Transcript
Lusk: Hey, Tshwanelo. Thanks for being here. Congratulations on being the transformation of the week. Tell us a little bit more about your background.
Tshwanelo: I’ve got about eight years in strategy consulting. Started off at Deloitte Consulting and ran a couple other projects for other companies internally, and in my own capacity. Mainly serving financial services and telco clients. So these are your banks, insurers and multinational telcos, and before that I studied mechanical engineering.
I’m not all the way a technical person, but, I’ve been in and around, technologies and advising clients, in any case, on digital transformation for over a decade now. Spent about 2 to 3 years at a health tech startup, where we essentially had a platform where previously disadvantaged patients could get access to private health care, and we served about 3000 patients. And that was really awesome.
Currently working at one of the biggest banks in Africa, in Johannesburg, South Africa. Driving I use cases for the corporate investment banking.
Lusk: So what first got you interested in gen AI?
Tshwanelo: You sort of reach a point where you will potentially get frustrated at the pace of how quickly you can churn out and ship features. And as a non-technical founder, you’re like, the best thing that you can do is to, be really good at leading developers to do the work. At the end of the day, you’re almost leading by cheerleading other folks who have the power to actually build.
And I reached the point where I’d had enough of that, and then generative AI sort of popped up as a useful way to get closer to the ability to actually build for myself. As soon as I experimented with ChatGPT and used it to generate some code, I thought, okay, this is potentially a way for me to sort of course correct my trajectory and become more technical and be able to build. I wanted to go even deeper. Because the nature of my work is that I need to speak to stakeholders, what I need to give them the confidence that AI is not a toy. It can be used in real business contexts for processes that actually matter.
I wanted to understand one. Is this real? Can it be applied in a real context? But to, I wanted to go deeper into the subject matter so that I could convey confidence to whoever I speak to. I now have a good sense for, you know, what’s actually good? What approach should we take? Or even, you know, here’s something these guys have left out. And we should maybe try a different option. So I think that’s a big value that I’m able to give to the bank on the back of, course with AI Makerspace.
Lusk: You graduated from the AI Engineering Bootcamp about a month ago; have you been able to put any of your learnings into practice at your job or on personal projects?
Tshwanelo: So it was actually towards the end of the course, not quite after I graduated, but I definitely gained enough knowledge to be confident in what I’m talking about. I was approached by a senior person at work to talk about AI, and then I asked them, you know, who’s the who’s the audience for this? And then they said, it’s the whole of the corporate investment bank. And I think before the course, I did take that opportunity and grab it with both hands as I was able to after this course.
You know, as soon as that senior person asked me, you know, do you want to say a little bit about AI? I knew exactly what topics to cover. And then I took the audience through an example, which was actually one of the worked examples in the course where we used, agents to do synthetic data generation. Th AI Makerspace course, sort of in a really brutal way, forces you to code because you’re submitting two assignments per week. So now I’m able to code and I use GitHub copilot. But I’m a lot more knowledgeable on what I’m actually doing.
Lusk: What words of wisdom do you have for people who might be sitting on the fence of whether or not to upskill in Gen AI?
Tshwanelo: This really is the kind of technology where the more you leverage it, the better you are. The competitive dynamics of the job market are going to flip. Jobs where there’s probably going to be a bias towards employing people who can work with generative AI technologies. If you don’t do it, it’s almost like moving through the world without using the internet.
Lusk: Tshwanelo, thank you so much for your time, and congrats again on winning the Transformation Of The Week.
Tshwanelo: Thanks to everyone for putting this course together. It’s been fantastic.