NEXT up Schulich’s annual alumni forum — Connect 2018

Schulich Alumni and Toronto business leaders, it’s time to CONNECT! This weekend Schulich School of Business hosts their annual alumni forum and I have the great honour and privilege to be this year’s Co-Chair alongside Raj Metha — Global Head, Private Capital & Partnerships of Starlight Investments Limited.

This year’s theme is Next: CONNECT to the Future and the team has put together an incredible line up speakers covering a wide-range of topics and industries from marketing to real estate, artificial intelligence and the curious world of high end art investing. The only challenge is trying to plan which session you’ll attend!

Here are a few of the key speakers that we’ll have the chance to hear from:

Howard Lichtman — President of The Lightning Group; Partner at Ethnicity Multicultural Marketing and Advertising

Howard is a founding partner of Ethnicity — Canada’s leading authority in marketing and communications to a multicultural world. He is responsible for all of the marketing, programming and sponsorship for the Taste of the Danforth. He created the American Express Front of the Line program and transformed Cineplex from being just a movie theatre to a media outlet. He’ll be bringing together a panel of veteran marketers to share their perspectives on the future of marketing.

Pam Laycock, SVP Transformation & Strategy, Torstar Corporation

Pam was last year’s CONNECT co-chair, and has been with Torstar for over 26 years. She currently leads Transformation and Strategy, where she is working with the leadership team to transform the organization for future growth and leadership. She holds the ICD.D certification from the Institute of Corporate Directors and sits on the Executive Council for the Ontario Chapter. She is Interim Chair of board of directors for the Toronto Public Library Foundation. She previously sat on the boards of CAA South Central Ontario, Shop.ca and Workopolis. She’s going to be talking about What’s next for the role of a board member, and as you can tell, she’s probably got a lot to say.

Som Seif — President & CEO of Purpose Investments Inc.

If you’ve ever flown Air Canada recently, you might have heard of Som or at least seen his commercial. He’s the founder of Purpose Investments, which he formed following the sale of Claymore Investments to BlackRock Inc. in March 2012. Som started Claymore Investments in January 2005 and turned it into one of Canada’s first exchange traded fund companies.. Som will be talking about cryptocurrency and I hope he talks a little bit about Etherium Capital.

Tony Chapman — Keynote Speaker, Conference Host, Moderator

Tony is one of the youngest individuals to be inducted into the Marketing Hall of Legends. Five years ago, he sold Capital C, the agency he founded, and his interests in Fresh Intelligence, a research firm he cofounded so that he could freely speak his mind in the media at conferences around the world. I’m really excited to hear what Tony has to say.

For a full list of speakers and programming, visit: http://schulich.yorku.ca/connect/connect-2018-program/

Last year, my colleague (and former MBA classmate) Marc-James Abi-Jaoude and I shared our thoughts on the future of AI, design, and the impact it will have on business. It was quite the experience for us to stand in front of the class to lead an engaging conversation with fellow alumni, faculty and business leaders.

We helped dispel common myths of AI and explained how we tend to prefer the term augmented intelligence to artificial intelligence. The critical difference is that one tries to replicate human intelligence, and the other enhances and scales human expertise. We showed a few examples of current applications of AI and concluded that no matter how technological our world becomes ultimately, we still need a human’s touch.

We’ll be exploring the future of business this weekend and hearing from industry leaders on what they think is coming up next. I’m so excited to return to CONNECT and I hope to see you there!