Building Through Complexity: How ICI Innovations and Formic AI Are Supporting Faster Major Project Reviews

A major project in Canada can generate thousands of pages before construction begins. Environmental assessments, technical reports, engagement records, permit conditions, compliance documents, and public submissions all have to be reviewed, understood, tracked, and acted on. Each document has a purpose. Together, they form the record that helps governments, regulators, proponents, Indigenous communities, and the public make decisions about projects that can shape regions for decades.

The challenge is that the volume of information can slow the very decisions it is meant to support. Important commitments can be buried deep inside reports. Regulatory teams can spend valuable time searching across files instead of reviewing evidence. Project proponents can struggle to track issues, permits, and obligations across long timelines. In a country that needs to build more energy, infrastructure, natural resource, and strategic projects, information management has become part of the productivity problem.

That is where ICI Innovations and Formic AI are bringing together two Canadian-built technologies. ICI Innovations, based in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, develops software for major project information management. Its RIVAS system gives users a single visual interface to manage project information, engagement, reporting, communications, issues, commitments, permits, compliance, and risk.

Formic AI, based in Toronto, has built a responsible AI engine designed for regulated industries and high-security sectors. Its system gives users answers that are tied directly to verified source material, with sentence-level citations linked back to the original documents. In practical terms, that means people working through large volumes of project material can see not only an answer, but exactly where that answer came from.

On April 28, ICI Innovations announced the production release of its RIVAS solution integrating the Formic AI Engine into its Major Projects Information Management System. The integration brings Formic’s responsible AI technology into a platform already designed for the heavy information demands of major projects.

“This will transform how regulators, proponents and the public access and use reports that address developments and their impacts,” said Corey Tucker, President of ICI Innovations. “The complementary nature nature of our products promises to create a new way to tackle the mountains of information that currently slows down development to instead speed up the process at a time when it is most required by Canada.”

The timing is important. Canada is facing pressure to approve and deliver major projects more quickly, but speed alone is not enough. These are high-stakes decisions involving environmental risk, public trust, legal obligations, economic development, and long-term regional impact. A faster process only works if the people using it can trust the information in front of them.

For Formic AI, that question of trust is central to the company’s work. Its engine is designed to avoid the risks that can come with standard AI systems, where answers may be generated without a clear, verifiable connection to the source material. In major project reviews, that distinction matters. A generic summary is not enough when a decision depends on technical evidence, regulatory commitments, or legally significant documents.

“Natural resource extraction, energy, and infrastructure projects involve regulatory submissions that commonly number thousands of pages,” said Daniel Escott, CEO of Formic AI. “In these high-stakes environments, relying on probabilistic ‘guesses’ is an unacceptable risk. By integrating the Formic Engine into RIVAS, we are providing a responsible AI solution that empowers teams to prepare, review, and approve Major Project proposals with absolute certainty and in a fraction of the time.”

For regulators and project teams, the source of an answer matters as much as the answer itself. Users need to know whether a claim came from an environmental assessment, a permit condition, a consultation record, or a technical appendix. They need to be able to check the context, verify the citation, and understand how the information fits into the broader project record.

“This technology should make a huge difference for participants in our environmental assessment to use and leverage the vast amount of information on our public record,” said Alan Ehrlich, Manager of Environmental Impact Assessment at the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board and Past President of the International Association for Impact Assessment. “Right now, there’s so much info that only a few participants know how to efficiently find analyses and predictions for a given impact. This tool gives them a super-powered librarian that knows all the documents intimately. You can ask plain language questions, like ‘What could happen to trout spawning areas near the outflow?’, and immediately get the most relevant information from many thousands of pages, all with links to sources that can be easily verified. It’s like magic. Our public records will change from being a dusty archive to a dynamo of insight. What a difference this will make, to help level the playing field for under-resourced parties in our environmental assessments!”

The companies describe the integrated system as a “Glass Box” environment. Every response can be audited. Every citation can be checked. Every technical detail can be reviewed in context. That kind of transparency is especially important in sectors where decisions are contested, timelines are long, and public confidence can be difficult to earn.

There is also a broader economic story here. Major projects are often discussed through the lens of capital, labour, politics, and regulation. Those factors matter, but information flow is part of the system too. When the process is difficult to navigate, projects slow down. When commitments are hard to track, risk increases. When reports are too cumbersome to use effectively, good information loses some of its value.

ICI Innovations and Formic AI are working in that less visible layer of nation-building. They are not building the mine, the transmission line, the port, or the energy project. They are building the software that helps the people responsible for those projects make sense of the evidence, track the obligations, and move decisions forward with confidence.

That kind of work matters for Canada. The country needs to build faster, but it also needs to build responsibly. From St. John’s and Toronto, two Canadian companies are showing how better information systems and accountable AI can help close that gap. Major projects will always be complex. The question is whether Canada can make that complexity easier to understand, easier to manage, and less likely to stand in the way of getting important work done.

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This article is part of CCI’s “By Canadian Innovators” series, which showcases how members of the Council of Canadian Innovators work with homegrown companies to fuel their growth and make Canada more prosperous. Each story in this series highlights the unique contributions of these companies to building a more prosperous, innovation-driven economy. To learn more about the companies CCI works with to build a more prosperous Canada, visit our member directory.

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