AI Augmentation: What Actually Works for Businesses

The place: Cross Street Chapel, Unitarian.
Cross Street Chapel, Cross Street Manchester, Manchester M2 1NL.
Entrance at the intersection of Cross St and Chapel Walks, immediately opposite the entrance to Pret a Manger. Use the intercom button.

We will be waiting for you from 5:30 PM with hot coffee, tea, and biscuits. This is a great time for informal meetings.

The Talk:
AI Augmentation: What Actually Works for Businesses, by Tom Brandwood, Chief Technology Officer for Traverse Automation

Abstract:
Over the last few years Traverse Automation went from scripting RPA (traditional automations coded in), to training our own models for specific features and comparing the performance and cost to GPT 3 (pre ChatGPT), to riding the wave of AI services, using their APIs as they evolved and implementing Agents where pragmatic.
We’ve built several agents to handle aspects of our software development life cycle, and project management most recently - some of them worked brilliantly, some not so much and we’ll be sharing what we’ve learned through the process.
At Traverse we believe strongly in human authorship and ownership to avoid the common pitfalls of trusting AI Agents too heavily, we’ll cover our mindset around AI, ways to get the most out of the tools (generally kept broad with some platform specifics) and practical demos of real-world use cases.
We’ll finish with an open discussion, we’re more than happy to discuss anyone’s use case and are particularly interested in hearing where AI hasn’t worked for people so we can talk these through and help.
Professional Bio:
I’m Tom Brandwood, Chief Technology Officer for Traverse Automation. With around a decade of experience focused on automation of complex business processes for Travel companies, and a background in Astrophysics from the University of Liverpool.
I began as a software engineer building our cloud orchestration and a low code automation scripting platform from the ground up. This really took off as I helped grow our team of incredible solution designers, problem solvers and developers, together we’ve built many production systems to automate anything our clients need.
More recently I’ve been working with several Travel Technology teams, running workshops and consultancy to help other businesses implement AI and Agents where it makes the most sense for them.