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Meet Prashanth Sharma:

Prashanth is the CTO at thought focus and leads the technology function across all business lines and customer engagements. With over 22 years of industry experience. Prashanth is spearheading the next wave of technology growth at thought focus, motivating teams to exceed customer expectations. He's a natural innovator with entrepreneurial flair. Prashanth is driven to architect new tools and strategies that bring together people processes and technology to solve complex business challenges. A trusted technology advisor both in-house and to third focus clients, Prashanth leads the development of innovative business solutions custom-built for client success. Prashanth entrepreneurial mindset has characterized his career, his technology leadership was integral to the success of two technology startups, which have gone into multimillion-dollar solution providers. Before joining thought focus Prashanth worked in key positions at Tech Mahindra and ces era software. 

Lori: What is your positioning on AI? And how can people make sure that they're staying relevant and, and ready for the evolution of what's happening in the future here?

Prashanth: That's such a great question only because AI seems to be the centerpiece of conversations for every single person on this planet today, who understands technology, or who connects with technology in some form or the other, right? And typically, whenever there are new technologies, there are always conversations at the beginning of the hype cycle where you think that technology is going to be a game changer, that technology is going to take away jobs, if you want to look at it from a different perspective, or that technology is going to change our lives so drastically that we've got all going to be in flying cars in two years. So, you know, AI has followed the same pattern in terms of human behavior and their analysis of a new technology that is being introduced, and they're getting to know this AI as a technology is not new, how we interact focus have been working on AI technologies for the last eight years. What has changed in the last, probably six months is that it has been democratized by the likes of tech GPT and others. There are also a couple of other technical improvements that have gone into AI models if you will, that have enabled this conversation that we are having, as well as other conversations that other people are having in either boardrooms or podcasts or just to friends on meeting across the table for coffee. It's changed the way people understand AI and look at AI as a practical solution. Because if you log into chat GPD and ask a question, you get an answer that is meaningful enough now that people understand that okay, this is a technology to reckon with, right? So, all right Just a baseline AI is a technology. That's where the conversations are. But primarily, the improvements in the models have resulted in enabling AI as a technology to solve meaningful problems for people or businesses. Asking a question and getting an answer is probably a relatively simple one. But what happens, especially if you take such generative models or transformer models than they do models or where your algorithms create new information or data for you? And when you take both of these algorithms or models, combine them and train them on large data sets, you get a really powerful computing and answering machine for you. And it's only up to the human imagination to figure out how to apply that technology. If your business and if you train those powerful models on a set of data that is within your sphere of business, then it becomes that much more efficient. They're called large language models, primarily because they are connecting information, words, data, and whole large space of the internet, if you will, or data spaces. So when you connect all that language, and words and meanings and everything else and