The WZCC Toronto chapter kick-started their third meeting with a Networking Summer meet with two excellent speakers on contemporary topics that had the audience lapping for more. Our President, Cyrus Patel welcomed the attendees and gave a quick update on the Global WZCC AGM, held in May 2019 in Orlando and proceeded to introduce our speakers. Ms.Afreed Mistry, from Bank Of Montreal, gave a presentation on “How Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain Technology & Smart Contracts are changing the World”. She started off by explaining what Artificial intelligence is and then proceeded to give us examples, viz a vie, the farming industry and how AI is applicable and how it helps with robots, predictive analysis and even gave examples of machine learning. (How machines identify different species of plants). Other big industries where AI is very helpful is healthcare where AI helps in drug development and medical imaging. She proceeded to fascinate us about Molly, the first virtual robot nurse. The car industry is another example where AI benefits example, Tesla and the Google driverless cars. Afreed discussed chatbots, virtual assistants, IVR’s , sentiment analysis, RPA’s (Robotic Process Automation) and had us laughing when she predicted that we in the audience soon would be talking to robots and not even know it. Blockchain was next on her list and she explained what it is and how it is de-centralized and safer than our other servers. She explained how exactly blockchains work and how each page is separate and secured so if someone tried to hack in, they would only be able to hack one page and not the sequence of pages. We learned how blockchain helps vendors with smart contracts, how supply chain management benefits and future blockchains coming up would be insecurities, mortgages, loans, real estate, etc. We learned how cryptocurrency works and about tokens, crypto wallets and ethereum and how smart contracts started. How different countries already have this technology and how some countries have banned certain technologies. Our President thanked Agreed for her fascinating presentation and then introduced our next speaker Sohrab Ghadialy who owns a number of Oxford Learning Center franchises. Mr Ghadialy inspired us with him very down to earth journey of entrepreneurship and how he came about acquiring at one time, 7 centres in the GTA. Mr Ghadialy talked of his middle-class family upbringing during his teens and how he was driven to start his entrepreneurial roots just because he wanted to impress the ladies (amidst lots of tongue in cheek laughter). He spoke of finishing his college and taking up an entry level join the middle east and how from there he grew to become the COO of the company supervising over 600 employees. He talked of how he had a terrific life, his kids went to the best schools, had lots of servants, had a huge villa, his wife and he wanted for nothing…Still, he had an urge to be his own boss and so in 1994 he migrated to Canada and took up his first franchise of Oxford Learning as he and his wife felt that they had the same synergies and philosophies as they did. It was a match made in Heaven, and soon Sohrab and his wife owned 3 territories for the price of 1 and from there onwards they never looked back. This was at a time when the concept of supplemental education was non-existent and paying for such things was not at all popular. Slowly, parents started coming to them for advice rather than the kids and also his staff was not money minded but rather happy to be serving kids and moulding minds. He made the staff a part of his family and most of them stayed with him since inception. He believes, that to succeed one needs to have the will to succeed and have a belief in oneself. He opened new centres, worked on them for 2 years and then sold them to like-minded people, very often parents of his existing students. His centre was the first to be awarded the President’s Award, won franchise of the year and consistently had the top 5 franchise centres. After this inspiring talk, our Chapter President thanked him and then opened the table for dinner and discussion. Thanks to Meherwan Wadia who set up the audio/video so that our event worked out smoothly. Dinner was a scrumptious Dhansak, brown rice with kachumber and a vegetable stew by our Zarthosti caterer, Khushnuma Bamboat. Our guests went home, satiated with good food, great ideas and terrific networking friends.
