Participated in public demo 2605 with SofIA - Your Ally in Canada

The problem [00:00] Sandra identified a specific wall facing skilled Latino newcomers to Canada: after doing everything right, translated resumes, hundreds of applications, they hit silence, and by the time someone tells them "you need to network," the word itself feels like one more thing they're failing at. She grounded this in nine research interviews, surfacing four stacked barriers: language, an unfamiliar mental model of networking, unspoken cultural rules, and confidence worn down by months of silence. What they built [03:10] She built SofIA, a bilingual (English/Spanish) WhatsApp companion for Latino newcomers to Canada, delivered as a chatbot via Twilio. SofIA coaches users through their career story, turning a raw fact like "I was a logistics coordinator in Venezuela for eight years" into a confident, sayable answer, and proactively builds a living profile of the user's contacts, milestones, and learnings as the conversation unfolds, shared back through a temporary web profile link. What happened [04:50] At the time of the demo, SofIA was in active validation with real users, five testing, with a three-month pilot planned to grow to 10 users and 10 mentors while tracking honest engagement outcomes and cost-per-user. The ask [05:25] Sandra is asking organizations that serve Latino newcomers to send people to SofIA, professionals to become mentors, and partners to pilot it for three months, and is handing the project to Jenniffer Triana to lead phase 2.