Tackling Unconscious Bias Through Realistic Simulations
Learn how the Canadian Women's Chamber of Commerce is leveraging virtual reality AI to help women founders build skills to disrupt real-world bias.
Highlights
40+
Students supported
Course
Enhanced through VR
Realistic
Immersive conversation practice
Scalable
High-quality support delivered at scale
Customer Introduction
The Canadian Women’s Chamber of Commerce (CanWCC) represents the diverse voices of more than 1.2 million women and gender-diverse business owners and self-employed people in Canada.
Founder Nancy Wilson discovered that being a woman entrepreneur in Canada came with some significant challenges and barriers, and created the organization to support women in Canada growing successful businesses with resources, networking opportunities, and tools for growth.
The Goal
As part of CanWCC’s mission to support its members, the group offers a “Control the Conversation” online course, aimed at women founders.
This course explores the unconscious gender biases that women business owners experience when they seek financing to grow their ventures, and teaches to disrupt that thought pattern when they encounter it – helping them “flip the script” and increasing their chances of obtaining the financing they need and deserve.
CanWCC wanted to enhance the course with a way to allow participants to actually practice the skills– rather than only including theoretical or hypothetical examples – but it is difficult to realistically replicate scenarios and allow for truly immersive practice experiences.
“Integrating VirtualSpeech into our Flip the Script program transformed how participants practiced their skills. Through three custom role-play scenarios featuring realistic levels of unconscious bias, we created a safe, risk-free environment where participants could build confidence and apply new strategies in real-world situations.”
Nancy Wilson, Founder & CEO at Canadian Women's Chamber of Commerce
The Solution
Initially, CanWCC began work on a custom prototype to meet this need, but discovered VirtualSpeech at a Centennial College event and realised it was similar to the prototype - but significantly more advanced!
Now, CanWCC uses VirtualSpeech’s Roleplay Studio to create custom, immersive training scenarios that give their learners realistic experiences in three key areas:
- Conversations with angel investors
- Conversations with lenders
- Conversations with venture capitalists
VirtualSpeech’s Roleplay Studio gives CanWCC the ability to offer a more scalable course and embed realistic exercises using a powerful AI model into this course, providing a higher quality of learning and better experience for the program’s participants.
Results and Benefits
The first rendition of the Control the Conversation course, with the VirtualSpeech roleplays, launched to 40 students in January 2026, with plans to run the course several times a year, and the potential to expand practice exercises to other parts of their offering.
