Alexandre Guilbault
We’re seeing a revolution over the last 20 years. For instance, a lot of people are using Wikipedia. Nobody would have thought 30 years ago that the best encyclopaedia would actually be done by collaboration across the world and not by big businesses out there. I do fondly believe that open source is the way to accelerate, democratize, and help the full world to leverage those technologies instead of keeping this in the hands of a few big techs.
Alex is all for the concept of an AI intrapreneur. At Telus, the culture of ‘fail fast’ exists that hugely benefits projects. Failure is not always owing to technology, but other elements such as change management, people being reluctant to start something unfamiliar, sometimes security. Alex believes you never know if a project is ever going to successful, but if it is fated to fail, let it fail fast!
Alex, a telecommunications stalwart, loves how the field has evolved, but is grounded in the belief that one cannot sit on laurels because things are just evolving so fast. Alex says, “When I first joined, we were speaking about moving from HSPA to HSPA plus and then LTE and we’re already in 5G, so every two, three years, we need to relearn all the technologies. while I’m even better served in AI. In AI, it’s not a cycle of couple of years, it’s a cycle of month, if not weeks. There’s new discoveries every single day, new products out there. So, you need to keep on learning. You need to be a lifelong learner. And I think that’s one of the key thing I love about that field. You can never just be an expert and share your tuition value. You need to remain humble and you need to keep on reading and be interested in that”.
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