AI compliance platform for youth sports: product & go-to-market innovation - ON-1250

Project type: Innovation
Desired discipline(s): Computer science, Mathematical Sciences, Mathematics, Business, Social Sciences & Humanities
Company: Next Play AI Inc.
Project Length: Flexible
Preferred start date: As soon as possible.
Language requirement: English
Location(s): Oakville, ON, Canada
No. of positions: 2
Desired education level: Undergraduate/BachelorMaster's
Open to applicants registered at an institution outside of Canada: No

About the company: 

Next Play AI Inc. (SportsX), an Ontario startup, provides an AI-native compliance system for youth sports organizations. It automates jurisdiction-specific obligations—such as Rowan’s Law, abuse screening, privacy, and insurer rules—replacing error-prone paper and spreadsheets with auditable workflows: counsel-reviewed templates, e-signatures, portable verification records, injury tracking, and minor data protection. Partners include Road Tennis Canada and TDSB; pilots involve provincial and national sport organizations. A member of Innovation Factory and TechPlace, SportsX is pursuing SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 while scaling across Canada and the U.S.

Describe the project.: 

Youth sports organizations must comply with complex, overlapping obligations (Rowan's Law concussion protocols, UCCMS safe-sport requirements, privacy and consent law, insurer rules) that differ by province, state and sport. Most administrators are volunteers without legal expertise who still rely on paper forms and spreadsheets. SportsX is an AI-native compliance evidence system of record that turns these obligations into automated, auditable workflows.
This project has two parallel workstreams (4 interns):
Workstream 1 – AI-Assisted Compliance Workflow Generation (2 interns)
Explore, design and validate how AI can help non-expert users safely and easily turn complex, multi-jurisdiction legislation and sport policies into ready-to-use compliance workflows in SportsX.
• Build a structured knowledge base mapping legislation and policies to workflow components (forms, consents, screening steps, deadlines, approvals).
• Prototype a natural-language assistant using LLMs and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that drafts workflows tailored to an organization's jurisdiction, sport and age groups, citing the source rule behind each step.
• Design safety guardrails: human-in-the-loop review, confidence scoring, hallucination and rule-conflict detection, privacy-by-design for minors' data, and full audit trails.
• Run usability tests with partner and pilot organizations, measuring accuracy, setup time and user satisfaction.
Methodology: agile sprints, user-centred design, rapid prototyping, LLM evaluation benchmarks, usability testing.

Required expertise/skills: 

AI Product Development (2 interns – Computer Science / Software Engineering):
• Strong Python and/or TypeScript; experience building web applications and APIs
• Hands-on experience with LLM APIs, prompt engineering, RAG, embeddings and vector databases
• Knowledge representation: structured data modelling, rules engines or knowledge graphs
• LLM evaluation and safety: test sets, guardrails, hallucination detection
• Cloud and data tools: AWS/GCP or similar, SQL/PostgreSQL, Git
• Assets: UX research or usability testing; interest in legal tech; knowledge of privacy and security practices (PIPEDA, SOC 2)
Assets for roles: interest in sports, youth safety or legal/regulatory technology; startup experience; self-directed and comfortable in a fast-paced small team.