Back to Artificial Events (Intelligently)
Disclaimer: Everything below is a mix of what I observed and heard during the event. The goal isn’t to pinpoint "who exactly said what," but to share (usually) an outsider's view and overall perspective on these industries. I’m not here to act as a definitive firsthand source—readers should do their own research. I hope this inspires you to attend events, explore new industries, and hear what leaders are presenting. These notes combine my observations with thoughts on how things could run smoother and how ideas connect (IMO). I’m not an expert, you know? Just hanging out in the room with them. Enjoy!Topics: Ai, Future Proofing, Innovation, AI Builders, New Products, CEOs, Ai Education for Youth
It’s time to get back on the saddle and learn about AI. I’ve got two events to attend tonight and my goal is to be a bit more vocal with the community… about my goals!! My goals to help empower youth alongside this big push for artificial intelligence that is heading our way, full speed ahead. I’m curious to learn more about what’s budding in the industry and see if I can start to meet others on the same page as me.
Why Attend? Lately I’ve been really discrete about my goals. I didn’t feel as confident or cool about it all. I felt like I needed to be a bit of a incognito detective to figure out what’s going on and emerging. But lately, my mood has changed and I want to be more vocal and realyl make things happen. So… how do we do that? Find events with “AI” in the title and head that way!! So, we’re far away, across the water, and ready to learn. I like to learn from event hosts and all of these people. So, let’s get started!!!
Overall Event Review:
(first event) - venue (4/5), food (5/5), speaker content (3/5), networking (1/5), likeliness to return (2.5/5)
(second event) - venue (4/5), food (NA), speaker content (5/5), networking (2/5), likeliness to return (4/5)
Photo Collage and Commentary:
FIRST EVENT:
This event was all about finding funding and turning ideas into reality. I felt like it was so much good information and had many nudges of the right direction for how to push through your ideas and make them happen. This felt really “personal” to me… cause I’m just struggling so hard to figure out how to ‘succeed’ and reach actual customers. But, ‘not giving up’ will… probably work. Right? We’ll see.
Goal of this group is to help women be founders in tech, even at least one woman in every tech company’s leadership.
Work as a family office and work with investors.
They’re also having an AI startup showcase and I want to attend that and maybe even pitch there. For my AI Edu for Youth website.
Three panelists and a host.
The audience is a mix of founders, investors, aspiring entrepreneurs and (hopefully) all questions answered in conversation + Q&A.
Founders are turning AI breakthrough into traction. It takes timing and vision. Let’s hear how they’re transforming their markets for sustainable growth, fundraising, and market impact.
Fastest growing AI business immigration platform. Helping companies work with speed and compliance and hire international talent.
Automated software testing, and some other things. Lots of automated work.
Building AI infrastructure to support efficient machine learning. Technologiest are focusing on how to make infrastructure smarter, agentic infrastructure and leverage the smaller data centers to 10-20 megawatts.
Top talent and lawyers. Backed by AI engineers. Excited to be here and talk to people.
They’ve onboarded over 50k users for their tool. Help you automatically verify if the software you’re building has issues, if it’s high quality, etc. It’s automated testing tools. Recently raised 7M.
Founder builds tech to combat deepfakes and unauthorized content online. Really advocating for women and girls, especially impacted by digital abuse.
Like what?
Makes me think of the event I attended in Portland which said 1 out of every 8 kids is knows someone who has been tricked into sexual abuse by deepfakes.
Founding journey? What’s the specific moment/problem/frustration that led you to start the company in the first place? What made you certain enough to leave where you were (corporate or whatever comfortable environment you had) to exit and start a company?
This is such a classic first question.
Over a decade at a big corporation, lots of AI and even helped release super famous products that many people use now.
Most of career is using ai to simplify complex systems, especially immigration - super complex. Its “an alphabet soup” - l’s to h’s … jumping around
At one moment, realizing you have deep expertise in building enterprise-grade systems, but immigration as a legal service provided to the world… after going through the journey, an invitation from the incubator to join the startup and help with problemspace? But by the time visa and such arrived… they said, “are you ready to get rolling?” - and she said, no, let’s fix this. Let’s fix this process
Cause the experience was so exhausting and frustertaing. It’s super personalized and high stakes. No room for error.
Never a point in time to see massive time and effjicneinty gains until now.
It was a big pain point and time to help.
You get a chip on your shoulder after a really compelling/annoying experience.
