RUNWITHIT Synthetics: Using AI to gauge the future

What would happen to a city’s residents if rents rose by 6%? How might a major earthquake affect a city’s infrastructure? Could a new technology succeed in the marketplace?

These are the kinds of questions that Edmonton-based RUNWITHIT Synthetics (RWI) helps organizations answer—not by predicting the future, but by using AI to create realistic virtual worlds (“synthetic cities”) where it’s possible to explore scenarios before making decisions.

At the heart of each synthetic city is a synthetic population: AI-generated virtual residents whose characteristics and behaviours reflect those of the real community. 

These digital simulations allow governments, businesses and other organizations to test ideas, evaluate investments and prepare for an uncertain future. 

Myrna Bittner, the company’s co-founder and CEO, calls it “sandboxing the future.”

The approach has earned international recognition and is helping clients tackle challenges that range from housing affordability and energy security to health care and climate resilience.

Looking beyond today’s data

Dean and Myrna Bittner founded RWI in 2014 to help organizations test complex digital systems in realistic virtual environments before deploying them in the real world. The idea was to reduce the cost and risk of failure.

Initially, those projects focused on communications networks, safety-critical systems and other highly technical applications. 

A turning point came in 2019 when a technology firm asked RWI to simulate how a major earthquake might affect the city of San José, California and demonstrate how smart city technologies could minimize the damage.

The project was meant to focus on infrastructure. But RWI insisted on adding something else: people.

"We felt people were really the whole point," says Myrna. "If you couldn’t relate those systems to saving and helping people, then you were missing out." 

The team created virtual residents and assigned them realistic behaviours based on research into how people respond during disasters. They could watch how individuals evacuated (including whether they stopped to help others), how stress affected their decisions and how different emergency responses changed outcomes.

The project crystallized the company’s thinking. Rather than just testing technology, RWI began modelling entire communities to show how infrastructure, the economy, public policy and human behaviour interact in ways that are often impossible to understand with conventional forecasting tools.

Building virtual worlds

In the company’s virtual communities, residents have homes, jobs, incomes, transportation options and other attributes. Organizations can explore how different events or policy decisions are likely to affect them over time.

"It’s kind of like Google Earth meets SimCity," says Myrna. (SimCity is an open-ended city-building video game.) "People can see their communities as living, interconnected systems and ask, ‘What happens if...?’" 

While traditional forecasting relies on historical data, RWI can generate data about situations that have never happened before.

"We’re always working in areas where there isn’t data. We work from the future, from ‘what ifs,’ from hypotheticals," says Dean Bittner, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. "We’ve become adept at generatively creating data." 

That ability allows the company’s clients to ask questions that spreadsheets alone cannot answer.

Helping decision-makers see around corners

One recent project illustrates the power of that approach.

Working with Centraide of Greater Montreal, RWI created a digital replica of the Montreal region to explore housing affordability. 

The model incorporated information about households, housing, transportation and other factors that affect financial stability. The team then asked: What would happen if rents increased by 6%?

The simulation estimated that more than 30,000 people could be pushed into poverty, while many others would move from financial stability to precarity. 

For Myrna, the value of the exercise wasn’t simply producing another statistic. Too often, she says, governments and organizations react only after problems become visible.

By modelling potential outcomes in advance, decision-makers can figure out which communities are likely to be most affected (and how) and where interventions could have the greatest impact.

Thinking big even if you’re small

Building technology this ambitious took patience. Rather than raising venture capital early on, RWI grew largely through revenue while using BDC financing to help fund new opportunities. They received a multi-million dollar investment from Raven Indigenous Capital Partners in 2024.

According to Myrna, BDC loans were particularly valuable in the early years because they provided the matching capital needed to access government innovation funding. 

"BDC was there for us," she says. "They’ve always been just a phone call away."

While many of RWI’s clients are governments, utility companies and large organizations, Dean says its technology can also help smaller businesses reduce uncertainty before making major investments.

For example, a company developing a new heat pump could deploy the pump virtually across a synthetic city to understand whether and how different customers might adopt it. Or an industry association could explore how a proposed policy might affect the businesses they represent. 

Virtual simulations can also help start-ups understand and demonstrate the potential of new products or technologies before they spend money on costly real-world pilots.

"You don’t have to be a big company to find this useful," says Dean. "The future—and understanding what’s possible for your business—is important regardless of your size." 

The broader message is one that applies to organizations of any size: before committing significant time or money, look for ways to test assumptions, explore different scenarios and understand the potential consequences. AI can help businesses make better decisions, but only if it’s used to answer meaningful questions.

AI as a decision-making tool

The founders describe their approach as "glass-box AI." The idea is transparency: unlike AI systems that produce answers without showing their reasoning, RWI’s models help users understand the assumptions behind the results and see how different decisions influence the outcome.

But while AI powers RWI’s platform, the founders view AI as a means rather than an end.

For them, the real objective is helping organizations make better decisions.

The founders encourage businesses to adopt AI thoughtfully. Generative AI can improve productivity, they say, but companies should:

• use AI where it creates genuine value
• understand how the tools handle sensitive information
• avoid exposing valuable intellectual property

"If you’re making decisions about implementing AI, use your regular good business sense to make sure the value you’re getting outweighs any costs," says Dean. 

Planning for tomorrow

A major milestone for RWI this year was its launch of Synthetic Canada, a national digital sandbox that combines 3D maps with context, time and AI-generated virtual populations. It allows users to evaluate housing, major projects, energy transitions, defence, policy decisions and climate impacts.

The company is also expanding into health research, giving University of Waterloo researchers access to its modelling platform, and commercializing its technology so clients can eventually run their own simulations to explore future scenarios and evaluate investments. 

Even though RWI’s work often involves modelling disasters, economic shocks and other difficult scenarios, its founders are undaunted about the future.

"We’re fiercely optimistic, in fact,” says Myrna. Rather than dwelling on what could go wrong, she’s motivated by the chance to help organizations make better choices, potentially averting problems.

As businesses face growing uncertainty, whether from climate change, evolving technologies or unpredictable global markets, the ability to test ideas before making costly investments could be increasingly valuable.

After all, the best way to prepare for the future may be to visit it first.

Next steps

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