There have always been a lot of buzzwords in the technology space in Montreal. I remember 5 or 6 years ago everyone would say they work in Agile but few companies had actually mastered the methodology. In todayâs world AI and Machine learning have become the new trend. Using them properly could unlock great potential for your organization but how many have truly done that? With Montreal quickly becoming an AI hub in North America I wanted to highlight 10 companies that are using AI to improve their business.
Nuance Communications
Office Location: 1500 Robert-Bourassa, Montreal, QC
Who are they: Nuance Communications, Inc. is the pioneer and leader in conversational AI innovations that bring intelligence to everyday work and life. The company delivers solutions that understand, analyze and respond to human language, amplifying human intelligence. With close to 500 employees in their Montreal office.
What makes them great?
Culture: They are a people first environment that believes in investing in their employees and the community around them. This includes diversity and inclusion programs, career development and community outreach. They have won numerous awards including Montrealâs top employers and Best places to work for LGBTQ equality.
Technology: As a true innovator in the voice recognition space they have been leveraging AI and cutting-edge technology to remain a leader in their industry.
Benefits: They offer many different benefits including training and education programs, parental leave, remote work and financial programs.
Compensation: They have competitive salaries along with employee stock purchase plans and RRSP match.
How they use AI: They have been at the forefront of AI, Machine learning and Natural Language processing for a long time. They continue to incorporate this technology into their voice recognition software and products to make them the best in the world.
Tech Stack: Java, Spring boot, Spring Cloud, Microservices, Kubernetes, JVM, Azure, Helm, Docker, CI/CD Gitlab, Jenkins, Jira, Git, JavaScript, Maven, Linux, Python, Tensorflow, Pytorch, NLP, Machine learning
Explorance
Office location: 1470 Rue Peel #500, Montréal, QC H3A 1T1
Who are they: Explorance is a Journey Analytics provider that empowers organizations in making the right decisions with fact-based feedback data. Through its main offerings Blue and Metrics That Matter (MTM), Explorance is at the heart of the learning organizationâs continuous improvement strategy. Montreal team with over 100 people.
What makes them great?
Culture: They believe in empowering their people through a more results and collaborative approach. They support their employees to continuously grow both personally and professionally. Their culture has made them a top workplace in Canada for 6 straight years finishing number 2 on the list most recently.
Technology: They encourage innovation in terms of technology and have already begun implementing AI and machine learning into their platforms in order to give better insights to their customers.
Benefits: Their uncapped time off policy is definitely their major feature but flexible schedule, great health and dental benefits along with RRSP match and other paid perks like transportation and gym memberships.
How they use AI: Being a company focused on analytics it makes sense they would implement machine learning into what they do. It helps each of their products give better information to their customers.
Tech Stack: ASP.Net, C#, SQL, Javascript, HTML 5, CSS 3, Angular 2+, Rest API, SOAP, Python, PyTorch, Machine learning, Azure Devops
Location: 1253 McGill College Ave, Montreal, Quebec H3B 2Y5
Who are they: A problem isn’t truly solved until it’s solved for all. Googlers build products that help create opportunities for everyone, whether down the street or across the globe. Bring your insight, imagination and a healthy disregard for the impossible. Bring everything that makes you unique. Together, we can build for everyone.
What makes them great?
Culture: It is one of the most known cultures in the world which focuses on personal development, innovation and growth. Their 80/20 rule allows you to work on things you are passionate about as well.
Technology: Once again Google has always been know as a company looking to drive innovation when it comes to technology. The consistently push the boundaries of what is possible.
Benefits: They have an extensive benefits plan that includes your regular health and dental, competitive compensation, stock plans, paid parental leave, spouse death benefits, great offices and other perks.
How they use AI: They are working to implement and use Machine learning and NLP in most of what they do from Chrome, Search and other products that they create to give their users the best experience.
Tech Stack: Python, C++, Javascript, Machine Learning, Google Cloud, Chromium, Blink/Webkit, skia, HTML specification, TensorFlow, Deep Learning, Flume
Autodesk
Office Location: 10 Duke St, Montreal, Quebec H3C 2L7
Who are they: Autodesk makes software for people who make things. If youâve ever driven a high-performance car, admired a towering skyscraper, used a smartphone, or watched a great film, chances are youâve experienced what millions of Autodesk customers are doing with our software. Autodesk gives you the power to make anything.
What makes them great?
Culture: They are dedicated to providing a great environment for their employees. To them that begins with respect for their employees and offering an environment that values Authenticity, humility and impact.