It’s an interesting time to live in but wouldn’t be doing anything differently.
Next guy: similar story, comes from own experience
He said he used to work in famous companies for 6 years. At a big famous company. He used to be a software engineer himself. He was in touch with many technologies, it was fun…
But as a programmer he hated writing test cases and making code that the company needed. But the company needed him. These huge companies needed hundreds of test cases from front end and back end to make sure you can get the coding requirements met - if you don’t do all of those tests, it can be a lot of work.
Is there someone who can help him do this? Are there tools that can help? At his company there weren’t, weren’t useful… but as these new LLM’s came out - they started thinking maybe these tools can help. Leverage the power to help them do the work.
Lots of other companies can have the AI do the dirty work and let the humans do the most interesting work.
The most tiring work can be testing. So it’s straightforward and smooth to do that.
So they felt it was super obvious to try this out - and then it worked out.
The third guy said he used to work at 0->1 products. Using advertisements, using privacy, the other using election.
He’d already worked on two startups. Worked on the word class engineering team.
Then he thought to go back to big companies, had a lot of education… but why not go work in AI infrastructure.
Wanted to work on things that were exciting and have big social impact. And wanted to leverage computer sources and put them into an elastic fabric. And work to start a new journey.
OVERALL: enjoying the product development, but the personal pain of dealing with the problem itself. So now is the time to address and deal with it.
How did you figure out what to prioritize, build first, and wait to build?
The easiest way to attribute a product is to copy what has already been proven. Then make it better. Or trying to find an area that you don’t think others are good at but you can build a better product.
If you think many people are doing something but you could do it for lower cost or more efficiently, may be a good opportunity.
Not only just what’s faster but really what solves the problem.
He used to work for a big social media company
But it’s hard to understand everything he says
He says he wanted to work on his own startup… and find something a customer will pay for, then build it
That’s the problem ahahaha. I have to figure out what people will pay for.
Don’t build something that you think customers will pay for… if you have a paying customer, prioritize that.
Now, let’s talk about AI in regulated spaces. Immigration law is high stakes and complex. So how do you build trust with your customers when it comes to this very high stakes piece of what they have to get done. Trust when you’re asking them to rely on AI for something as critical as a VISA application. And what does compliance-grade AI mean to you?
She says they’re not in the business of selling AI. The end product that matters, the end product is a VISA.
You getting approved is the only thing that matters in the market. In the shortest time possible. Most cost-effective way.
Most days won’t be talking to you about AI… just talking about getting hte outcome in the shortest time possible.
Every position does get reviewed my licensed attorneys. Each case has love and care as needed, but 11 times faster.
Lots of back and forth that needs to happen, 20% of the time legal teams will make a mistake, then the officer will come back and ask for evidence. And it can be 1,500-2000 pages. YOu’re bound to make mistakes with that many pages.
And in a normal law firm, people will review this 3 times before submitting.
But the AI doesn’t get tired of these reviews.
They have a 100% approval rate and keep getting better at handling diverse cases .
They’re paying for the outcome, not the technology.
How do we train the AI? How do we store the data?
Immigration journeys don’t end with approval… if you move from A-> B, if its adjacent to immigration, we look at not only compliance from how to build the product but also how to build (or bill?) the employers.
-Make it really simple and slick (though simplifying the process)
Developers are really used to testing tools. What’s your strategy for winning over your audiences? What says if they’re adopting something or trying it out? Is it just something a company is pushing or is it true adoption?
Customers are used to what they already have and are really picky.
Customers usually only pay you for the outcome. Not whatever technologies you are using. If it’s 5, 6, or 16th edition, people don’t care. They just care about the outcome.
Can the outcome change your life? Can it change your existing workflow?
To inspire or persuade them…
People tend to join once they’ve already heard good things about your company.
RIGHT? uugh hahahaha.
You need to prove your value proposition… are you an existing tool? Are you most affordable?
A special case about our industry. But before our company, businesses used to charge thousands of dollars… decided to make this tool accessible for everyone, and trying to align with tools that already exist. Some even have free versions, freemiums, and even pro versions that are cheap. So everyone can try and afford it financially.
Try to focus on the “boring process” more than the other features.
If the customers can’t arrive easily, they won’t take the time.
People won’t spend time if they don’t know how to use it
If the customer can’t get to the point in 5-10 minutes, probably something is wrong.
The visible value needs to be in the shortest time, then they can decide if it’s something they want or if they’re building another app.
