The Road to Innovation Expo 2025: Regional Mass Transit Agency
Stevens senior design consulting team demonstrates how AI can improve efficiency
Every organization with regulatory oversight must invest time, money and human capital toward ensuring their contractors are compliant with every rule and regulation. A team of Stevens School of Business students used their senior design project to help a large, regional mass transit agency understand how integrating artificial intelligence could improve their efficiency, specifically in reviewing documents with hundreds of pages.
The group developed a use-case scenario to demonstrate how AI technology could be integrated into the construction plan review process from an occupational health and safety perspective.
“We wanted to show them how using AI could make their workflow easier by to creating something that reduces the repetitiveness,” said Moises Quiteño, a business and technology major. “We used AI to develop a document scanner for construction plans submitted from third party contractors. The idea behind this was to simplify the contract-review process. Some of them take multiple days because they are hundreds and hundreds of pages long. If you could do it in 30 seconds by only reviewing the parts that actually need revision rather than all the fluff that's in the contract, it would make the process so much simpler.”
The AI scanner the team developed checks to see if the plans comply by comparing them against a 30-point checklist. The AI scan results as either yes, it meets the requirements, no, it doesn’t meet the requirements, or it requires human intervention for further review.
In addition to sharpening their technical skills, these students also learned a valuable lesson in navigating a complex organizational structure.
“It’s such a big organization and there was a lot of legal work that was necessary,” said accounting and analytics major Nishad Manohar. “We didn't have access to all the information we needed at the beginning of the project, so it was a long process. We learned a lot about what goes on behind the scenes. When you start a project, you think you know what you're going to do, but then you learn the ins and outs of the client and what you need to do get things done. We definitely learned to improvise and be prepared for anything.”
The Team
Arnaldo Alegre | Bloomfield, New Jersey | Accounting & Analytics
Nishad Manohor | Ridgewood, New Jersey | Accounting & Analytics
Rajesh Parmar | Edison, New Jersey | Business & Technology
Moises Quiteño | West New York, New Jersey | Business & Technology
Ryan Savard | Irvine, California | Finance
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Aron Lindberg, Associate Professor
Q&A with the Team
How were you able to integrate artificial intelligence into your work?
Nishad Manohor: “The AI technology that worked with was Replit, which is an IDE or integrated development environment. It has a product called Replit Agent, which is an AI agent that develops programs for its users based on the prompt engineering. Users give the agent commands and requirements, and it develops a program based on those requirements. We connected Replit with Claude, the anthropic AI, to develop the program.”
Moises Quiteño: “None of us are engineers or software engineers. The School of Business teaches us how to use technology, but there was still a learning curve. Our amazing advisor, Dr. Lindbergh, gave us different resources. We started playing around with Replit to see how we could make something for them. We wanted to show them that we're students who don’t know a lot about software development, but we could still develop something they could use in their everyday workflows. Imagine if they put all their resources into training employees on how they can use this, or more everyday applications like ChatGPT, to improve their workflows. At the end of the day, these are tools for us to use
How did your academic work prepare you to work with a real-world business?
Ryan Savard: “We had to be creative and think outside the box because a project might not always as straightforward as you may think it would be. We had to use a lot of our resources because not many of us had backgrounds with coding. It was a lot of fun because of how the technology is evolving. The experience of going to a school that is technology focused helped develop our willingness to use all the technology and resources that are available.”
Moises Quiteño: “The School of Business has taught us that how to present information, and in this project, our first step was introducing the AI and how it's used in a professional setting. Putting together that type of presentation and crafting the story of how it's been used in large organizations is one of the soft skills that we honed over the past four years”
How important is adding a real-world consulting experience to your resume while still a student?
Arnaldo Alegre: “I was a data entry intern for a nonprofit in New York, so I didn't really interact with clients. On this project, I actually met with the clients in-person and I had something to create. It really supplements my accounting degree. I developed both coding and soft skills in this project that I can use in any situation. When you’re working in client service, trying to find their needs and figuring out a solution based on what they need is everything.
Nishad Manohar: “This was my first experience working with an external client and as part of a consulting team. I think it's very important to me because having experience as a consultant not only means that you can solve problems, but you know how to understand the problem and the pain points of the client. That’s not necessarily something that I would learn while working within a company because they already have their own procedures and standards. Consultants have to be more proactive about learning all they can and trying to find a solution on their own.”
What was the most important thing you learned during your senior design project?
Ryan Savard: “You have to be willing to meet everyone's concerns. We learned we had to find ways to change our plan to make sure that we met everyone's expectations and get best result. Working with a big company like this gives you insight into what you're going experience after graduation. Having that experience and a bit of understanding of how things are going to work when you have a job is very useful.”
Nishad Manohar: “I didn't have much experience applying the technology aspect in a business environment. I thought it was very interesting. Prompt engineering, working on code and developing applications using AI are definitely things that I'll use going forward.”