Technology: This is at the center of what they do and they work to constantly be looking to innovate and grow their technology to support their customers.
Benefits: They have a competitive total package including all the regular benefits out there. The things that make them standout is paid volunteer time off, 6 week paid sabbatical every 4 years and 1 week of rest at the end of the year.
How they use AI: They use AI in order to improve their 2D and 3D geometry models which are used by their customers on all sorts of projects. This will hopefully help the engineering industry continue to improve the way things are built.
Tech Stack: Electron, TypeScript, React, Webpack, HTML, CSS, TensorFlow, Python, Keras, PyTorch, AWS Lambda, SageMaker, API Gateway, EC2, CAD drawings, AutoCAD, Revit, Raster images
Intact
Office location: 2020 Boulevard Robert-Bourassa suite 100, Montréal, QC H3A 2A5
Who are they: Intact Financial Corporation is the largest provider of property and casualty (P&C) insurance in Canada and a leading provider of specialty insurance in North America, with close to $10 billion in total annual premiums.
What makes them great?
Culture: They do have a big focus on creating work life balance while also giving their employees the opportunity for growth. With a 35-hour work week and flexible schedules it enables you to manage your life. Their career growth plans include workshops, courses and internal opportunity.
Technology: In terms of the Insurance industry they are constantly looking to stay at the cutting edge. They have invested in tech such as AI, Big Data and Digital transformation to keep them ahead of their competition.
Benefits: Their overall benefits package is comprehensive in terms of a package that provides remote work, flexible schedules and wellness account.
Compensation: They have competitive salaries within the market while providing a performance bonus and an Employee Share Purchase Plan to match 50% of stock purchases.
How they use AI: Usually when it comes to AI itâs mostly being used in technology companies for them to stay at the cutting edge. Intact although an insurance company has been working with AI for 5 years now. They are working on models to better predict good drivers and reduce premiums for them.
Tech Stack: Java, Spring boot, Hibernate, Docker, SOAP and REST webservices, Javascript, Angular 2+, Oracle, MongoDB, Activevos, Jenkins, Openshift, Git, Python, PyCharm, Elastic Search, Kibana, Kafka
Expedia
Office Location: 63 Rue de Brésoles, Montréal, QC H2Y 1V7
Who are they: Most people have heard of Expedia the travel company which operates globally. Few know they have an engineering office in Montreal with over 250 employees.
What makes them great?
Culture: They are a company that strives for the best by bringing in some of the best developers in the market and having them mentor and coach people within their teams. Itâs a highly collaborative environment that offers growth opportunity.
Technology: As an organization they are always striving to innovate and improve their technology. They accomplish this through open communication and companywide hackathons.
Benefits: They offer good overall benefits packages including health and dental as well as flexible schedules and remote work. They also offer yearly transport support, fitness and hotels grants.
Compensation: They have good overall compensation packages that include stock options, bonuses and RRSP match.
How they use AI: In the competitive world of travel Expedia has done a great job of being a dominant player. Using technology has been at the heart of everything they do so using AI to improve suggestions, pricing and more is no surprise.
Tech Stack: Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, Angular, Python, Go, ECS, EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, CloudFormation, Splunk, Grafana, Scala (scikitlearn, lightgbm, smile)
Morgan Stanley
Office Location: 700 Wellington St, Montreal, Quebec H3C 3S4
Who are they: Morgan Stanley mobilizes capital to help governments, corporations, institutions and individuals around the world achieve their financial goals. For over 75 years, the firmâs reputation for using innovative thinking to solve complex problems has been well earned and rarely matched. A consistent industry leader throughout decades of dramatic change in modern finance, Morgan Stanley will continue to break new ground in advising, serving and providing new opportunities for its clients.
What makes them great?
Culture: Everything they do is centered around their 5 core values doing the right thing, put clients first, lead with exceptional ideas, commit to diversity and inclusion and give back. This shapes the drive within the environment and the constant push to deliver results.
Technology: In the world of investment every second counts which is why technology has become increasingly more important. Morgan Stanley understands this and invests heavily in creating technology that will give them the edge.
Benefits: They offer a solid package of health and dental benefits to go along with a usually above average compensation package and bonus structure. They offer the ability to learn new technologies, grow your knowledge and progress in your career as well.
How they use AI: Being able to crunch data and information on a huge scale is becoming more an more important in the investment world. Morgan is using AI to better predict the market and to make better decisions.
