Transformation of the Week
Allan Tan

Transcript

Lusk: Hey, Allan, congrats on winning the Transformation of The Week. Let’s start by you giving us a little bit more about your background and what you’re doing today.

Allan: Thank you Chris, excited to be here. Well, my background is in the software industry. I’ve been doing programing for more than 20 years now. We’re doing a lot of software development, primarily on the enterprise and the mobile app development. And now I started my own startup called Predictive Systems, Inc. where we’re building AI based solutions to different enterprises and companies in this part of the world.

Lusk: Way to rep that brand Allan that’s awesome. Tell me a little bit more about where you’re at now, and what got you into AI in the first place?

Allan: Yeah, I’m based here in Manila, Philippines, all the way in Asia. I’ve really been passionate about AI, generally but, you know, with the new technology of Gen AI it will change a lot of the different industries, and the way different industries work. So I want to be at the forefront applying all these new technologies across different industries.

Lusk: Now, you graduated from our AI Engineering Bootcamp, cohort number two, about ten months ago. Have you been able to put anything that you’ve learned into practice at work or on personal projects?

Allan: Well yeah, definitely a lot. We were able to build our own AI-based legal case management system which we are showcasing here in the country. So we’re trying to close a couple of big accounts on that one. More importantly, I think the training gave me the confidence that I have the latest state-of-the-art knowledge to apply Gen AI. And at the same time, I’ve been doing a lot of talks and sharing a lot of this knowledge to the academe, to the industry about large language models. It’s been quite a very fulfilling, you know, ten months after I the training.

Lusk: So what’s a big Gen AI challenge that you’re currently working on?

Allan: Well, yeah it’s an interesting question because, as you know, a lot of the Gen AI applications we’re seeing now are all dependent on the cloud. But there’s a new breed of technology coming in with SLM, right. Small language models where you’ll be able to run your models on prem, which are very attractive to industries that are highly regulated, where they have private and confidential information.

Maybe they have top secret documents, and yet they will be able to leverage the advantage of gen AI while, you know everything is running private within their network or within their control environment. So that’s the key differentiator that our company’s building on.

Lusk: So what words of wisdom do you have for people that are considering a move into Gen AI?

Allan: So one thing I have learned after taking the AI Makerspace [course], and everything I’ve explored for the last ten months is (because my background is in programing) is that programing AI is very different from traditional way of programing. You know, when we write software programs before everything is deterministic. You know, you write to an SQL, you retrieve the data, you expect the same data. But with Gen AI you send the prompt, you don’t know what comes back. So it’s a totally different shift in mindset when you call Gen AI. It’s more of this discipline of establishing metrics so that you’ll be able to measure the performance of your system, exploring different ways to improve the measurement.

Right? So that you can reach 90%, 95% accuracy, which doesn’t exist in traditional programing because, in traditional programing, it’s always like 100% it works when I retrieve the data it will always return me the same data. But with Gen AI it’s totally different. So that’s that shift of mindset is, I think is important. That’s why, you know, when you’re building systems, you need to look for people who understands this and who can build the right data sets, the right model that would satisfy, you know, the strict enterprise needs/

Lusk: Allan congrats again on winning the Transformation of The Week, thank you so much for joining me today. How can people get ahold of you?

Allan: Well they can connect to me in LinkedIn or, if they’re interested, I have a YouTube channel where I try to “laymanize” LLMs and transformer. I am artificial intelligent. If they’re looking for companies or software providers who do understand how to make use of Gen AI, and put this really into production, that actually works, they can check out my company Predictive Systems. And our theme is, “your data, your AI, your way.” Because we install solutions that are on premise. Remember here, Predictive Systems, Inc.