In this exclusive CanadianSME Small Business Magazine interview, Marcelo Roldan, Implementation and Product UI Lead at Initus Technologies, explains how intelligent integration and workflow automation help Canadian SMEs move beyond double entry and disconnected systems. Drawing on his experience across eCommerce, CRM, and ERP environments, he outlines how low code integrations, embedded AI, and people first automation unify fragmented tools into one scalable operating engine. The result is less manual work, stronger margins, higher productivity, and the ability to compete globally even as talent remains hard to find.
Marcelo Roldan is responsible for product strategy and implementation delivery at Initus Technologies, driving the roadmap for Initus’s integration and workflow automation solutions and overseeing solution implementations. With deep expertise in technical consulting and system architecture, he specializes in eCommerce, CRM, and ERP environments. Marcelo excels at translating complex requirements into scalable, results-driven outcomes. His leadership ensures that the Initus solutions evolve to optimize business processes and deliver value upon Go-Live.
The 2025 BDC report found that “double-entry” remains one of the largest inefficiencies in Canadian business workflows. From your experience at Initus, how can intelligent automation empower small and mid-sized businesses to break this cycle, moving from simply managing their paperwork to truly scaling their operations?
The BDC’s latest analysis identifies double-entry as a primary form of process waste that keeps Canadian SMEs in a survival mindset. This inefficiency is a core driver of Canada’s productivity gap, which currently sits 28% behind the United States. Breaking this cycle requires moving from manual entry to Intelligent Document Processing (IDP). While manual workflows are prone to error rates as high as 4%, InitusIDP leverages AI to achieve up to 99% accuracy. InitusIDP does more than just read text, it understands business context, automatically injecting usable data into your ERP.
The impact is measurable: CFIB’s 2025 research shows that SMEs using such tools save an average of 1.08 hours per day. This is the 5-hour productivity hack. If every Canadian small business saved just five hours of manual work a month, our national GDP could rise by 1.2%. By eliminating the double-entry tax, InitusIDP allows your team to stop acting as data transcribers and start acting as strategic growth drivers, achieving the $2.40 return for every $1 invested seen by Canada’s digital leaders.
Sources:
BDC: What can entrepreneurs expect for 2026?
CFIB: Digital adoption including AI paying off for SMEs
With labour and skills shortages tightening across multiple industries, hiring alone no longer solves growth constraints. How do Initus’s AI-enhanced integration and workflow automation tools allow SMEs to protect margins and maintain growth without increasing headcount?
When you use integration solutions like Intus’s InitusIO to sync your eCommerce, warehouse, and accounting systems, you create an integrated, seamless ecosystem. Instead of hiring three people to manage increased order volume, our workflow automation allows your existing team to handle 10x the throughput. Doing this achieves capacity liberation. By automating repetitive tasks, you reduce your dependence on a tightening labour market and mitigate the rising wage costs. This allows SMEs to maintain a lean, high-performing core team that focuses on high-margin strategic work, ensuring that as sales climb, your overhead remains flat.
Many Canadian SMEs juggle multiple disconnected apps for CRM, accounting, and eCommerce, yet still struggle to achieve unified data flow. What role does a low-code integration platform like InitusIO play in transforming fragmented systems into a cohesive, scalable business engine?
A low-code integration platform is the bridge. It allows a business to map complex logic, like custom tax rules or multi-currency conversions, between apps without needing the required in-house expertise. In 2025, Statistics Canada reported that only 10% of SMEs have fully integrated their digital tools. This integration gap is why many firms hit a ceiling, their data is siloed, making real-time decision-making impossible.
Integration solutions like InitusIO solves this by ensuring that when a sale happens in one app, inventory, accounting, and shipping update everywhere instantly. This creates a single source of truth, providing leadership with the accurate data needed to compete globally and scale without the friction of manual data reconciliation.
While AI adoption is rising in Canada, very few businesses are embedding it into their core processes or products. In your view, what mindset or infrastructure shifts are needed for Canadian entrepreneurs to move beyond experimentation and start owning their AI systems?
The shift happens when you move to Embedded AI. This means building custom workflows where AI is a silent worker within your proprietary processes, handling things like automated product descriptions, fraud detection, or sentiment analysis on customer calls. To own their AI, businesses must ensure they aren’t leaking IP into public models. This is where Initus’s custom solutions come in. We provide a secure infrastructure where SMEs can leverage the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) on their own data. When AI is built into your specific business logic, it becomes a competitive moat that you own, rather than a generic tool that your competitors are also using.
As we move into a year of transformation and resilience, what advice would you share with Canadian SMEs looking to evolve their business processes, leverage AI, and compete globally despite market uncertainty?
First, audit your business processes and identify frictions. Identify every manual touchpoint in your business processes, that is where your profit is leaking. Prioritize the leakages based on volume and impact. Second, invest in integration. Resist buying another app until your current ones are talking to each other. Finally, embrace human-centric AI.
Use automation to handle 80% of routine tasks, so your team can use their uniquely human skills to build relationships and create products that allow Canada to compete on the world stage. The productivity gap is real, but for the proactive SME, it is also a massive opportunity to outpace competitors who are still stuck in the era of manual data entry.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CanadianSME Small Business Magazine. Our platform is dedicated to fostering dialogue and sharing insights that inspire and empower small and medium-sized businesses across Canada.
