🌐🇨🇦 immigration, ai and canada with visto.ai CEO josh schachnow

Welcome to another CEO Wisdom Bot AI edition with Josh Shaknow. He is CEO and co founder at Visto AI. We're going to talk about immigration topic that is close to my heart. Whether we're talking about immigration in my native Canada or in the US because I'm in Mexico right now and a bunch of Mexicans are trying to immigrate there. We often have friends ask us hey, can you help? So I guess I'll refer them to Josh or someone that Josh knows in that in their specific area and I another of my favorite topics are really happy to have Josh on. Josh has his own newsletter. He is used to verbal and well content on podcasts I guess. So that'll be pretty fun. If you want to start scale be invited to your to a podcast that would be podpire.com which is my own company, my own podcasting agency to learn from folks like Josh. Quite amazing to grow your brains. It's quite amazing to grow your network and to grow your networks too. Get leads, get clients. Podcasts is amazing. Podpar.com for that. Josh, welcome to the pod. Can you tell me a bit more about yourself and about Visto AI?

Yeah. Charles, thank you very much for having me on the show. I'm an immigration lawyer by trade. I don't practice anymore. To make a long story short, I had my own practice back in the day, was doing a lot of traditional economic immigration, working with companies in Canada, helping them bring people in, helping students, workers, et cetera, et cetera. Tried a whole bunch of the software out there because a lot of immigration is still filling out forms and gathering PDFs and submitting them to the government and really didn't find anything that was all that great at automating the process. So I got together with a friend of mine from back home. I was born and raised in Ottawa, who's a software engineer. We partnered up ever since we've been building Canadian immigration technology and it's been a lot of fun, especially with the advancements of AI in the last year or so and how we've been able to pull that into our platform to make it even better. And obviously a lot of exciting stuff in the future. So happy to be here, thanks for having me on and happy to chat about anything and everything, dude.

So one of my favorite business model nowadays is AIs that fill out boring and long and headache producing government forums. So I'm extremely bullish on that. The last guy had on the pod to talk about that was a CFO in Canada, Greg Solis. Very cool pod we made together and we were talking about an AI that would fill the request for proposals of the government, you know, when they're looking for contractors. Wouldn't it be genius to just send your AI to fill all of these forms and TADA, 6 to 12 months later, get an 80k in the mail, an 8 million here? I mean it's not as simple as that, but I am extremely bullish on that.

Why?

Because governments are not evolved by all means. You know, like they're quite slow, they still operate on 2000 technologies and if we can have an AI, because their formulas are quite simple. Right. They're well made though, they're very solid. It's like easy questions, well asked questions most of the time you might prove me wrong there, but I'm extremely, extremely bullish on these businesses. So tell me about Vista and how far we are from me clicking on a button and the AI filling my wife's full immigration form to actually live in Canada. She's Mexican, by the way.

Yeah, it's a good question. I would say we're not there yet, but I don't think we'll be too, too far away. What we've built so far is a platform that sits in between the firm and their clients and it makes it really easy to fill out those forms, gather those documents, all that kind of stuff. In Canada, one of the big headaches is the government might have for any, depending on the type of application, multiple forms with overlap between said forms. Right. So for example, what we've done on Visto is made one form per family member per application. The client fills it out once, the immigration professional can review it once and then click one button and all the applicable data fills out the applicable forms. It can then be one click sent for E sign, stuff like that. For right now, mostly what we're using AI for is actually drafting documents. An immigration professional might include a cover letter, for example, or sometimes called a submission letter with their application and they can click one button in Visto and, and the platform will draft a custom cover letter based on the profile of the client and the type of application. Now, in the next six to 12 months, I don't think it's too far sighted to be able to say, hey, we can improve the AI. The good thing about immigration is, as you mentioned, the forms are not overly difficult and they're pretty objective. Right. Obviously things like name, date of birth, stuff like that we could rip off of a passport for, for example. Right. But even things like work experience, if you upload A resume or you upload a reference letter. We could probably train AI to, you know, if we feed it enough documents to pull. Okay, what's, you know, figure out what on this resume entry. What is the company name? What is the title? What are the main duties? When did they start working? When did they, you know, end working? When were you born? Okay, rip it off. The passport. When did you last come to Canada? Okay, look at the last entry from their travel document. Right, so that's coming for. It's not here yet. I haven't seen it yet anywhere. Or at least in North America in probably a year or two. Year or two. We'll probably start seeing companies that can do most of that for you, which will be pretty cool.

Yeah, upload your LinkedIn in there so that the bot could see like your experiences in there as LinkedIn's like the modern CV. Another very cool not use case, but like core function quite literally would be that this AI, because the government, it won't tell you why it refused you most of the time or it will be quite vague. So it would potentially analyze as per why this particular application failed over time. And the thing is their criteria is it constantly changes, right, Depending on who's in. In power, the procedures that they're adding up in precise departments. So the AI would tell you, hey, if you write this, if you write this work experience instead of that one, right. You might get a higher acceptance rate. And then I think it would become genius because you would have an UN advantage of having people get their application accepted and people are willing to pay a very high price for that.

