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A Class Act: AI Builders & Founders
What does it really take to build and lead a world-class AI or data team?
I'm Michael Young, founder and CEO of MBN Solutions in Scotland. After two decades placing top talent across data, AI, and tech, I've seen what actually separates high-performing teams from the rest, and it's rarely what the headlines tell you.
A Class Act is where I bring you those stories.
Honest, experience-led conversations with the data and AI leaders making the hard calls right now: who they hire, how they build data science capability, and what real leadership looks like when the technology never stops moving.
No hype. No jargon. Just practical insight from people who've actually done it.Whether you're a data leader, a people manager, or hiring in tech, you'll walk away from every episode with something you can use.
New episodes twice a month. Follow A Class Act so you never miss one.
A Class Act: AI Builders & Founders
Episodes
Season 3 Trailer | Meet the People Building the Future of AI
Season 3 of A Class Act is here.Every breakthrough in AI begins as an idea almost nobody believes in yet. But brilliant technology doesn't change anything until it survives contact with the real world.So why do some AI products tr...
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S3E1: What Does A Forward Deployed Engineer Actually Do? With Tom McLaughlin, Forward Deployed Engineer at The OpenAI Deployment Company
Every AI company seems to want a forward deployed engineer. Yet very few can explain what they’re actually hiring for.Tom McLaughlin was doing the job before it became one of the hottest titles in AI. He went from software engineering at...
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S3E2: AI in Customer Service: Sabio's Chief AI Officer Stuart Dorman on What Changed and What Hasn't
Stuart is Chief AI Officer at Sabio Group, a CX consulting and technology firm that has spent two decades helping large organisations run their contact centres. He was working on speech recognition and natural language when it was still called ...
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Season 2: Navigating the AI Landscape
I’ve been in this market for nearly 20 years and in that time, I’ve helped place over 4,000 senior leaders in data, analytics, and AI roles around the world from the dot com boom to big data.What I’ve learned is this: technology ...
A Look Inside How OpenAI Deploys Enterprise AI With Stuart McMeechan, EMEA Deployment Engineering Leader at OpenAI
In this episode of A Class Act, Michael Young sits down with Stuart McMeechan, EMEA Deployment Engineering Leader at OpenAI. Stuart leads the team that OpenAI sends into the biggest enterprises in Europe to help them get AI into pr...
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