Transformation of the Week
Xico Casillas

Transcript

Lusk: Hey Xico, thanks for joining me today. Congrats on winning the Transformation of The Week. Tell me a little bit more about your background and what you’re doing today.

Xico: I got a master’s in linguistics. I went back, I’ve always had a passion for language, and I knew I wanted to work in conversation design, or conversational AI. So, I wanted to like, you know, improve my toolset, get some familiarity with, you know, what linguistics is, how conversational design works. Ended up working at a conversational AI startup. Then worked as a conversation designer at a UK company.

And then now I’m the Conversational AI Solutions Engineer for Conversation Design Institute, where I work with various clients on implementing and improving, chat bots and building internal rag based applications.

Lusk: That’s a really interesting background. What got you interested in Gen AI, specifically?

Xico: Yeah so, working in conversation design, for a long time was very deterministic, NLU, decision tree type, chat box, right. Where if a user wanted to cancel, right, their subscription, you would go down like a pre-written flow. And obviously with, you know, the proliferation of gen AI, these experiences were being transformed in a way that were more responsive to user inputs, better, capable to handle natural conversation between users.

I noticed that there was really only a few methods that conversation designers have to improve or augment a gen AI chat bot. And that would be through prompting, through content management, or through like model selection. And I really wanted to understand deeper into that, like how can we improve conversational experiences with Gen AI beyond just swapping out a model, updating a prompt or, you know, shifting around your content structure.

Lusk: So you graduated from cohort four of The AI Engineering Bootcamp about three months ago, have you been able to put anything that you’ve learned into practice?

Xico: Professionally at CDI, we’ve built a RAG-based chat application that we’re going to be using, or hopefully using in a potential client pitch, using a lot of the technology and architecture strategies that I learned directly through the course.

Personally, I built a at home RAG solution that takes in all of the user manuals for all of the appliances, technology, and vehicles within my home. And now my partner and I, we can ask any troubleshooting questions that we have about any of our technology. We can ask, you know, warranty information. We can ask for, you know, where can we find replacement parts. It’s almost an at-home Alexa.

Lusk: So that personal app that you’re building sounds really interesting. What big challenge are you currently facing with its development?

Xico: It’s not necessarily like a challenge per se, it’s more just an expansion of its capabilities. Right now, I’ve supplemented the rag with a web based tool. So now the next step is to integrate some agency into it. For example, if I wanted to, you know, ask the warranty on a particular appliance, I can tell this application what the problem is, and then hopefully it’ll be able to send an email on my behalf to the supplier asking for a replacement part or something like that.

Lusk: So you have this nontraditional background for an AI engineer, yet you’re out there building, shipping, and sharing like a legend. What words of wisdom do you have for people that are watching this?

Xico: Yeah, so for those that maybe have a nontraditional background like myself, you know, maybe you’re not as technical, right, or Gen AI seems a lot more advanced than your current capabilities. When it comes to building, specifically, you’re going to run into errors. Things are not going to work the first time. It’s important to not stay, don’t get defeated, right, by seeing these errors, seeing things not working. But also understanding what those types of errors are, right. Like what a runtime error versus a value error versus type error. Knowing how things are broken can really help you, one, build up your knowledge and then also build up your determination so you’re not discouraged by anything not working.

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

Xico: Directly on LinkedIn. There I’ll be reposting things I find interesting, sharing any any updates to anything I’m building.