Let the customer make decisions easily.
Do you have the feature you want?
Try to figure that out.
Everyone is trying out AI and trying to have a competitive edge…
Is this helping with day to day work?
Vibe coding and experimentation is great… but, the amount of deployments are super low.
High retention… but how much value actually providing?
Ugh hahahah I feel I’m taking so much of this personally. I am just having trouble with my businesses lately. But, persistence is key.
As a founder, you want to figure out who you want to work with, how to deploy the capital responsibly/efficiently… it’s not an easy job.
Even spending $2000, takes a lot of time to figure out how to spend it.
But usually founders know where to get capital and allocate it. So, what are the milestones before they can raise more capital? But what are the other milestones to raise?
Always be open to talk to investors for different reasons. And some friends literally used to try and raise money every 6 months to just get reactions. Look at the term sheet.
We either have to add more peopel to the scrappy team to scale - or it’ll be too late.
There comes a day where you go, okay, let’s get rolling.
Once you get into build mode, you have to figure out how much “networking” versus “heads down” you want to use.
Start a tight process with limited time, multiple term sheets… pros and cons on how we decide when to raise and get the goals
One strategy that different founders can use… building tools are hard so much time is polishing products
I realize I need to be reading my books at different kids events and get feedback from the real customers. For my books, not related to this AI. But I’m doing so much at once right now! Haha
Literally I’m going to make this my goal for this week. I think you need to get them ISBN’s? Right? Then you can go read.
Focus on the momentum and then raise when you’re at the point you can show your success, the lines on the curve.
When do you raise the money? When you run out of runway or almost close. And don’t have sufficient capital… though that’s not always the most ideal way to raise.
Maybe I should be applying for grants, too… all of this stuff is so intimidating and hard to do on your own, you know? But the more I learn, the more i realize there are so many different people and organizations which can help you.
The more ideal way is to raise when you’re scaling. If you want to scale up, it’s hard to support… but let’s say you want 10xs more customers, then you may need to hire 10 more sales people.
Sometimes you need to spend money in an aggressive way
What’s your existing user persona. How is your product?
Get data room. Show them what you already have at this moment and then talk to lots of investors, maybe even 100.
The earlier the stage you’re at, the more you need to talk to.
You don’t have much revenue, not a big team… it’s hard to see.
Later you probably can raise in a shorter time, as you have more dots which show the line you’re headed towards
With predictions and momentum, you’ll raise easier.
This moderator has nice stage presence.
There are a lot of founders trying to navigate fundraising… how do you get in between the term sheet shopping? In an ideal world we would all love to do this. So how do you go from meeting investors to term sheets?
Right now this really doesnt’ apply to me. Right? I just don’t even know my business model or what I’m pitching cuase I have so many ideas and they keep not coming togetherhrhrrrrrr. I just feel like ‘business’ doesnt’ make sense to meeeee
and I feel like the last time I attended their event it was all about investors too.
Introductions aren’t that important to close the deal, it’s more about the product momentum, your team, and the founder’s image.
You don’t have to be too nervous to get big names to help with the intro? It won’t probably make a big difference. If you have a common friend you should be fine. \
See... this is part of why I don’t love networking, I feel like the world lately is so obsessed with doing business and just making connections to try and find the opportunities to make money.
Of course a lot of things are great, helpful, bettering humanity, but the way this is being worded.. and then the girl saying that she’s met many people to help them connect with investors… it just feels like the world is a bit unaligned lately. You know? Just like priorities stink.
Just reminds me of corporate networking events i’ve been to and how much “networks” and presenting yourself matter and I’ve seen this IRL like corporate peopel working in corporate jobs having the most shallow conversations and fake smiles. I don’t meant to be judgemental it just feels so unnatural and like the world is completley warped rightnow - in my perspective. It just feels like things don’t make sense. It’s part of what I want to help with and change. Somehow. Help make businesses more human.
These are people who will be at your table, your meeting rooms, the people you call when things get scary.
Create your list of people to identify warm connections and intros
You want to see who calls back.
But it can be energy draining… so be focused and choose who you want to work with and be intentional
Yeah this is so exhausting hahah. But its “the times” right now
All introductions are valuable, how you execute on them comes down to your personal strategy
As you scale, how about hiring?
When you made your first hires, what did you optimize for? How has your philosophy evolved as you build your company?
As a startup, it’s very important.
