Utilizing AI With Steph Locke

The three Utilizing AI episodes featuring Steph Locke covered practical, technical territory: MLOps (machine learning operations — the engineering discipline of putting AI models into production and keeping them there), Microsoft’s approach to democratising AI, and the broader question of how AI is actually used by practitioners rather than described by marketers.

Steph’s perspective on these topics comes from years of hands-on work — building models, deploying them, maintaining them, and helping organisations adopt them. That experience gives her something genuinely useful to say on a podcast aimed at AI practitioners, not just AI enthusiasts.

Utilizing AI is a podcast for technology professionals working with AI and machine learning in practical, production contexts. Created by Stephen Foskett and Andy Thurai, it brings industry experts onto the show to discuss what AI actually looks like when it is deployed and running, rather than in development or in a research paper.

The show has a technically sophisticated audience — data scientists, ML engineers, and technology leaders who want to hear from practitioners rather than from people who describe AI at a high level without getting into the specifics. Being invited to contribute to three episodes is a recognition of the depth of knowledge that Steph brings to the subject.

Machine learning operations — the practice of getting AI models into production reliably, monitoring their performance, and managing them through their lifecycle — is one of the most important and least-discussed topics in applied AI. Most of the conversation about AI focuses on building models. The harder problem, in most organisations, is deploying them in a way that is reliable, auditable, and maintainable.

This is directly relevant to what GoSmarter does: building AI tools that work reliably in production manufacturing environments, not just in demos.