Sheridan secures $250,000 OCI funding to advance AI innovations in business and transportation

Two bold, industry-focused AI projects aimed at streamlining and improving organizational processes are underway at Sheridan’s Centre for Applied AI (CAAI), thanks to a two-year, $250,000 investment from the Ontario Centre of Innovation’s (OCI) Collaborate to Commercialize (C2C) program. As a member of the Ontario Network of Entrepreneurs and funded by the Government of Ontario, the OCI C2C program supports collaboration between academia and industry to address real-world challenges, accelerate innovation and drive the commercialization of intellectual property (IP).

The funded initiatives, ‘Agentic Digital Twin for Business Process Optimization’ and ‘Optimizing AI-Powered Delivery Logistics with Flite Transport Inc.’, aim to unlock major gains in efficiency across the tech and transportation sectors and will push the boundaries of what AI can do for workflow and logistics optimization. These improvements will help eliminate redundancies or errors that increase companies’ operational costs, help sustain employment and improve decision making — ultimately improving profitability across both industries.

“Through AI-powered innovations, Sheridan is helping organizations reimagine how they work — building smarter, more efficient systems that fuel Ontario's economic growth.”

– Dr. Vicki Mowat, Dean of Research at Sheridan

“OCI’s investment highlights Sheridan’s strength in applied AI research and the real world impact our expertise can deliver to industry partners,” said Dr. Vicki Mowat, Dean of Research at Sheridan. “Through AI-powered innovations, Sheridan is helping organizations reimagine how they work — building smarter, more efficient systems that fuel Ontario’s economic growth.”

Agentic Digital Twin for Business Optimization

Led by Drs. Nick Sajadi and Kobra Khanmohammadi, professors in Sheridan’s Faculty of Applied Science and Technology (FAST), and supported by Dr. Haruna Isah, Research Manager at CAAI, this project works to address a common challenge: the lack of real-time insight into how an organization’s processes, systems and employees interact. This gap often results in decisions based on assumptions rather than data, creating barriers to effective AI deployment and ongoing improvement.

Partnering with StereoLOGIC, a Toronto-based software company specializing in AI-powered process intelligence and task mining, the project will develop an Agentic Digital Twin of Operations (ADTO) platform which will leverage Vision Language Models, Large Language Models and other computational methods. This will allow organizations to improve their financial position by gaining access to a real-time, dynamic model of “as-is” data to refine and visualize technical workflows and inform critical operational decisions.

If organizations across the sector leverage this technology, they can strengthen Ontario’s economic competitiveness and reinforce the province’s leadership in enterprise-grade applied AI.

Optimizing AI-Powered Delivery Logistics

In partnership with Flite Transport Inc., a GTA-based company specializing in last-mile logistics and transportation services, CAAI will address inefficiencies in logistics operations that can lead to increased costs, delays and customer dissatisfaction through the development of Ontologi, a proprietary logistics platform.

The project, led by FAST professors Dr. Alex Babanski and Dr. Volodymyr Voytenko, and supported by Dr. Haruna Isah, Research Manager at CAAI, will leverage AI models and real-time data collection to enable Ontologi to adapt to changing conditions, optimize workflows and support data-driven decision making across delivery operations. The project aims to bolster Flite Transport’s standing as a tech-enabled logistics leader in Ontario and to develop a solution that can be sold to other carriers and shippers.

With a scalable approach to improving efficiency across the broader logistics sector, the project has the potential to help sustain employment within the transportation and warehousing companies that currently make up 5% of Ontario’s workforce.

About the Centre for Applied AI

The Centre for Applied AI (CAAI) is at the forefront of research in the development and application of artificial intelligence (AI) across industries including health care, telecommunications, finance, education, cybersecurity, entertainment and retail. CAAI sparks impact and advances real-world solutions by bringing together industry and community partners, researchers, students and change-makers to harness the transformative power of AI through collaborative research and industry partnerships. CAAI is an integral part of Generator at Sheridan, where people with diverse perspectives work together across disciplines and sectors to spark ideas and advance solutions that really matter. Learn more by visiting sheridancollege.ca/applied-ai.

About Generator at Sheridan

Generator at Sheridan is where purpose and passion unite the extraordinary research, innovation and entrepreneurship undertaken by Sheridan’s faculty, staff and students, working across disciplines and sectors, to drive meaningful impact for an ever-changing world. In addition to our exceptional faculty-led research, Sheridan also boasts five renowned research and entrepreneurship centres that provide innovation supports to community, industry and government partners. Learn more at sheridancollege.ca/generator.