Toronto Pearson International Airport handled nearly 48 million passengers last year—more people than the total population of Canada. That volume makes it one of the busiest airports in North America. It also gives it an unusually powerful role in the country’s innovation economy.
“We have an opportunity to build a much more modern, much more efficient, much more intelligent airport.”
As airports become increasingly digital, Toronto Pearson is rethinking how it sources technology to improve the movement of passengers, baggage, and aircraft. The goal is to give more Canadian innovators the chance to test and prove solutions in one of the country’s most demanding operating environments and help shape how major airports operate in the future.
The opportunity comes as Toronto Pearson embarks on a massive rebuild. In May, Toronto Pearson broke ground on Pearson LIFT (Long-term Investment in Facilities and Terminals), a multi-billion-dollar modernization effort that will reshape terminals, baggage systems, and airfield operations over the coming decades.
“If we get procurement right, airports like Toronto Pearson won’t be buying just technology,” Brian Tossan, chief technology officer at Toronto Pearson, told Betakit. “We’re going to be creating markets for Canadian innovation at infrastructure scale. That is not a small deal.”
Problem solving
Toronto Pearson is casting a wide net when it comes to potential technology partners. Tossan said Pearson is not limiting itself to traditional aviation vendors, but is open to working with everyone from startups and small and medium-sized businesses to large global players. The view is that building a smarter airport requires different kinds of expertise.
“I don’t think there’s only a targeted spectrum of solution providers or partners anymore,” said Tossan. “Many, many different ecosystem players have to come together.”
Where Toronto Pearson is more specific is in the kinds of problems it wants help in solving. Tossan points to biometric security screening—technologies such as facial recognition and digital identity systems that help travellers move through airports more seamlessly—as one area where Toronto Pearson sees room to potentially leap ahead of other North American airports. The systems are already common in parts of the Middle East, China and India.
The airport authority is also exploring AI applications aimed at improving operational safety, systems integration and enabling airport staff to make faster, more-informed decisions in an environment with thousands of variables—from weather delays and gate changes to bottlenecks and baggage disruptions.
“We have an opportunity to build a much more modern, much more efficient, much more intelligent airport,” said Tossan. “Especially if we really think about these digital platforms and what they can do.”
From pilot to Pearson
For innovators wondering how to get in front of a large organization like Toronto Pearson in the first place, they have created a couple of pathways. Last October, it launched two six-month innovation pilots with tech incubator DMZ at Toronto Metropolitan University and global startup program, Creative Destruction Lab (CDL).
The move is partly about tapping into what Tossan described as Toronto and Canada’s “hotbed” of startup talent and AI, bringing more homegrown technologies into the airport’s broader digital transformation.
DMZ’s senior director of programs and global operations is now embedded at Toronto Pearson as an expert in residence, helping translate airport challenges into clearer opportunities for emerging companies to test ideas and products. The CDL partnership is focused on AI applications across baggage handling, gate management, and the behind-the-scenes operations that keep the airport running.
“Innovation is about putting out the problem sets and the pain points we want to try to address, and then being open to different ways to solve for those.”
Innovators can still approach Toronto Pearson directly, but Tossan noted the incubator channels are designed to quickly assess ideas and whether they’ll work in a demanding airport setting.
“We didn’t want to close the aperture through a procurement process per se,” he said of the vetting process. “Innovation is about putting out the problem sets and the pain points we want to try to address, and then being open to different ways to solve for those.”
Toronto Pearson still depends on major technology providers to run core airport systems. But Tossan sees startups and smaller companies as complementary to those larger vendors, not competing with them. Large providers supply what he calls the “fortress-like foundations” of airport operations, while emerging companies can bring more targeted solutions.
Not your typical enterprise scale
An airport is not like selling to a typical enterprise customer, Tossan noted. A single passenger journey can span the physical airport, private airlines, CATSA, CBSA, and a web of other operators, many running systems that were never originally designed to work together.
“You might be really surprised at the number of stakeholders and systems involved,” he said. “If you start to appreciate that, that’s where the opportunities are extremely exciting—because you can connect dots that aren’t as closely connected, or maybe not connected at all.”
For companies that can navigate that complexity, Toronto Pearson offers a proving ground that’s hard to find. With passenger traffic expected to hit 65 million passengers a year by the mid-2030s, technologies can move quickly from pilot to proof, but only if they can stand up to the real-world demands.
“That’s very, very difficult to find in any sector, anywhere else in the country,” said Tossan.
Success, however, will be measured against more than just passenger growth. Toronto Pearson is looking at how technologies can strengthen the airport’s overall resilience, improve cybersecurity and, over time, help it become more responsive and capable.
“Physical infrastructure is constrained to the physical reality of the world. Digital infrastructure doesn’t necessarily have some of those constraints,” he noted. “Digital capability can actually get smarter if we’re intentional about that.”
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Drive the future of aviation by piloting breakthrough technology at one of North America’s busiest airports, Toronto Pearson.
Feature image courtesy of Toronto Pearson.