Yeah, I mean, you take it a step further and you don't you actually warn them about that before they submit the first application. Right. Because as you said, when you get a refusal from ircc, IRCC is Immigration Canada. It is extremely vague. And in most cases, if you want the actual reasoning, you have to apply for what are called GCMS notes, where you get the full notes of the processing agent and why they made their decision. But what we will plan on doing is, is like, yes, hey, if it got refused, here's some of the reasons why. But ideally at the beginning, when you're preparing that first application, the AI can look at all the data and flag certain things, right? Hey, you have an education gap between these years, make sure to explain it. Or hey, you haven't shown enough proof of funds. Your documentation's a little bit weak in this part, so you should strengthen it. Right? So I think that's. You're spot on there's huge opportunities for right now. I like to think of us as kind of in phase one, which is automating the boring stuff, right? The copy pasting, merging and compressing, generating basic documents, you know, filling out forms. And soon I, you know, in the six to ten month mark, once we cover all those bases and we're saving firms a lot of time to do those, you know, more manual tasks, will be able to improve the AI and actually start doing almost like legal work, right? Like evaluating cases and information and documents and providing suggestions to the firms and their respective clients, right?

Yeah, there's a lot to be developed there, I think. You know, another very cool AI startup business that could be deployed almost ASAP would be with another podcast that I had this morning, which is the guy that registered my business in Hong Kong. Nowadays, with the current landscape, business owners can choose to register their business anywhere that's more advantageous in the world, AKA that less costly in this capitalist world. I mean, it's quite obvious, right? Like we want to pay the less tax possible. And I would certainly picture a bot that would go out there and regarding all your conditions, it would register your company at the best place in the world. I think that could be another epic AI company that would fill out forms again with the governments quite easily. I want to talk about immigration for a moment with you. In the us we've seen that the Trump administration was extremely bearish on immigration. It was very sad. Not sure about Biden, but Canada, I mean, Justin, he's doing an incredible job, I think, on that level and making sure that Canada is still very accommodating. I mean, and he's out. It's, it's not, it's not even an emotional stuff to me, a capitalist, an entrepreneur, it's just like he knows his and he's intelligent. He has his brain cells, right? Because if you get immigrants, you get more cash in most of the time, you get more entrepreneurs, you get more job. And I think that's quite amazing. I've talked with various entrepreneurs also on this podcast that are refugees in Canada from Iran, from Ukraine, and that's just amazing. You know, it's like, hey, smart folks, you have a crappy country. Come in a country that makes sense. What, what better than that? You know, like it's that competitive. When you have a country, it is your duty to try to keep your people in and serve them right. And if you're corrupted, if you don't have your shit together, then yeah, you're going to lose these people. And that is pretty bad for you. Anyway, my point is Canada has been doing a hell of a job, in my opinion, with immigration. Do you share that view and is there any other model in the world to follow in terms of immigration?

Yeah, I think Canada, for really its entire history has always been very pro immigration, right? A couple important factors I would note is like, number one, countries like ours, we need more young people, right? We need skilled workers. Because our population, specifically in Canada, we're seeing this in other countries as well, is aging, right? The boomers are all getting old. They're going to retire or they already are retired. We're going to need more people to work and we're also going to need more people to pay taxes to cover the health care of all these old people, right? No offense to old people. I like old people. But it's just the reality, right? If you look at the statistics of our population and how it's aging, we need more young, skilled workers, right? Period, end of story. I think up until around like 2021, they were doing a phenomenal job. It was like a. It was like a 5, 10 year glory day period where they were coming out with these new innovative programs and had built a really good system and their quotas were increasing and things were getting really good. I think, I think Covid set back IRCC a little bit. In my opinion, in terms of, number one, it threw them all back into their homes and they had. Understandably, the government had no plan for something like Covid happening, right? So it caused a huge backlog. I'm sure you might have seen it in the news. You know, multiple millions of applications in the backlog threw them for a big loop. Caused a lot of difficulties for individuals and companies and people trying to navigate the process. I think the big problem we're seeing right now is related to immigration is the Canadian infrastructure and whether it can support it. We all know that we need the people and we actually have a pretty good system in place to bring them here. The problem is, and this relates to why so many people like you are going to work in Mexico or wherever is if you want to live in Toronto, in Vancouver, in Ottawa, like the cost of real estate and cost of living is starting to get a little bit out of hand, right? And as we bring in more people and people get older and our healthcare system's already at its kind of peak, what are we going to do, right? Last year we brought in over 2 million people, right? So that's like one more than 1% of like, like historic Numbers of, of newcomers. Right. So does Canada as a country have the infrastructure to support it? I don't know. We're going to find out the hard way over the next few years because I don't think we can afford to turn immigration off. But I think, and there's a big discussion going around right now on, and the government has floated this more so in the headlines, I don't know what they'll actually do about it, of capping international students because the numbers have just become astronomical and not enough of them are being able to settle and become permanent residents and stay in Canada and housing costs are getting out of hand and we can't build houses fast enough. So anyways, it's very timely for a conversation like this. I think it'll be a very interesting three to five years for Canadian immigration. Getting to build technology and be at the intersection of AI and immigration is pretty fun. And it'll be interesting to see what the government does, especially with, you know, elections and stuff coming up soon. What, you know, what they all decide to do.