Person needs a passion and shared vision with your team. It’ll make your future challenges much better to be solved.
If they don’t care about the product that’s a red flag. As the company grows bigger, think of how you can diversify the culture of the team, the skills, and the personality of the team.
You need to make hard decisions on how to upgrade your team.
When you are small you may have people who are good for that stage, but as the company gets bigger, you need to probably upgrade some of the team members. But that’s another topic.
Highly motivated individuals who want to solve problems, they’d go above and beyond, not even viewing this as a job.
Find someone who wants to solve a problem.
You may even find peopel will unexpected experiences, but tehy may end up being a great fit.
Usually we hire peopel who found their way to them because they cared about what the company/mission was doing.
Maybe it wasn’t the right person for this role, but they still come in and have time to show how good they are, how quickly they learn.
The elements of speed to deliver. People amaze me, when they care - they upskill on their own journey.
When they see you putting the energy in, they start to step up too.
So find people with hungry, high agency and give them the scope and runway to solve the problem. See how they do it, then modulate it…
If you can do that, here is more.
Let’s scale down and figure out what’s better for your skillset and energy.
It’s hard. Recruiting is hard. But once you get a feel of early hires and what’s making them excited to be a part of the team, there’s a pattern to follow.
You can always coach your employees. Hungryness you can not train.
It’s hard to tell from just some simple questions. You have to spend time with them and see it by yourself.
It’s hard to find people… not so many are hungry and passionate about everything.
this sounds like people are intentionally starved so that they act in this way. you know? Like on a bigger level, if leadership knows this, they’d ‘starve’ people on purpose to get them to try harder.
So the best way is to copy existing tools. But innovating in the industry…. There probably isn’t even a way to address these problems. But is there a way today to make things accurate?
If achieving your goals is impossible, how can you come up with a 90/10 solution? 90% workable solution at least 10% of the time?
If you can have bias and come up with solutions all of the time, you will succeed very fast, more than others in the sector.
That will give you time to acquire customers, go to market… assuming perfection is good, but sometimes we just want peopel to balance, do trade-off, and instead of pursuing perfection, do it 90%, very fast.
Let’s make decisions, find a temporary solutions for a nearly impossible solution.
Maybe over the next 12 months, maybe AI for science (working on how to develop new models, make scientifical discovery more powerful)… that’s going to be the next popular narrative to attract Silicon Valley. 300M at some companies working on automation.
Even the US government is doing the “genius” mission. One effort is infrastructure to connect 13 national labs under the department of energy.
Probably also rbotics and models will be robust enough and we can train robots to take care of some of the work we don’t want to do.
And how can we leverage AI? To make it realistic and how we interact with the physical world. There is a lot of innovation on how to make LLMs fasters.
2026 and the landscape of AI is developing.
They keep having so many mic problems. On their 3rd mic of this event.
The guy sitting next to me jokingly literally tossed over some spare batteries at the speakers (but more as a joke than sincerely). I laughed.
Paving way to build more trust in the community. AI can deliver high-quality outcomes with limited human interaction in the loop. The middle ground is something everyone is getting comfortable with. But now it’s a new norm.
Lawfirms used to be scared of the cloud, but now households are going to be comfortable with AI
To me, this isn’t the best thing to hear. I just think we’re starting to lose value and pride in human intelligence so quickly (right? idk just some people I know working hard in the tech industry, at the cutting edge have even talked to me about ‘how important is human intelligence? not very). It’s part of what I want my website to help with. Teaching kids and youth to value their own thoughts, intuition, and mind. We so badly need this to stand strong. It’s like the anti-ai… but also “embrace AI” its like, i can’t even figure out how to say what Im’ tryingto do in an elevator pitch. But I feel like my heart is in the right place.
Just makes me wonder if AI is going to stay “hot” forever or if it’s gonna fade here soon. I feel like it’s really being embraced..
Even some of the top LLMs are only 70% accurate, but tehy are getting better.
Coding will keep getting better. Iterations will keep getting better. Companies will soon realize the gaps to fill and they’ll start to fill them quickly.
Last question before audience Q&A
If open AI gets so smart tomorrow, what is your defensibility? How are you different from their model? What prevents them from doing what you do?
How do you not become obsolete as an individual……….?
This type of question stressed me out, but it’s such a classic question throughout all of history. Video killed the radio star, right? No. So, probably it’ll be fine. But it’s worth trying so hard to help. That’s my opinion.
