Steven Jast
President & CEO
ROI Research on Investment / Gazelle.ai
Montreal, QC
Steven founded ROI Research on Investment in February 2003. As President of ROI, Steve led the growth of the company from a two-person start-up to a Profit Magazine “Hot 50” company, having posted revenue growth over 330% (over a two-year period), ranking as Canada’s 26th fastest growing company in 2007.
In 2008, Steve was recognized as a Finalist in the Ernst & Young International Entrepreneur of the Year Competition.
Steve is a recognized thought leader on the fundamentals and best practices of investment attraction, business retention and expansion, as well as advanced lead nurturing and engagement techniques for economic development organizations. Steven has written a number of guidebooks and provided training on best-practices relating to investment attraction to international governments at all levels. Since 2003, ROI has worked with over 400 economic development organizations from around the world, facilitating over $30 billion in capital investment, creating over 200,000 jobs.
Prior to ROI, Steve was Partner and Executive Vice President at a boutique Site Selection firm from 1992 until 2002. Steven led the company’s site selection and incentive negotiation team and was awarded the Gold Level Achievement Award in the Private Developers Economic Development category by Business Facilities Magazine.
Most recently, Steve has been leading an ambitious R&D effort to harness the power of big data and artificial intelligence for investment attraction. Having built a multi-disciplinary team comprised of Mathematicians, Economists, Data Scientists and Software Engineers, Steve is exploring the capabilities of trained algorithms to detect companies in their earliest stages of expansion. Following 3 years of development, Gazelle.ai was launched in September 2017, and now has over 500 users in 15 countries. In July 2019, for the second time in his career, Steve was nominated as a Finalist for the Ernst & Young International Entrepreneur of the Year Award, based on his work as Founder and CEO of Gazelle.ai.
Over the years Steve has been a featured speaker/panelist at a number of economic development gatherings including: Select USA Annual Conference, International Economic Development Council (IEDC) Annual and Leadership Conferences, State International Development Organization (SIDO) Annual Conference, Global Carolina Connections Annual Conference, Ports to Plains Annual Conference, Council for Community and Economic Research (C2ER) Annual Conference, Texas Economic Development Council Annual Conference, Alberta Economic Developers Annual Conference, among many others.