What do you think about the immigration policy of the us? I mean the American dream is still living somehow. I'm not sure how it survived the past decades, but it did. And people are still coming to the US in the hopes that yeah, they'll make it. And there's somewhat. Right, you know, like US is still a huge, is the epicenter of capitalism. So if you want to have opportunity and if you think money can change your life, it can at some degree, you know, well, you will try Harvard, you will try UC Berkeley, you will try Yale, you'll try MIT and all of these universities. My thoughts on the thing though is that people don't need to travel nowadays to be financially successful. They can stay. That's my mission actually one part of my mission in Mexico to educate people that they can make money from a computer. What are your thoughts on this? Is like traveling physically still needed in this era to make good money. And what about the US policy on immigration?

Well, yeah, I mean it's a great question because I've done a lot of immigration work in tech. Not just building technology, but working with tech companies. And the reality is this, if you're a 30 plus year old engineer or software developer, you can probably make two, three, five times more money working in the US or working remotely for a US company, which, which goes to your point than working in Canada. Right. So like most things, if you follow the money, you'll get a pretty clear indication. Right. So if you're a Software developer, if you're a data scientist, if you're like any of you know, product manager or project manager and you're, you know, you're looking for a job with a tech startup or a big, you know, a fang, right? Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, et cetera, you're going to make disproportionately more money working in the US and depending on what cities, you might also have a lower cost of living, right? Because look at the, look at the price of a home in Toronto versus, I mean obviously not like New York and maybe la, but, but look at some of the other, you know, I don't know, Chicago and like Philly and you know, like those kind of like more, maybe more mid market Miami, you know, those, those types of cities. If you look at graphs you will see that Canada compared to the U.S. the salaries raise maybe about the same proportion. But the cost of real estate in Canada has risen disproportionately a lot compared to the U.S. so number one, salaries, number two, real estate, number three, if we talk about immigration, the policies are definitely pretty different. I would say the big difference is on average Canada is friendlier, which means it's easier to settle here, right? So for example, we've had a lot of clients that, you know, for example, if you're trying to get an H1B or a green card, I should say in the US which is like the US version of permanent residence, it's partially based on citizenship, but like if you're an Indian national trying to get a green card in the US it could take you 10 to 15 years, right? Whereas in Canada our policies are a little bit more streamlined and a little bit built around. Hey, if you come here and you fit into what we need, you can get permanent residence in like a year or two, right? Depending on, depending on your profile. If you get let go in Canada, you can stay for the length of your work permit as an example to find a new employer. If you get let off in the U.S. depending on what, you know, if you're on one of those temporary work visas, you have 60 days to leave the country, right? So there's clearly like written in the policies and, and the, and the, the strategies and the plans and stuff like that, a different outlook. I think that the, you maybe we'll see some improvements over the next few years in the U.S. because you mentioned this earlier about where should people incorporate. But now, so countries are thinking about how do we attract the best talent, right? It's getting more competitive than ever. Multiple countries are facing work Shortages. And if you have a guy like Charles who's talented and he's going to start a business and he's going to generate taxes and maybe hire people, he can only move to like one place. So, like, if you can't attract him, he's going to go somewhere else. Right. Where it's easier to settle and fewer taxes and more entrepreneurial friendly or whatever. Right. So I think more and more countries are going to get a little bit smarter and intentional with their immigration programs. How fast they move really depends on the government and the parties. The US Obviously has historically had troubles making improvements in immigration for a variety of reasons. But yeah, I mean, that's, that's a can of worms that we could have a whole episode on. Right, right there. Right.

So we talked about your ICP pre podcast. Ideal customer Persona. How do you get in touch with them? Like, what's your GTM go to market strategy nowadays? How do you generate new clients?