Tech stack: Python, Numphy, Pandas, Flask, Dask, Plotly, Jupyter, Scala, Java, Spring boot, Javascript, HTML 5, CSS3
SSENSE
Office Location: 333 Rue Chabanel O #900, Montreal, Quebec H2N 2E7
Who are they: Founded in 2003, SSENSE is pacing the vanguard of directional retail with its mix of luxury, streetwear, and avant-garde labels.
What makes them great?
Culture: They have a culture that is focused on their own people. SSENSE believes first that people are capable of learning and therefore offer courses and internal development programs to help people grow. Create both career growth and tracking plans to help people with their own career growth.
Technology: Although they are in the retail space they are definitely more of a technology company. They understand that their competitive advantage comes from the technology that they create.
Benefits: Outside of the regular medical and health benefits they offer a great work environment with perks such as coffee, snacks and more. They allow you to bring your dog to work and have a very flexible schedule.
Compensation: They offer competitive salary for the market that includes RRSP match, annual and signing bonuses.
How they use AI: For an online retail company they do use it in the obvious sense to promote products to you based off your preferences. They use it to better understand where things need to be stored in warehouses around the world to ensure quick delivery of purchases. As well as using it to buy the right pieces and price them accordingly.
Tech Stack: Typescript, Javascript, NodeJS, VueJS, Restify, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Travis, Docker, AWS, Python, Pandas Numpy, Apache Spark, Hadoop, Hive, Pig, PySpark
LogMeIn
Office Location: 1080 Beaver Hall Hill #1101, Montreal, Quebec H2Z 1S8
Who are they: LogMeIn simplifies how people connect with each other and the world around them to drive meaningful interactions, deepen relationships, and create better outcomes for individuals and businesses. They were founded in 2003 in Boston and have grown considerably over the years. Their Montreal office has over 60 employees mostly in software engineering.
What makes them great?
Culture: Seeing that they are a company focused on improving connections between people that is exactly what they bring in their culture. They have teams who openly communicate and are free to bring ideas to the table. They offer support and mentorship from team members to help each person grow.
Technology: They have a microservice architecture and are always looking for ways to improve their technology.
Benefits: They have a comprehensive package that includes unlimited time off policy, remote work, free snacks and coffee. Another benefit is lunch and activities programs.
Compensation: Beyond the regular competitive salaries they offer bonuses and a 6% DPSP contribution from the employer.
How they use AI: They want to implement machine learning into many of their products to improve them including a chatbot.
Tech Stack: Java, Spring boot, Python, PostgreSQL, Docker, Git, AWS EC2, Github, JavaScript/Node, Angular, React, GraphQL, Apache Spark, Machine learning, NLP
Stradigi AI
Office Location: 1470 Peel St suite 1050 tower a, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1T1
Who are they: Stradigi AI is a leading North American SaaS AI business platform provider that enables organizations to bring business-accelerating AI projects to fruition, quickly. Its AI business platform, Kepler, bridges the AI talent gap, democratizing the use of AI and machine learning for any type of user by way of intuitive Automated Data Science Workflows, designed to generate results for hundreds of use cases across many verticals.
What makes them great?
Culture: They have a culture built on trying to create excellence. They accomplish this through togetherness, openness and diversity. Their values center around commitment, courage, enthusiasm and respect.
Technology: They are built on technology and specifically AI which means staying at the cutting edge is critical to the success of their business.
Benefits: Outside of the usual benefits and compensation they include RRSP match of 3%, provide health and wellness dollars to encourage a healthy lifestyle, half day for your birthday, training programs for teams and office activities and events including company wide breakfast and learn each week.
How they use AI: AI is at the core of their product and business and something they are working to bring to the market.
Tech stack: Python, Github, Jenkins, Docker, Open shift, AWS, Scikit learn, TensorFlow, Keras, NumPy, Matplotlib, PyTorch, FLASK, Dask, Hadoop, Machine learning, Deep Learning, Node.js, Typescript
Companies need to keep up with the latest in technology in order to compete in this world. AI and Machine learning can be used to do many different things and improve the way you service your customers. Montreal is quickly becoming a hub for AI and companies are taking advantage of that knowledge in our market. These 10 companies that are using AI to improve their business show that.
Interested in exploring new opportunities?
Create a Candidate Profile so we can get a better understanding of what the right opportunity looks like for you. If you want to learn more about the Montreal IT market you can always reach out to Corey or Jason our avansai advisors
