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Muaawia Jannat (photo at right) started building his industrial software startup company, Tagsight Technologies Inc., in March this year and formally incorporated the company in July, while studying computational and applied mathematics at the University of Calgary.

His curiosity about the execution and delivery of engineering projects was met with numerous conversations with advisors and family in the electrical and process engineering-spaces, such as how much time they spent extracting, checking and reconciling information across documents.

The opportunity Jannat found was to help engineering firms get more value from the knowledge they already had.

Tagsight builds independent engineering software for the engineers, project managers and integrator teams who carry the documentation load on any project that ships engineering drawings.

The company’s AI platform converts industrial drawings into structured engineering records, avoiding a time-consuming process that engineers typically do manually. The software reads piping and instrumentation diagrams and other engineering drawings, then turns them into structured records: instrument indexes, input/output lists, equipment, line and valve registers.

Tagsight’s platform reads every document, classifies the signals and surfaces the disagreements to settle before construction.

Engineers inspect each entry against its source on the drawing, with the ability to correct it, and export the reviewed records to the desired, supported engineering format.

Jannat said he expects AI automation to change engineering roles significantly.

“Young engineers have a strong opportunity to learn these tools while developing the knowledge

to use them well,” Jannat, founder and CEO of Tagsight, said in an email interview with Research Money.

But experienced engineers should be leading the discussion and decision on implementation, he said.

The implementation of AI comes with benefits and risks, just like any other new program or software – with one of the biggest concerns being job security.

The research on what using AI for automation does to engineering work is varied.

A 2024 University of Toronto study said that as new AI-based technologies are implemented into the engineering world, skills required of an engineer will evolve. The study measured how exposed each engineering discipline is to AI, finding that microsystems, human factors and electrical engineering scored relatively high.

The study also found that AI “may displace or alter the nature of a task” rather than undermine an entire skill. The authors came to a similar conclusion as Tagsight’s approach, saying that “even if tasks can eventually be replaced by AI, human interaction will still be required.”

Similarly, a 2026 Statistics Canada economic and social report, found that in the case of high exposure, high complementarity jobs such as health care, teachers, and engineers, that require advanced training requirements, “AI may be more likely to augment rather than substitute for human labour.”

Jannat’s answer sits closer to the augmentation position, with a caveat about how junior engineers learn.

“Understanding a system, questioning assumptions and recognizing what needs further investigation will remain valuable abilities,” he said.

But he also flagged that firms need to think about how people acquire experience. As working methods change, junior engineers should still have meaningful involvement in projects and access to experienced colleagues, learning how decisions are made and what those decisions mean for the work.

The founder’s road

Jannat said that coming from an entrepreneurial family, building a business where he owns a personal stake in the quality of outcomes and experiences, while solving a difficult problem that helps people, is personally rewarding.

He developed and launched Tagsight by independently financing his startup, without any outside equity investment, which he says allowed him to retain control of the company’s direction and make decisions with a long view of what he is building.

Jannat now has substantial development behind Tagsight, and he said that gives discussion on future investment a solid foundation. He said he’d want to see what an external investment would make possible, and whether it would line up with the company he’s setting out to build.

The hardest part, he noted, “has been the breadth of what has to come together at the same time.”

Tagsight says advisors with more than 30 years of combined electrical and process engineering experience support the work.

Understanding the drawings means understanding the engineering conventions behind them and the work the extracted information will eventually support, because symbols, tags and connections only carry meaning in relation to the rest of the document and the project context.

On top of that, Jannat said, is the responsibility of handling another firm’s project information, where confidentiality, document ownership, data governance, and licensing and contractual obligations all apply, and where the software has to respect the commitments an engineering firm has made to its own clients.

As Tagsight’s founder, Jannat has to hold all of those requirements together, since they shape technical decisions, product design, customer agreements and how the company operates.

He said he chose to build in engineering knowing it would demand that level of involvement, that he is comfortable going deep into the details, and that he takes the responsibility seriously.

On data privacy, Tagsight uses encryption throughout its process. The company also excludes customer drawings and extracted project data from AI model training, allowing customers to retain ownership of their documents and extracted data.

Jannat said Tagsight’s policy on privacy is made available to firms to examine before using the service. “Their knowledge has commercial value. I want customers to feel confident that using Tagsight respects the ownership and control they have over it.”

Company has attracted international attention

Starting his company in Calgary, Jannat said the city has given him access to valuable engineering experience required to develop Tagsight. But the goal was always to branch out internationally.

“I have always intended to build an international engineering software company from here. The interest across different regions has reinforced my confidence in that opportunity,” he said.

Tagsight has attracted global interest from engineers and engineering organizations across North America, Europe and Asia. The company says its product is used in more than 30 countries. The company’s software is used across process plants, utilities, facilities and capital projects.

Jannat attributes the reach to how engineers can evaluate the software online using documents

relevant to their work, since the requirements are familiar across markets.

He declined to disclose staffing numbers, annual revenue or the commercial breakdown of customer relationships.

Tagsight joined the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program and the Google for Startups Cloud Program this summer; the two memberships are involved in different work.

Through Microsoft’s program, Tagsight gets access to the partner environment and the resources for building business software and taking it to market, Jannat said.

He said Google cloud credits have helped with development and testing on infrastructure the company already uses, and the program offers technical learning resources as well.

The more interesting payoff is on the research side, Jannat noted. Engineering documents give Tagsight concrete questions to dig into about how AI reads and understands images. The company can test a capability against a real drawing and the records an engineer needs to produce from it.

“Working at that level of detail gives a useful perspective on where improvements in AI could have industrial value,” he said.

He is also interested in collaboration with model developers, because Tagsight brings “demanding problems” to those conversations along with hands-on experience figuring out what engineers actually need the software to accomplish.

Jannat plans to keep building Tagsight and expanding what engineers can achieve, with the goal of helping engineering firms take on more ambitious work while supporting them in delivering it.

He said an engineer with 30 years of experience should have a tremendous advantage as engineering incorporates AI, and he wants Tagsight to help them put more of that experience to work while bringing younger engineers further along.

Jannat envisions that five years from now, Tagsight is regularly helping customers feel proud of their work they achieve in collaboration with the software. “I want our customers making bigger plans because they have the tools, the capacity and the confidence to deliver on them.”

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