Yeah, it's. It's mostly through either cold outbound or content marketing. Right. So cold outbound being the, the good thing about being very niche. Like us, we help Canadian immigration firms. Right. And there's only so many of them, but they're all regulated. And so there's a directory of all the regulated professionals on the regulator's website. Right. With contact information. So it makes cold email, cold calling pretty easy. We don't shy away from cold calling. I think it's great, especially when you have a full list with all their phone numbers. Right. Tough to beat, tough to scale, but tough to beat. And then social media, Right. Doing stuff like this. I told you before the show, I was on a webinar this morning. I post on LinkedIn five times a week. I'm just getting my Twitter up and running. I have a substack where I cover a wide variety of stuff. Obviously immigration. Try to be a bit of a thought leader and sharing my opinions on updates and where things are going and, you know, whether they're good ideas or not. And also just sharing my journey. Right. What it's like being, you know, a young entrepreneur in Canada who's trying to build legal tech. And a lot of people appreciate that. Right. Whether they even want the product or not sometimes doesn't matter. Right. You can build cool relationships with people who just want to follow your journey and you never know what could, what could happen down the road.

You're also quite present on TikTok and you do a bunch of Insta video. I guess these are quite helpful for folks that want to IMMIGRATE themselves more than the actual immigration firms, Right?

Yeah.

So

we've pivoted multiple times through visto over the years. Luckily we've kind of found our niche and kind of found what works. But at a point in time a couple years ago, we were more B2C. We were selling direct to consumer and we can talk about why we pivoted away. But selling B2C tech, especially in legal, we found very difficult, expensive, tough to scale, etc. Etc. But yeah, my TikTok got pretty big because I just started sharing ideas and, and guides on how to do different things related to Canadian immigration. And probably the, the best thing I did by accident was I would post a video and then somebody would comment with a question and then I would just post another video answering that question. Right? And so that's like a pretty easy and effective way, I think, to get content ideas and, and you know, get your name out there. But a surprising amount of immigration professionals follow as well because number one, I share news and updates and I think more importantly, I'm pretty opinionated when I post, right? So I think too many people, and maybe you agree or don't Charles be interested to hear your opinion. A lot of people, especially in my industry, they just share news. They just share facts. And if I'm going to share news or facts, it's always going to be followed by. And here's what I think about it because I think that's where the real value is, right? Anyone could go on a blog and find information and facts, right? But I really like to. I'm opinionated to begin with, which helps and I think sharing that personal opinion and thoughts is kind of like the extra cherry on top that that has allowed me to build a pretty good following with. If you check out my TikTok page, it's low production, right. People are not following me for flashy and dancing and you know, take, you know, the, the hottest trending song that week, right? It's just me sitting with my stupid face on the couch or on this chair and hitting record, right? And the reason why I say that is because I talk to a lot of people about getting started with social media and it can be intimidating, right. Just to get started, keep it super basic, keep it, keep it simple. And there's some unsolicited advice for, for those who it might be helpful for.

If you've checked my content, I mean 1% of it is sharing news. Like the last news I share was Nvidia's conference, which I thought everyone should listen to if people are not like in touch with AI. And I knew that like not a lot of people would listen to that one. Right. Maybe people have listened to the Apple conference I believe was yesterday, but Nvidia still under the radar. I rarely share stuff that is that. Yeah, I mean I share stuff that's impactful and I feel that people don't have a clue. So it's always my opinion and I'm very opinionated. I am on the complete left on this side, you know, way too opinionated. So much so that I'm losing business and I don't care. You know why? Because it scales honesty skills, you know, that's me. I'm learning also I'm getting feedback. I'm not getting enough on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is like kind of professional and, and cringe. I treat it more like a Twitter. By the way, I saw your poll saying should I post on X? Don't listen to people. You should post on X. You know, don't listen to these LinkedIn people. They. They don't have a clue. X is gonna under Elon is. Is doing well. You know, it's gonna do even better. And yeah, I'm very bullish on X. I mean doesn't mean that it will give you the greatest growth. But they're working on the ad platform. You can get paid a lot on Twitter also from your content. They added that function which is cool. You don't have that on LinkedIn. The only big player in that area was YouTube and a bunch of folks have tried and fell at that like medium and so forth. Yeah, I'm very opinionated. Thank you Josh for showing up today. Where can people find out more about you online?

Yeah, a couple places. I mean if. If you are an immigrant, Canadian immigration professional and you're interested in AI and software to help improve your practice, definitely check out our startup at Visto AI V I S T O AI or maybe we can include links in. In the description. I'm probably Most active on LinkedIn so if you just search my name there's only I think one of me on LinkedIn with that, with that first name, last name, combo. Definitely give me a follow there. And I do have a weekly substack where I share just stories and takeaways from my week as. As an entrepreneur. Subs again same name. If you just type in Josh Shack now on substack or again maybe we'll include a link to it in the description then would be happy to connect.

There you go. And I am Charles Cormier. Your host of CEOWisdom podcast.com if you want to start scale be invited to a pod, you can go to podbuyer.com that was Josh Shaq. Now.