Transcript: Five Questions With Sean Wood - Human Pilots AI
About Sean Wood:
Sean Wood is the Founder and CEO of Human Pilots AI, a management consulting practice dedicated empowering leaders to achieve their business outcomes with Generative AI. He leads the company with expertise in AI business transformation strategy.
About Human Pilots AI:
Human Pilots AI helps organizations effectively integrate AI to enhance operations and growth by aligning strategy, processes, and culture. They offer AI strategy development, AI readiness assessments, AI training, and advisory services to guide mid-sized businesses in scaling AI initiatives for measurable outcomes. Learn more at humanpilots.ai
Full Transcription:
Jeffrey McConnell (00:02)
Sean, welcome to Five Questions with
Sean (00:05)
Hi, Jeff. Thank you for having me. My name is Sean Wood. I'm the founder and chief executive officer of Human Pilots AI. I lead AI business transformation strategy for my clients. I work with executive leaders and their teams to successfully drive results through the adoption of AI into their organization.
Jeffrey McConnell (00:22)
Great AI, lots of fun in the past You know, a month ago, it was just this dull, boring, rapidly growing, sucking all available venture capital known to man. And then boom, this thing no one had heard of DeepSeek came around and in a matter of a couple of days, it sucked $2 trillion in market cap out of all of the AI companies. It's settled down since then.
Sean (00:27)
Yes it is.
Jeffrey McConnell (00:52)
What do you see as that last month has occurred? Has that frozen people? Has that pushed people? Probably a mix. What's your observation? What do you think about that?
Sean (00:57)
It's been quite a wild ride. That was a big wake up call to the race to get bigger and faster that we're seeing in the U.S. So the good part about DeepSeek is that it lifts up the industry and the attention. It changes the conversation a bit about how can we drive the cost down? How can we get it easy to run local reasoning frontier model? They were able to do what others they were able to do so inexpensively what others have spent millions of billions on.
But we find a few lessons in it. It's not about the headcount of growing bigger, bigger. It's more about removing those barriers to brilliance by having a few smart people do things a little differently. And so that's a good lesson for business leaders right now that are looking at this saying, what does all this mean? You you can do significantly more with less people when you remove a lot of the overhead and
Well, the DeepSeek conversation has been really interesting, both in the industry at large and with the clients that I'm working with. So it elevates the conversation around how do we get bigger and faster?
to there's some security concerns and where's our data going? And so the privacy and the governance is coming to the forefront of where is the stuff going? It changes the conversation from black box to open source. But really what they did was brilliant where they were able to capture significant share with less people with less power. And so the cost went really far down.
And they were able to show that when you have a small team that can move quickly without all the overhead of bureaucracy, you can achieve a amount of results.
Jeffrey McConnell (02:38)
You mentioned, you know, the data and where it is in the first week or so after the announcement, a lot of people were very concerned about the fact that like a few other things, TikTok and others, this is in China, the server's in China, your data resides in China. Well, we don't trust the Chinese.
It seems to have died down and it seems to be there are ways that you can easily protect things, but are you still seeing that as a problem or a concern with particularly with some more sensitive companies here in the US?
Sean (03:15)
Right, well, if you're in a sensitive company, you don't want to put this on your network. We did see the largest adoption since ChatGPT, which had been the previous record holder. So a lot of people are downloading this onto their personal and their work
This raises the question of, your company have a solid AI policy? Are you carefully tracking it? But not only are you looking over your employee's shoulder, but are you teaching them and training them?
What's appropriate and what's not and helping guide them to make smart decisions on behalf of the company, helping to lift their critical thinking abilities that they're not doing anything that wouldn't be damaging to the company. But it's really that governance piece that's going to drive the adoption and the innovation. And the winners will be the organizations that master both the governance and the innovation. So there's a balancing act, but I'm glad that the conversation's been lifted so that people are paying more attention to what's happening.
Jeffrey McConnell (04:10)
So as you look at DeepSeek, and there've been a couple of other things announced that are in terms of architecture of the solution, A, being built really quickly, looking like they're pretty competent in their capabilities and very cheap.
Where do these new things excel? Where would you think about using them? And where would you not use them in terms of their capabilities? Where do they lag?
Sean (04:38)
Well, we've seen from the testing that some of the data that's been trained into DeepSeek has been limited due to political concerns and what they want to be shared. Where it excels is any sort of math or analytical problem. It is really good at that. And it's been able to show for any company that has the risk profile that can bring that into a safe sandbox locally that it does work really well in that case. For creative, I would go with one of the other models like a Claude or GPT or one of the other big ones.
Jeffrey McConnell (05:09)
And then, and then finally, I mean, your day job is talking to company. So, you know, if your company comes and says, wow, lots has occurred. Should I slow down? Should I wait? Should I speed up? What do I do? How do I interpret everything that's going on and then go back to my boss and say, because of this, we should this. What is that now?
Sean (05:29)
Yeah, so this seems overwhelming for most people that they're busy in their day job, they're trying to keep the business running, This is a distraction that is really confusing and each wave of news cycle that comes out on AI, it just continues to paralyze many, folks. There is great opportunity, but for those that haven't started or haven't accelerated,
I would stick with hands down the fundamentals of working on data and people. So how's your data quality and governance? And how are your people in their capabilities and training? Have you set out good guidelines that they can start to accelerate and experiment internally?
Jeffrey McConnell (06:11)
So you look at a lot of companies and talk to a lot of companies. How do you make sure that this doesn't paralyze them in an action because there's so much happening so quickly? Is the advice wait and see or is the advice you better get moving?
Sean (06:24)
The wait-and -see approach is the riskiest maneuver you can do. Competitors are quickly moving forward and waiting and seeing is pretty dangerous. But the way to push forward is to start small with the pilots, to get your governance set the data level.
and then work on the people in your human capital with helping them train up on how to use the tools appropriately, how to find use cases that will drive value, and then use those learnings so they can fail forward in small little incremental pieces to move things forward.
Jeffrey McConnell (06:55)
One final thing I had, I saw a quote that said, you know, your job.
AI is not going to take your job, but somebody who knows AI will. And I think a corollary to that is, you know, if you don't have AI, you're going to lose out to the company that is. And so really with all of the developments, everything getting cheaper, if you were thinking about doing it before, everything has shifted to a point where you really should start pursuing it now. So anyway, thank you very much, Sean.
Sean (07:25)
Absolutely.
Jeffrey McConnell (07:27)
Great to have you and on our five minute conversations.
Sean (07:32)
All right, thanks, Jeff.