX looks again, and only a check that actually passes resolves a finding.

Manage a business record

It’s a diagnosis of how your business appears in public data: what’s missing or inconsistent, why that matters, what to do, and whether the fix worked.

There’s no score, in any cycle. The headline is categorical, and progress is counted in findings that verified as fixed rather than a number climbing. If a check couldn’t run — no website supplied, say — it reports that it couldn’t look, which never reads as a pass.

Some findings are opportunities rather than problems: places where OEX itself would benefit from something only you can tell it. Those have to say what you get back, they never count toward your attention total, and they never affect the headline.

Check a business

From published and authorized sources, and from businesses themselves where they’ve agreed to contribute.

That means statistical agencies, municipal licensing, public procurement and regulatory registries, housing surveys, published institutional programs, and a business’s own website where that business has asked OEX to look at it. Every source is listed with its licence and its current serving status.

The source register

Every published figure carries its source, its reference period, its geography, how confident OEX is in it, and what kind of claim it can support. You can follow any of them back.

Confidence runs A to D. A is a direct primary-source observation. B is a published reference. C is a modelled estimate, which should be quoted as an estimate with its method and never as a measurement. D is a synthetic placeholder that shouldn’t be quoted as market fact at all. Anything derived inherits the weakest input that went into it.

How to read the evidenceThe model register

The disagreement is kept. OEX doesn’t pick a winner quietly and present the result as settled.

A value derived from inputs of different strength is marked as mixed and carries the weakest of them. Where two records might be the same business, they’re merged only on deterministic evidence — and a business’s own answer to “is this you?” is recorded as evidence rather than treated as the decision.

It says so, plainly — and that’s the design rather than an apology.

“We couldn’t look” and “we looked and found nothing” are different answers, and they never render the same way. A check that couldn’t run reports exactly that.

No. This is the single most important thing to understand about reading anything here.

A missing fact is unknown. A business that declined to state its employee count hasn’t told you it has no employees. A community with no rent evidence doesn’t have free housing. Absence is never converted into a zero, a no, or an average — not on a page, not in an answer, and not for an AI reading the same evidence.

They’re the things a business actually operates: its website and domain, its profile on OEX, its listings on search platforms, its accounting workspace, its CRM, its point-of-sale or online store, its booking system, its licences and registrations, its credentials.

OEX has a defined vocabulary for these so it can reason about them consistently — what each one is, who controls it, whether control implies any authority, and what may or may not be published about it. Having the vocabulary isn’t the same as having a live connection to each: most of these are definitions today. The one working in production is the website domain.

No. Describing something isn’t owning it, and connecting something doesn’t hand it over.

OEX publishes what it’s authorized to publish and holds the rest under the permission you gave — which you can withdraw. Transfer never carries authority by implication either: if an asset changes hands, provider or custodian, nothing about who may act on it comes along for the ride.

No. Connecting something means OEX may use it for the purpose you agreed to. Publishing is a separate decision, asked separately.

Your website is the clearest working example. Tell OEX your domain and it can inspect the site to diagnose your record — but that doesn’t become something OEX publishes about you, because saying “this is my website” isn’t the same as proving you control it. Those two are deliberately held apart, and the domain you assert is stored where it has no path to publication at all.

One stated purpose at a time. Permissions aren’t a single yes.

Appearing in a directory, disclosing your size and hiring activity, contributing to a regional total without being named, publishing what you can make and who you serve, and stating what you buy are all separate agreements. A business can appear in a directory without disclosing its size, or count toward a regional figure without appearing in it by name.

Declining is recorded as a decision, not as an absence — which is what stops a refusal being read later as a zero. Every grant, refusal and withdrawal is kept in order, so what was authorized at any point in the past stays answerable.

Yes. Signed in, you can describe what you do — your occupations, your skills and capabilities, credentials, the industries you work in, and where you work. The profile is yours rather than your employer’s, and it stays yours when you change jobs.

What it will never be is a listing. People aren’t searchable on OEX: you can’t look someone up by name, filter people by capability or location, or get a list of people back from anything — not the website, not the API, not an AI assistant. A request for a person is refused, and OEX says which kind of refusal it is instead of returning an empty result. The things a labour market would need are not collected either — whether you’re looking for work, what you’d want to be paid, whether you’d relocate. They aren’t switched off. They were never there.

You can share a link to your own profile if you want to. The distinction that matters is who hands out the address: you do, and OEX doesn’t. What you contribute can raise a regional capability count without you appearing in it.

It’s the principle that you keep control of your authority, your permissions, what you’ve connected and what gets disclosed — and that OEX has to be able to show it honoured that rather than simply promise it.

In practice: authority over a record is established, recorded and revocable; permissions are granted for specific purposes rather than in bulk; a permission for one purpose never quietly authorizes another; and withdrawing is always available. It’s a governance model running underneath, not a product you have to operate.

No. There’s no coin, no token, no wallet, and nothing to buy, mine or trade.

“Digital asset” here means the real operating assets of a business — your website, your listings, your records, your credentials. The phrase collides with crypto vocabulary. The thing doesn’t.

Yes, and they tend to use it differently from a single business. A business mostly looks at itself. A city, a regional development office or a post-secondary institution is usually looking at structure — which industries are here, where the workforce comes from, how exposed local trade is, and where the evidence is thin enough to be worth fixing.

One boundary matters: working for an institution doesn’t give anyone authority over the businesses in its area. An institution can refer or vouch for a business as part of that business establishing its own claim. It can’t claim on the business’s behalf.

A community briefing

The structure is built for it. The evidence is the part that has to catch up.

Nothing in the model is province-specific — businesses, places, industries, occupations and the relationships between them are general, and national data is already carried. Extending to another region is a question of evidence and agreements rather than a rebuild. Outside Canada the classifications themselves would need mapping, which is real work nobody has done yet.

Public data is free. Reading the site, following the evidence back to its source, using the machine interfaces, running a health check on a real business — no account, no key, no payment.

Worth saying in the same breath: paid placement isn’t available at any price. Position in results can’t be bought, and that’s a property of how the system is built rather than a policy that could quietly change.