Knowing companies’ approaches to environmental, social and governance issues is important for a well-functioning economy and society, says Leila Tahmooresnejad.

But information on how companies perform in these areas is not always easily accessible or complete.

“Many small and medium-sized enterprises do not publish formal sustainability reports, which makes it difficult for others — such as investors, customers or regulators — to understand their environmental performance or responsible business practices,” says the Assistant Professor in Information Systems at the Goodman School of Business.

So, when the Niagara data analytics company Rel8ed — a Coface Company approached the business school for a research partnership, Tahmooresnejad jumped at the chance.

“Rel8ed specializes in enriching business information on small to medium-sized enterprises that typically lack rich data presence in the market,” says Rel8ed Data Research Programs and Projects Manager Ryan Hilimoniuk (BA ’10, MBA ’24), who is also a Brock graduate. “The research question was, how can we leverage artificial intelligence to gather sustainability information on such companies and make it accessible via retrieval augmented generation or a chat assistant for submitting queries?”

Tahmooresnejad quickly set to work. With Mitacs Accelerate funding, she hired graduate students Milad Olad and Ehsan Khaksar to help build such an AI-driven system.

“The data is out there, but it’s not readily available to other companies to access,” says Olad.

He and the team created two tools to gather obtainable data on companies’ environmental, social and governance performance.

One tool is a data engine that constructs profiles of a company’s environmental and social activities by collecting and organizing public information gleaned from company websites, press releases and other sources.

The second tool uses a technique called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which blends document searches with language models so that the interactive chat assistant provides information that’s more insightful and context-aware, says Tahmooresnejad.

“Together, these tools help users get a clearer picture of a company’s social and environmental performance, even when the company does not provide a full report,” she says. “The system also lets users compare what companies say about themselves with external sources, helping to identify missing or inconsistent information.”

Tahmooresnejad says the tools her team developed can boost:

• risk assessment activities carried out by financial institutions
• efforts by small and medium-sized enterprises to have their sustainability measures recognized and promoted
• transparency to help the public know more about how the companies operate

Hilimoniuk says, in addition to the two AI tools developed, the partnership with Brock gave Rel8ed “a basic framework to support development of a range of different use cases and data products” that was enabled by the research partnership and Mitacs funding.

One of the most exciting parts for Olad is the team’s opportunity to present details of the system’s design and broader social value at the 2025 Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) taking place Aug. 14 to 16 in Montreal.

“Mitacs was a fantastic opportunity for me because it took the idea from a very basic seed to a full-grown tree,” says Olad.

He says the Mitacs internship at Rel8ed and his Brock University education paved the way for his current position as Generative AI Engineer for TD Bank.

This is Rel8ed’s second partnership with Brock University. In 2023, the company worked with Tahmooresnejad and Professor of Information Systems Anteneh Ayanso to explore the effectiveness of combining social network analysis with current prediction models to help companies be nimbler and more responsive to market changes.