Each year, HH Angus staff teams flex their creativity and ingenuity in our Innovation Hub Challenge - devising creative solutions for engineering-related questions or issues.
Our most recent challenge focused on how to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to improve specific internal workflows.
Each team was assigned a unique process that could potentially be improved through the use of AI and were tasked with creating an AI prototype to address their challenge. Their submissions also required a business case addressing real-world considerations such as cost, privacy and implementation strategies.
The ‘AutoMates’ team took top prize. Team members Laura Farid, Max Mizrahi, Nigel Harvey, Shaun Lee, and Shawn Shi took on the challenge of automating the capture of meeting minutes and formatting them into HH Angus’ standardized template. Meeting minutes are a critical but time-consuming aspect of project management for consulting engineers, and the multi-disciplinary team impressed the judging panel with a smart and scalable AI solution that not only produced meeting minutes, but also included attendee lists, content summaries, and other key information.
The AI model addressed a tangible need and demonstrated the strength of cross-functional collaboration and the power of applied technology. Ultimately, the AutoMates’ work and that of the other teams showcased the company’s commitment to innovation in professional services.
Identifying the Issue
The initial spark for the project came from a scenario familiar to engineers and designers. How to ensure during meetings, especially those involving multiple stakeholders, that all valuable ideas and action items are documented, while discussion moves rapidly in new directions and input comes thick and fast. Assigning a team member to take minutes presents its own problems: it disrupts that person’s ability to participate fully in the discussion and introduces the risk of bias or omission. Even when recordings are made, manually reviewing them to extract notes is time-consuming and inefficient.
Recognizing this is recurring issue across not just the firm but the industry at large, the AutoMates team set out to answer a deceptively simple question: What if there was a way to capture everything from a meeting—discussion points, action items, next steps—automatically and accurately?
Ensuring a 360⁰ Perspective
What made the AutoMates team uniquely positioned to solve this challenge was its composition. Members came from different corners of HH Angus, bringing fresh insights and a range of expertise. The group included professionals from the Science & Technology, Energy Infrastructure and Health divisions in our Vancouver and Toronto offices and included both electrical and mechanical designers as well as new grads. The multidisciplinary mix ensured the solution would be technically robust while remaining grounded in real-world workflow needs.
This diversity fueled their brainstorming process. Because team members represented both the users and the builders of the tool, they were able to identify pain points with clarity and propose features with practical value.
