AI-assisted Features for BRI's Growth Forge® Software
AI technologies are changing the software landscape dramatically and evolving incredibly rapidly. This project is a real-world example of the challenge software companies and IT departments face: how to best leverage AI technologies' current capabilities and integrate them into existing products and services. This project aims to do just that: integrate AI technologies within BRI's Growth Forge Strategy Modeling Software.
BRI is a Portland-based startup focused on helping business customers innovate and grow with new products and businesses. We have developed a cloud-based software platform that allows users to develop, model, and analyze new product or business strategies and guide them through innovation. We have identified some target use cases that AI could assist with 1) Provide continuous or periodic external industry monitoring and analysis contextually relevant to a user's strategy; 2) Provide real-time assisted synthesis and summarization of the details in their strategy models.
We are not experts in AI technology, but we know enough to provide some directional guidance. So, we will be looking for the team to educate both themselves and us. We are not talking about building and training custom models with massive amounts of data, but more likely, leveraging publicly available LLMs with an emphasis on building useful, context-specific AI through methods like Prompt Engineering, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), or Agentic workflows. We're asking the project team to evaluate available AI approaches and technology options, weigh them against technical and business criteria, recommend a solution, and implement a proof of concept for one or more of the target use cases.
Objectives
Objectives:
- Understand the Growth Forge software and the desired use cases
- Educate the BRI team on the current generative AI approaches and potential technical solutions. This will require a lot of legwork to research various approaches.
- Identify an AI implementation approach that meets the use case and other business criteria.
- Make as much progress translating the proposed approach into commercial features for the Growth Forge Software as possible within the available time.
Deliverables:
- Identification of multiple potential AI technical implementation options to address the use case requirements
- Evaluation of the options against key criteria (technical complexity/effort, security & privacy, accuracy, performance, operational maintenance, scalability, and cost implications) and recommendation
- Solution design & plan for a proof of concept of the recommended approach that would support the target use case
- Implement a technical proof of concept of the proposed solution
- Implement one or more of the target use cases as a commercial feature within the Growth Forge Software (stretch goal)
- Codebase & documentation of implemented proof of concept and/or product feature
Motivations
There are two motivations for this project:
- Explore and understand the opportunities for AI within our Growth Forge Software. What use cases is it applicable to, and a practical solution to solve? What are the technical implementation options? What are the operational, data privacy, and cost implications?
- Adding value and new functionality to our product. Strategy modeling and analysis is a complex and challenging area, so opportunities to simplify and improve the efficiency for users with AI-assisted features could significantly impact the product. We're hoping to use AI assistants to make it faster and easier for users to bring more & more relevant external market data into their strategy development and analysis while requiring less time and effort.
Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications:
- Self-directed, able to translate high-level objectives into structured a plan and tasks
- Strong technology research & analytic skills
- Strong communication skills
- CS 290 – Web Development (or similar exp.)
- CS 331 - Introduction to Artificial intelligence
- CS 362 – Software Engineering II (or similar exp.)
- Full stack development experience
- Experience with Javascript, Node.js, MongoDB
Preferred courses to be taken in parallel with project is okay.
- CS 370 – Introduction to Security (or similar exp.)
- CS 493 – Cloud Application Development (or similar exp.)
- CS 494 - Advanced Web Development (or similar exp.)
- Experience working with generative AI services, models, and 3rd party tools or libraries
- Business minor, interest & general understanding of product & business strategy (important context for our application- see special comments)
- Experience with AWS Elastic Compute, S3, & Fargate services
- Experience with Vue.js (or react.js), Vuetify, Snyk, Cypress testing environment
Details
Project Partner:
Jim Bodio
NDA/IPA:NDA/IP Required
Number Groups:1
Project Status:Accepting Applicants
Website:https://www.bri-associates.com/growth-forge/growth-forge-home
Keywords:
WebArtificial Intelligence (AI)SecurityNode.jsMachine Learning (ML)APIReactData PrivacyConsultancy