Creating inspirational ways for employees to innovate together: EY Canada Innovation Challenge

Leading workplace cultures nurture innovation from within. They create opportunities for people to come together, ask bold questions, test new theories and spark sustainable progress.

In brief:

• EY Canada’s Innovation Challenge empowered employees to co-create solutions using AI and emerging technologies to enhance engagement and collaboration.
• Over 110 participants submitted more than 50 ideas; three finalists advanced to design sprints, showcasing EY’s people-first innovation culture.
• Virtual Water Cooler emerged as the top concept, connecting colleagues through AI-powered networking to strengthen belonging and teamwork.

At EY Canada, our people-first culture provides more than 8,000 individuals across the organization with meaningful opportunities to help build the future of the business. That spans a number of internal innovation challenges. In this case, the EY Employee Experience Innovation Challenge showcased EY’s commitment to fostering innovation, enhancing engagement and encouraging employee-led approaches.

Our own people are shaping the future with confidence for us all.

As organizations around the world explored how best to tap AI’s potential, EY led by example. In 2023, we built on US$1.4 billion in global tech investments to create a value-based responsible AI strategy. The EY.ai platform launched publicly in September 2023. We brought public and corporate policy teams together to unlock AI’s social impact and discussions with regulators, governments and tech players. We developed new AI solutions and applied them to EY first, as client zero.

In Canada, that momentum moved us to explore how we could deploy AI and other emerging technologies to evolve our employee experience here at home, from day to day. From that question, the EY Employee Experience Innovation Challenge took off. The challenge was a structured initiative that encouraged employees to submit creative ideas aimed at exploring how our own people might apply advanced technologies to evolve and improve employee experiences at scale.

We launched the Innovation Challenge across every service line and geographic region across Canada, sharing the question via internal communications and townhall appearances across the firm. EY people jumped on the chance to get involved. More than 110 participants spent six weeks developing and submitting more than 50 ideas in response to our challenge question.

Then, leaders from across the firm came together during an EY wavespace^TM session to explore and discuss the ideas submitted. The creativity was astounding. Together, the leadership team zeroed in on three high-impact concepts to refine further through a design sprint, complete with coaching and feedback along the way. 

The three ideas selected were:

• EY Employee Health and Wellbeing Program, a health and wellbeing app that promotes and encourages our people along a health and wellness journey by facilitating team-based challenges, inspiring healthy habits and consolidating EY wellness resources in an AI-enabled platform.
• ODYSSEY, an immersive and gamified career management platform that transforms professional development into an engaging, story-driven adventure. Users can navigate experiences like a choose-your-own-adventure story, complete skill-based quests and view dynamic career maps.
• Virtual Water Cooler, an AI-powered networking tool that intelligently connects EY people based on their professional profile, project involvement, activities and work interests. The platform is designed to enhance internal collaboration and mentoring, foster knowledge sharing and create meaningful belonging.

With the finalists named, the three teams got to work.

The top three teams and their coaches spent 10 additional weeks bringing the ideas to life through a design sprint. That included prototyping, testing hypotheses, preparing a pitch to the EY Canada Employee Experience Innovation Council and more. 

The process itself generated opportunities for participants to network, present in front of the firm’s senior leadership, tap into coaching from professionals across service lines and meet EY innovators they may not have interacted with before. The Challenge brought people together and cultivated diversity of thought as teams of up to five individuals, from various service lines, career stages and cities came together to forge innovation. All of this remarkably fast progress culminated in an exciting day of well-articulated pitches and compelling storytelling. 

It wasn’t an easy decision, but the Virtual Water Cooler concept emerged as the overarching concept of choice. Like many new solutions, the idea initially grew from a problem the members of the team were trying to address. Sha Asadi, Ruolin Zhang and Daniel Maciel had noticed it wasn’t always easy for colleagues to get to know people from other offices. They set out to change that by working with the EY AI Hub team in South America to develop an algorithm. 

Rooted in a passion for enhancing the employee experience, Sha, Ruolin and Daniel collaborated with Talent, EY Technology, AI Hub, and EY Canada Innovation to refine a proof-of-concept pilot strategy. This was grounded in using an AI-based matching algorithm between people at EY. This solution provides relevant suggestions to connect people with given similar interests, shared work areas or other common areas. 

The user experience is streamlined and frictionless, starting with a simple profile form that — when ideally and ultimately combined with EY Discovery data — creates a smart profile. The matches will be generated based on the comparison between profiles resulting from users’ data.

Since setting out to prove the concept, the Virtual Water Cooler team recruited more than 300 EY employees as volunteer testers to support the pilot program. More than 200 joined the kickoff call or registered on the platform. They generated 114 matches and carried out 84 chats. The current total user pool is 175.

In participants’ own words:

“Although I have a pretty strong network at EY, I’ve truly enjoyed my experience with the Virtual Water Cooler and have seen firsthand how impactful it can be to connect others across the firm. I met someone from my local office whom I would not have met otherwise. She had recently moved to the city and primarily worked from home, avoiding the office because she didn’t know anyone, and her team was mostly remote. Since our coffee chat, we’ve been able to meet up in the office a few times, which has encouraged her to come in more often and connect with others in person.” 

“I met someone who, like me, returned to EY for the second time and is passionate about our learning programs. It made me feel inspired to learn more myself!”

“I continue to chat with one of my new connections.”

“I met colleagues from services lines I’ve never interacted with before.”

That’s the power of grassroots innovation and the importance of creating space where new ideas can flourish. Looking forward, the team has secured additional funding to make user-suggested updates, and the second phase of testing officially kicked off in fall 2025.

Have questions or ideas about the EY Canada Innovation Challenge? Connect with us at innovation.canada@ca.ey.com.