The Future Cities Institute travelled to Iqaluit to attend the Nunavut Economic Development Association (NEDA) Conference, where FCI researchers presented and piloted an AI-powered Community Economic Development (CED) Planning Tool with CEDOs, CAOs, and Indigenous Hamlet leaders.
The workshop demonstrated the tool's ability to generate and modify complete CED plans through guided questions, with the goal of streamlining administrative workflows including development planning and grant writing. Feedback and insights gathered on the ground shaped a clearer picture of the communities' most pressing concerns, including fragmented planning processes, low-connectivity challenges, and language barriers.
The experience reinforced a core principle of FCI's approach: meaningful systems cannot be built without first deeply understanding the people who use them. Being present in Nunavut made that lesson concrete in a way desk research cannot replicate.
Thank you to Amaan Merchant for leading an organised and engaging conference, and to colleagues Susan Brown, Shaghayegh Sadeghi, and Adam Zhu for their contributions throughout. Thank you also to Olga Garcia for conversations that opened new directions for future engineering collaboration.