On October 14 we had Thor Whalen as a guest and speaker at Lunch at the Circle. Here’s the interview with Thor:

Here’s the brief from the invitation to the event:

Integrating AI in our daily business – a threat or a panacea, with Thor Whalen

Thor Whalen co-founded and was the CTO of the originally French AI innovation company OtoSense, which was based in Silicon Valley and was then acquired by Analog Devices (https://otosense.analog.com).

Thor will share his experience with OtoSense and his journey of implementing AI into business operations.

Thor will be able to share his hands-on view and vision for the future of the LLM invasion and give us some pros and cons concerning its use in our daily businesses.

We’ll discuss how difficult it was and still is to integrate AI effectively into business operations and propose some of the main reasons why this is the case.

Next, we’ll explore how generative AI has expanded possibilities, making language-based tasks—content generation, data extraction, and research—more accessible than ever. This opens up new opportunities for workflow automation, insights from unstructured data, and collaboration tools, but it also introduces risks like privacy concerns, bias, and overreliance on AI.

Thor will provide practical advice on what to do—and what to avoid—when integrating these technologies into your business, along with strategic considerations like balancing automation with human oversight and investing in AI literacy. He will also share some predictions on where this space is heading and how you can position yourself to take advantage of these evolving tools.

Key areas of focus may include (depending on the exchanges):

• Opportunities: Data-driven insights, task automation, augmenting human expertise, new product offerings, and multilingual support.
• Risks: Privacy, bias, overconfidence, and the challenge of maintaining collaboration quality.

Finally, we’ll discuss strategic approaches to AI integration, including exploring open-source alternatives and ensuring human oversight in AI workflows.