Waterloo co-op students deliver results to local businesses
Communitech’s AI@Work program pairs student teams with local businesses to drive results and uncover new career possibilities
When Bilal Alberzreh started his studies in Systems Design Engineering, he didn’t expect to work for a construction company like Musselman Excavating — but that’s where he spent his latest co-op term.
Bilal Alberzreh
In May, he joined students in the AI@Work program, an initiative led by Communitech that pairs student teams with local small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to create practical, high-value artificial intelligence (AI) solutions.
As part of this unique work term, Alberzreh says he gained significant experience and skills he wouldn’t have found with other employers.
“I came in expecting the interesting part to be AI,” says Alberzreh, who worked as a Product Manager on the Musselman team. “It turned out to be sitting close to a business and working out what’s actually worth building.”
AI tackles excavation paperwork
Musselman Excavating files utility locates for three operating companies. Before excavation can begin in Ontario, companies must request locate approvals from up to 10 utility providers to identify underground infrastructure. Coordinating and replying to these requests was a manual process that had to be completed before a locate expired.
Over the course of a work term, Alberzreh’s team created a custom AI solution that saved time for the coordinator handling requests and generated responses before a locate expires, preventing construction jobs from stalling.
Dishita Chawla, a fourth-year Computational Mathematics student, worked as a Software Developer on the Musselman team. She describes their final product as a “human-in-the-loop AI platform.” The platform monitors the email inbox and extracts project information from various documents. Then, it organizes and calculates information in a dashboard for the coordinator to review.
“Active processing time went from 15 to 25 minutes per ticket down to roughly one minute,” Chawla says. “Package assembly went from 15 to 20 minutes to about two.”
It’s a great example of the value students can bring to co-op employers and showcases the results that Communitech hoped to achieve through the AI@Work initiative. After just one term, students like Alberzreh and Chawla have created AI solutions that local SMBs wouldn’t otherwise have access to.
Kanika Prajapati
Faster quotes for custom-made furniture
Kanika Prajapati, a third-year Management Engineering student, took the role of Product Manager for Hauser Industries, a furniture manufacturer that often creates custom products for clients.
Hauser has operated in Waterloo Region for more than 75 years. Thanks to its extensive business knowledge and experience, the company has intricate formulas to help create pricing estimates. Prajapati’s team created an AI quoting engine that reduces manual work with these formulas and generates estimates more quickly and consistently.
“The quoting team can now input product specifications, and the engine uses previous products to output an approximate quote,” Prajapati explains.
Prajapati says the AI engine cut Hauser’s quoting times in half. Since its implementation, Hauser employees have found additional uses in their daily work. The company has already decided to hire another AI@Work team next term with a new challenge to solve.
More than a typical co-op term
Prajapati, Alberzreh and Chawla all agree that the AI@Work experience provided a level of ownership that’s rare in many co-op terms.
“You get the opportunity to own an entire tool end-to-end and see its impact on the day-to-day workings of a business,” Prajapati says.
“Experiences like AI@Work are exactly what we want co-op to make possible," says Shabnam Ivkovic, Director of Industry Relations, Co-operative and Experiential Education.
"Students are given real problems, real responsibility and the opportunity to create something that makes a difference for a real business. At the same time, they’re discovering that AI isn’t limited to traditional technology roles — it can be applied in almost any industry. That combination of meaningful work and career exploration is incredibly powerful for students.”
“If you had asked me in April where AI was going to matter, I’d have said software, finance, health care,” Chawla says. “I would not have mentioned construction, manufacturing or any of the other industries I encountered through AI@Work. This term opened my eyes to the number of opportunities there are for AI in these industries. I would love to continue exploring them and finding new problems to solve.”
Students also benefited from their exposure to smaller businesses.
“I saw how mid-market companies have the same problems as large enterprises, and none of the internal software teams,” Alberzreh says. “That’s not a technology gap, it’s an access gap, and it’s much bigger than I understood before this term.”
The AI@Work program continues this fall, expanding opportunities for students and businesses to collaborate on the next generation of AI-driven innovation.