It’s good to have teammates who aren’t as mature because they’re often more honest with you.
OVERALL that event was really nice and I even enjoyed networking a tiny bit after. I met someone who knew of someone with similar goals as me, so its an option to follow through on.
Second Event:
Right now, hiring managers feel they’re not finding the peopel that they need. Tend to be more senior level and staff level… some entry level, but it feels like a proportion of senior staff is more. When peopel look for more experience, or senior staff you almost need to be a domain expert in the area that the team is working on.
For example, if you apply for database companies, then ideally, you have many years of experience working in database modules.
Expertise is important.
It is difficult to find people who have deep expertise, business expertise. Because there are fewer of them.
This is a good point. And so much of “expertise” is branding and explaining yourself accurately (which takes practice). It’s so true
They are well-established in existing companies. So hiring them out can be difficult to convince them to come.
They are looking for post-technical skills and domain expertise.
An ideal resume looks like… if you can choose your career path, it’s great if you have worked on similar domains or scopes for multiple iterations, multiple products, similar tech and business domain. Maybe advertising, searches… we want to help you stand out when you have a team match.
Maybe they’re looking to hire someone who has advertising expertise. Then theywant to hire someone who has worked on advertising before.
10 years of experience in advertising may be better than someone who switches around.
If you work on androids, ads, or if you’re too general, it can be harder for you to actually become an expert.
Hiring managers prefer candidates that have more consistency. Working on one thing for a long time and the experience is a better match than just a general person.
Leadership is probably different. Who am I? What tech do I work in and what am I an expert in?
Depth of knowledge and skills is important.Using AI to screen resumes… each job has 1,000 resumes, recruiters can not screen.
If you are interested in a job, look at the posting. What is the core skill they’re looking for? Make sure it stands out in your resume.
Your last job, make sure it’s there consistently. Know what they are looking for and if it’s a match, make sure your resume is crafted that way too.
SO when the AI is scoring, its more favorable to you (smart)
BTW this event is like 100% international and I get hte feeling it’s totally not for “me” for some reason. Like everyone looked confused why I was here when I arrived… and/or also cause I arrived 30 minutes late by mistake. But I don’t feel like I’ve ever received a reaction like this upon arriving to an event. It makes me think this is a club who posted an event and didn’t expect random peopel to show up (and definitely not ‘late’). And/or I’m just overthinking it.
They want to find people who are doing things differently, out of the box.
The companies want to fill the job, find people to help the company grow, lead, and do more.
The capacity to branch out into a bigger role.
You will be tested for your communication, technical skills, collaboration skills… you’ll be tested on how you think.
Your thinking process is critical.
There are technical skills that people have never encountered, but how you think about solving it is an important part of the evaluation.
How do you get through the initial screening? Get to the interview process? Pass the process, and show that you can come help build/grow this team, make it better, and do more for hte customers.
At the end of the day they want peopel who can contribute to the company’s bottom line.
Helping students and talking to hiring managers.
How do you work with teams? Resolve conflict? These things become more important when they evaluate you.
But the overall process is roughly the same. But usually peopel refer external hires
These days using AI tools to cheat is super common. So, how should candidates reskill as candidates?
Take small steps, right?
In the AI world, there are different philosophies about the different models.
Take small steps, read, and try to learn one thing at a time each day.
Slowly try to keep up. Not one person can just read one thing and learn it all. So just stay at it. Learn one thing a day, one thing a week… over time, even when you interview and talk to managers about your project, you will have ideas that others won’t because you’re staying up to date.
You can do conversations, time management… being open to reading news each day, taking little steps, and staying vigilant. Its key.
And how to upskill yourself? The fundamental
Upskill yourself so you can work well with your team. Not just limited to the level you’re hired at, but what is the next level? How can you make bigger contributions?
Can you use AI to improve your own productivity? Or to develop your customers? Machine learning from AI tech.
There are lots of productivity tools your company may be using or you may be using.
Build products and features that help your customers.
What types? Learn the tech as it comes up… there are two types to leverage your AI features.
Use other peoples model (open AI or others) and don’t have your own model and use the libraries to invoke their computations during this. Self explanatory. Image generation, advertising, generate images, etc…
Or if you have your own model, that takes more certifications and such from big cloud providers - to help you learn how to fully build a machine learning pipeline, process it, serve it from teh run time to help the customers. Require more formal study and structured study
Some tools can help us to improve efficiency and save our work.
