AI Proficiency: From Users to Builders

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Welcome to the Practical AI Podcast, where we break down the real world applications of artificial intelligence and how it's shaping the way we live, work and create. Our goal is to help make AI technology practical, productive and accessible to everyone. Whether you're a developer, business leader, or just curious about the tech behind the buzz, you're in the right place.
Be sure to connect with us on LinkedIn, X or Bluesky to stay up to date with episode drops, behind the scenes content and AI insights. You can learn more at practicalai.fm. Now, on to the show.

**Daniel Whitenack** (0:41)
Welcome to another episode of the Practical AI Podcast. This is Daniel Whitenack. I am CEO at Prediction Guard, and I'm joined as always by my co-host, Chris Benson, who is a principal AI and autonomy research engineer. How are you doing, Chris?

**Chris Benson** (0:56)
I'm doing good today. How's it going?

**Daniel Whitenack** (0:58)
It's going great. I'm continually impressed by just the amazing AI work that's happening around, not only on the coast, but in the heartland, the middle of the country where a lot of actually the large enterprises of our country are located. We have a guest related to that today, but I do want to remind folks, we're also involved in a sponsor of the Midwest AI Summit, which is coming up October 15th in Indianapolis. Really cool event, Chris. You were there, you saw what was going on. There's tables where you can sit down with actual AI practitioners and rather than just hear a bunch of talks, you can actually get feedback on what you're doing, suggestions, design, et cetera, and hear great talks. So recommend people check it out, Midwest AI Summit. You can use the code practicalai20 for 20% off. But we have an amazing AI practitioner from close by my area, more towards Cincinnati.
Mike Lewis was on a previous episode with us. You got a ton of great feedback on that episode. He's chief AI architect at TiER1 Performance. Welcome, Mike.

**Mike Lewis** (2:19)
Thank you, Daniel. It's great to be here again.

**Daniel Whitenack** (2:20)
Yeah. Like I say, we got, I have multiple people comment on just the utility and insights that they got out of our previous discussion. And just for context, because I think it's so impressive what you're doing and what you're involved with. Could you just set a little bit of context for kind of the types of projects that you work on, like give an example of kind of some of the types of companies that you work with in relation to AI initiatives?

**Mike Lewis** (2:50)
Yeah, sure. So TiER1 Performance is an end-to-end organizational performance and transformation partner. What does that mean?
We kind of help some of the most of the largest organizations in the world rethink transformation.
I would add in though that we have a non-traditional approach. And so in a multi-decade track record of success there. So the types of clients we'd work with day-to-day would be like Google, Eli Lilly, Takeda, Air Force. I mean, just most of the Fortune 100s. And we see everything related to transformation. So obviously, AI would just represent a sliver of the types of challenges we encounter as an organization day-to-day. But actually, that sliver is my whole life, you know? So I don't really see all the other stuff. I kind of get a glimpse into it every now and because more and more AI touches everything. But we are sort of a transformation partner. And so you can just imagine how the phone starts ringing when, you know, a massive disruptive technology is birthed into our lives, whether we want it or not, right?

**Daniel Whitenack** (4:09)
Yeah. And a part of that, I think people are struggling with on the transformation side is there's just so many sources of information. There's so much noise around like what you should be paying attention to, what people are actually doing, what people are saying they're doing, what is hitting the news. Like there's all sorts of a range of things. And obviously a lot of that can be noise. And one of the things I've appreciated in interacting with you over time is that ability to kind of pick out some of that signal from the noise and develop some kind of structural ways of thinking about AI and transformation in an actual real world organizational environment. In your kind of day-to-day, obviously you're hearing a lot of things both from customers that you're working with, the news cycle, the things from Anthropic, OpenAI, Hugging Face, whoever that's coming out with things.
What does your process look like, or how do you feel like your rhythms day-to-day help you isolate some of that signal, maybe distill down some of what you should be paying attention to? Any suggestions? I think it's something on all of our minds, certainly on my mind.