Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 1

Smooth Commerce, a Toronto-based company, has developed a fully-integrated technology platform designed to deepen the connection between retail merchants and their customers. They build best-in-class branded mobile apps for business-owners and merchants that activates their customers through mobile payment functionality, order-ahead, loyalty rewards, offers and promotions customized to be most relevant to the user. Their platform's powerful business tools deliver rich data analytics that provides valuable insights into customer behaviour, the ability to manage and analyze targeted campaigns, and drive improved operational efficiencies, increased sales and profitability. Smooth Commerce currently has four commercial mobile apps in market: Balzac's Coffee Roasters, Basil Box, SmoothPay and Hamilton Tiger-Cats All Access. In collaboration with Lambton College's Information Technology & Communication Research Centre (ITCRC) Smooth Commerce plans to integrate artificial intelligence into their apps in order for white-label merchants to be able to leverage the machine learning to analyze the detailed sales data to make automated intelligent decisions. The success of this project will result in Smooth Commerce's improved reputation among their partners and the technology sector as a whole, a new potential source of revenue for the company, and an ability to create new product offerings that focu on the company's analytical capabilities, allowing for the licensing of said technology as a standalone offering. Smooth Commerce is looking forward to collaborating with Lambton College and the ITCRC.