Are there some tricks for using AI?
Before this event, talked to the organizer. People may be interested to upskill their AI- how much they can use AI… can you provide how people use these tools or get more educated with AI?
-He just made this website yesterday - essentially there are two types other than things if you want to upscale.
his website looks amazing. geezeeeeee. hahahahaa. geeze. it’s hard to be good at so much and it makes me like, okay. i’m spreading myself so thin on so many ideas - but i like them all and believe in so many of them!!! So, in the long run it’ll work. Some of it must and then i keep building up the others.
AI for productivity, improve your productivity.
Also using AI to build products and features so that your customers can benefit from the AI solution that you built.
SO for productivity there are links
EVERY DAY ARE NEW TOOLS
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. This industry is so overwhelming but impotant.
On the top level there is AI for productivity and for development.
There are coding tools, general productivity, information, better documents, generating videos.
He generated the links using AI too so it’s straightforward.
For software engineers, coding tools help you write code with AI. And if you don’t know how to do those, you can use others.
SO much content helps you highlight one or two per page. Then you guys can do more research in the future.
AI productivity, so much is self-explanatory. You can just plug it in and use it. Just what can be tough is trying to build your own model. Those times you need professional training. But a lot of the time these are just tools you can use. Easy to use.
Use other peoples models instead of your own.
There is lots of vibe coding available.
Someone asked in the audience if there is a place on the website to make comments and give feedback on the website. This is a good/intimidating/valuable idea. I updated one of my platforms just today as a response to similar advice. I want to ask customers what they want and how I can achieve that.
Interviewers don’t just care about the courses that you’ve completed, they want to know about projects you’ve been a part of.
They want to test the depth of your knowledge. If you’re interested, take courses and graduate.
Try to get into projects in your team or company that work on sometohing that uses machine learning or AI features. That will get you opening doors.
The second level of machine learning and engineering friends, they said if you are an external hire, it’s very difficult to get by with just certificates or completions of a course.
If you have no work experience using AI… you have no chance to become a machine learning engineer while you do an external interview. If you’ve not worked on it, taken the course… they say it’s very difficult. They need to see what you’ve already done. There are so manycandidates right now. It’s easy to find people who have already done hte work.
Certificates are not sufficient to get you a job in a new company, but maybe in your existing company.
If you show your manager you have seriously taken time to study the courses and get hte certificates, you have a higher chance in your team/company to get to opportunities to work on these machine learning projects.
Study and look for external opportunities.
You should never let yourself get content. Learn a bit every day. Don’t just do your job, but stay connected to whats happening. Read the news every day. Learn a skill every day.
And go back to what AI can not replace? Collaboration. Leadership. Finding a different way of doing things. Continuing to improve, bring teams together, and solve issues.
But with big tech, the softer skills are more important mid-career.
These speeches are stressing me out. Just intimidating, even though everything they’re saying makes it sound like simple baby steps. Probably thats why hahah. They make it sound too easy. But it’s all hard and intimidating and tough. Thousands of peopel applying for one job. Trying so hard to get your startup or idea to sell. It’s so hard. Or, what? Copy others and try to do it better. That works too, and I’m even kinda working on that a bit. But it’s just all so competitive. But it’s what I want to be doing. Just intimidating and intense.
probably also the fact I quit smoking weed last month (and this is one of the first AI events I’ve attended since. It is realyl changing my mindset and making reality feel different.)
The more peopel count on your for non-technical skills (VPs don’t write code but have a huge impact). People look for leadership, product impact (do you deliver projects that gain a lot of revenue or users)… so you’ve got to understand your customers, understand the market, and understand the competition.
Who go promoted in your team? Among all the uncertainty.
It’s the peopel who deliver projects that make an impact.
Multi-person, muliteam projects. That demands a lot of interpersonal skills, resolving conflict, working with other teams, design.
Product and people skills are the things you can put more emphasis on.
You can climb up from being interested to spending time getting a certificate to working on the project.
The peopel skills are really important. And product, delivering impactful products.
How about the human results of workforce.
Even today, the HR can not immune to AI replacement transferring. So, what can we anticipate? What part of Human Resources will be transformed by AI?
So how will the function of HR change?
In general repetitive ones that dont’ need a lot of thinking. Processing data. Processing information. Junior level analysis.
That’s where AI will replace us and do much better.
