Transformation of the Week
Cesar Gonzalez

Transcript

Lusk: Hey, Cesar, congrats on winning the Transformation of The Week. Tell me a little bit more about your background.

Cesar: Hi Chris. I’ve been serving on the board of two companies. Talis, which is, a contractor for railway projects, mostly in Spain. And tComet, which is a provider of temporary communication systems for tunneling projects, around the world. And I also I’m, trustee of a local foundation. And I was trained as a physicist a long time ago so I got involved very early in the family business and that’s where I’ve been working for the last 30 plus years.

Lusk: That’s an interesting background. Tell me, what got you interested specifically in Gen AI?

Cesar: Well, I was transitioning out of my role as a solo administrator of my company a few years ago, and I wanted to sharpen my software development skills, which I’ve never been a coder, but I did some coding when I was in the university. It’s something that I liked back in the day. Our company also does some software development as well.

So I started taking, courses about programing all when of the sudden this generative AI took us by surprise, it was something that I immediately felt really interested in. So that’s basically the reason why I started.

Lusk: So you graduated from our very first AI Engineering Bootcamp, about ten months ago, and then you also took our large language model engineering class just a couple of months ago. Have you been able to put anything that you learned into practice, whether it’s personal projects or at work?

Cesar: Yeah, definitely. As a matter of fact, my final project from the AI Engineering Bootcamp was, a proof of concept for research and development that we are currently developing in my company. Our vision is to reduce the cognitive overload of railway workers, working in the field as they have to go through hundreds of documentation, which is designed for compliance. So it’s not user friendly documentation.

We’re build a RAG system with a chatbot interface so that they can have easy access to the documentation, the occupational health and safety documentation, for the project.

Lusk: So tell me about some Gen AI challenges that you’re working through that you’re trying to overcome right now.

Cesar: Well, this RAG application that we’re developing, we have done it the hard way. So we’re self-hosting, that’s actually quite challenging. It’s a little bit laughable because I attended one of your webinars, where you showed a picture of pros and cons between self-hosting a RAG application. it is really challenging to take this route but we as a research and development project, we wanted to learn as much as possible of this technology.

Lusk: So what words of wisdom do you have for people that are watching, who are considering jumping into Gen AI?

Cesar: Well, I don’t have, words of wisdom off of my own so I’ll just emphasize and pass on your words of wisdom, which is to build, ship, and share. The self-confidence that you gain, from solving small problems, ou actually see progress in building up your skills. This is something that I struggle a lot with because I tend to focus on learning and reading.

Lusk: Cesar, congrats again on winning the Transformation of The Week, thanks for joining me today. Where can people connect with you?

Cesar: In LinkedIn I think that’s the best way.