Innovation Automation Specialist

At Stantec, we have some of the world’s leading professionals passionate about enabling our business to be its best. Our business teams include finance, procurement, human resources, information technology, marketing, corporate development, HSSE, real estate, legal, and practice services. We bring diverse backgrounds, skills, and expertise and create a caring culture where everyone can thrive. Through teamwork and collaboration, we’re building a stronger, more resilient Stantec every day.

As the Innovation Automation & AI Workflows Specialist within Stantec’s Innovation Program, you will design, build, and implement intelligent automation systems that power our enterprise innovation infrastructure. Reporting to the Innovation Programs Leader, you will transform how innovation flows through Stantec—from idea intake through Discovery, Prototyping, and MVP stages—by creating AI‑enabled workflows, automated governance processes, and data‑driven decision support systems that scale innovation across a global organization of 35,000+ employees.

This role sits at the intersection of innovation strategy and operational execution. You will work closely with the Innovation Office, Digital Center of Excellence (DCoE), and Innovation Leaders to translate innovation intent into repeatable, scalable systems. Your work will directly impact how Stantec evaluates hundreds of innovation submissions annually, manages millions of dollars in active grant funding, supports evidence‑based stage‑gate reviews, and generates actionable intelligence from our innovation portfolio.

• Design and implement end‑to‑end automated workflows for the Idea Machine intake process, including intelligent triage, applicant notifications, coach assignment, and progression tracking across Discovery, Prototyping, and MVP stages.
• Build and maintain online application forms, dynamic review systems, and approval routing using Microsoft Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI).
• Automate funding lifecycle management including project setup, budget tracking, milestone monitoring, financial reporting, and closeout procedures for hundreds of active innovation projects.
• Create automated governance workflows for stage‑gate reviews, Innovation Leader evaluations, and escalation protocols.
• Develop intelligent notification and reminder systems to support applicants, coaches, Innovation Leaders, and program administrators throughout the innovation lifecycle.

• Design and deploy AI agents to support innovation program operations, including intake triage and classification, applicant guidance and Q&A, assumptions log generation, business case analysis support, and knowledge synthesis from program documentation.
• Implement CoPilot to analyze innovation submissions, extract key themes, identify synergies across projects, and surface insights for portfolio management.
• Build AI‑powered search and retrieval systems to connect applicants with relevant prior projects, subject matter experts, playbooks, templates, and organizational knowledge.
• Create systems to support portfolio analysis, predict project success factors, and optimize resource allocation recommendations.
• Develop AI workflows for report generation, documentation summarization, and templated content creation (pitch decks, business cases, final reports).

• Design and build Power BI dashboards and analytics platforms to provide real‑time visibility into innovation program performance, including submission trends, funding allocation, stage progression rates, time‑to‑decision metrics, portfolio composition, and ROI tracking.
• Create executive‑level reporting systems for Innovation Leaders, C&I program leadership, and senior management with automated data refresh and visualization.
• Develop data models and taxonomies to enable consistent tracking, querying, and analysis across the innovation portfolio.
• Implement automated KPI tracking and alerting systems to monitor program health, identify bottlenecks, and flag at‑risk projects.
• Build analytics capabilities to…