Every function is different. Even payroll calculations aren’t there, but hopefully it’ll be relieved by AI. The manual calculation will be replaced with algorithms. The repetitive entry level where you don’t need a lot of experience with customers. Ones where you don’t need a lot of skills will be first to go.
Do managers need to even exist? Maybe it can all be replaced with AI. Managers can now manage more people than before. But now we can see how much code people submitted, design documents automated.
Collecting facts is going to be easily automated.
Making judgements is not replaceable. Managers can know how the team works, they will make judgements. But it feels like there is a trend that managers can mange me more people now.
Leadership, teamwork, and solving complex problems. Fundamentally this is so important and people get promoted when they deliver solid products that make big impact.
Maybe some companies still need you to use chatbots for a few hours. Ai is here to help you, not a punch card to use each day. You can use it to help you, not just use it to use it.
In the future will there be more full-time jobs? Or do you think now everyone is the boss and you find customers? How do we shape the future?
Will people have more jobs opening? With AI? OR… are people, because of AI, can tehy just do their own things, not need to be employees? What trend do you see?
Adoption of AI engineer learning. Big companies versus small. Fulltime versus contractors, etc.
My sense is… there will be fewer… well, we are seeing big tech companies, the infrastructure companies probably will not grow as much as their stock prices. Their stocks keep increasing but they have so many layoffs and they’re not hiring as much.
There is huge leverage once these companies have mastered the data centers and GPU. Also the small team of talent. In the future these companies will not grow a lot.
The infrastructure will be aiallbe at a reasonable cost. The teams in these companies will stay at this size but not have huge growth.
Because these infrastructures will not be available in tech or traditional companies, insurance, manufacturing… there will be a lot of opportunities in other areas like cloud infrastucutre to build applicaiotns that use machine learning. Those opportunities will be a lot more than today. Even more than what traditional industries can benefit on.
Many existing applications are form based, workflow… need to be rewritten using a more human, friendly approach, with natural language, etc.
Lots of project based work.OMG TIMES ARE CHANGING hahaha. This is just, for real, not our parents/grandparents work landscape!! Not in this industry.. an industry which is currently being pushed by leadership and sewn into all aspects of reality. Times are wild these days.
Part-time project based employees has really increased this past year.
They’re trying to improve the costs and learn with AI.
Going to be for a while until we get to the destination. As technology continues to evolve.
Audience question: AI destination. Is there an immediate target destination that everyone is sharing now? What are our means to an end that we’re trying to get to in this current phase? If there is a discussion on this?
Good question
Automate everything. Replace everything that AI can replace and replace it yesterday
THat’s why teams are looking at all of their processes and seeing where things can be processed by AI.
Profitability is the goal.
Freeing up human resources to do more customer-facing, other things.
How do we do more with what we have? We can’t hire fast enough.
- Use AI when and where we can. We won’t get to that point that fast, so that’s why there is a lot of room for improvement.
The next few years will be the pursuit of efficiency, productivity, and doing more with less.
What about current college students? What shoudl they be focusing on (a girl in the audience asks more specifics but its hard to hear and idk what she said… but still, when I was in school it didnt’ feel like things were like this. Or I was just tuned out.)
Negotiate with companies, tell them you have projects and solutions. So what is the price?
- AI is coming, so in the future you just talk to the customer, figure out what they need, and then figure out what they need… then AI will do all of the code for you. Fully scalable.
-You don’t need to be computer science major. You just need to talk to the customer and undress and the true human workflow and the human need.
Then you don’t even need the code, but you need some type of communication skill and summary sill to collect this vague data. And then gradually consolidate into the workflow for customers.
AI can take the rest for you.
This is so much trust in AI!!!!!
This machine thing is learning everything about humanity. From humanity.
An audience girl asks if there are still courses important to learn
Lol omg, if he says “no” it’s like, what? There’s nothing left to learn for some
He says: fewer people need to learn this. If tomorrow no one knows how to write code, AI will be doomed. We need to tell the AI how to write itself, how to know this internal stuff on how the system works. How do you even know it’s generating hte right code?
SO there will be a core group of people still building and knowing these skills. Understnad the data structure. But probably fewer to do that.
Highly paid and still important.
Some students are really interested in coding competitions and championships. Smart, love algos… those kids will be hired by the top companies to build the core infrastrucfture. But other kids just want to solve problems and dont care about algorithms.
For them, if they want to understand the business and the customers, they shoudl talk more
Audience question: so mental health, your job is to not have clients. You want everyone to be well.
In this situation, recruiting people. Do you want direct reports?
Are there are roles and titles people look for on paper.
But this is something that has never existed before. Where does AI have a role if it hasn’t existed yet? If you can’t build a relationship with your client, you don’t know what they want. So AI is trying to figure out how to fill the hole.
The job of a computer instead of human being.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
How do you make a job opening for a role that doesnt’ exist today.
Eventually AI will write itself and then let humans walk around and do whatever they want right? Just push the broom at the end of the show?
The business area probably already exists. Maybe mental health or marketing. Tehy will value the business knowledge, prior work experience, maybe new tech to solve old problems. If you solved the old problem in the old way, it’ll help you solve the new problem in the new way.
At some point hte robots will be more efficient, will tehy solve problems that lead to growth and productivity? Do we want to keep solving with existing knowledge?
Makes me think this is a bit of a setup for failure? Maybe not. Probably not. But some of it seems kinda like, hmmmm… if AI can only use old facts to solve new problems? Though I’m not sure if that’s even true. It’s just a lot to think about.
There’s a hybrid of taking in existing knowledge.
But at what point to error lead to evolution?
How does this function?
A fish can’t ride a bicycle, even the best fish
Going forward where AI takes care of all the coding - humans will keep evolving and changing.
This is a good point, though. AI kinda pauses things.
- Bacteria and viruses evolve as well.
So rather than technical experts in computer science.
If you bag your own groceries, the tech is a higher paying job. Fixing the machines that people use to ring up themselves.
True… that’s uplifting.
Then he says the other answer, roles that don’t exist yet. Well, friends work in machine learning, managing hundreds of peopel… you learn it on the fly.
Start with small problems and understand.
But if there are solutions that haven’t existed, there are problems that haven’t existed yet.
So what is system thinking? The forest, not just the tree.
So how do you, or big tech, speak from both ends of their mouth? Be good at what you do but know more of the whole systems.
Go learn upstream and downstream.
Learn what they do.
We have really good engineers. Write codes, ship them to the next person, do their own design, then add on… but usually at the end, thats how things break
They don’t look up and down and see how their code fits in with others
We promote and reward people who not only write their thing but also understand how it fits with the flow.
Understand how others think about it.
When you represent your work, refer to how it was made.
Be curious about evertything happened and the bigger picture.
Learn adjacent areas. Nothing too big, because it may soon be obsolete by next year
-ahhhh hahahaha omg. makes you feel like “why try!!?” hahah. but. no. just makes you really think through what you invest in with your time and money. And “why”?
If you only do waht your manager tells you to do, you will never get to the next level or big picture. YOU need to manager you own career.
Managers are busy with many people. They have less time for individual team memers or individual engineers.
Who do tehy spend time on? High performer superstars, and low performers (manage them out)
They spend a lot of time on the high performers. And the middle people are most of us. And the managers are okay as long as they have deliverables.
The middle people need to manage their own careers. So, you need to find your own opportunties.
Middle people? You need to manage your own career. Dont’ expect your manager to hand you the next project for the bigger scope.
There are times the projects are not well defined yet.
Try to do earlier stage work to discover and talk to other teams, product managers. What are you planning next? What is the biggest problem your team is trying to solve?
When you’re trying to end your project, tell your managers that you’re looking to work with more people, other teams.. more people in your team.
Volunteer for larger scope and that give you the chance to look at the big picture. Work with other teams and coordinate with them.
If you are not a superstar, manage your own career and look for opportunities.
FINAL COMMENT FROM KELLY:
Attending events like this is just extremely fun and valuable. Of course its insanely intimidating, but its extremely worth it. I love to learn, be inspired, tuned in, and more guided on my purpose/mission. I want to help empower kids, families, and humanity. Also the animals on earth. You know? I want to see everyone feel less stress, more happiness… see systems work better. I want to see the world heal more and more each day.
I believe that attending events like this and learning constantly from others’ experience and advice is sure to be helpful. Then taking action on it. One of my favorite mentors used to always say, “each day take at least one step towards each of your goals.”
Until next time, I wish you the motivation and success to search for opportunities around your area. Search and explore: Who is out there giving talks? There are new things happening all of the time.
Find relatable or interesting topics you like and check them out! Maybe even something hosted at a cool venue, if there’s no other reason to go. Let’s see what you can learn and discover not too far from home. 😊
