The People Behind The Bots — Grant Ronald
Grant Ronald is the Senior Director of Product Management for the Oracle Digital Assistant. His development team is responsible for product strategy, evangelism and technical enablement. Grant shares his wealth of experience, working at Oracle for an impressive 24.5 years!
Q1 — What drew you to the Conversational AI industry?
Grant: I’ve been involved in the building of software development tools all my professional life, everything from database tools to Java to mobile. So when about 6 years ago Oracle decided to develop its own conversational platform I jumped at the chance — it’s the stuff of Sci-FI: communicating with computers using natural conversation.
Q2 — What skills or transferable skills helped you when entering this space?
Grant: Building a conversational interface is different from building, for example, a web application. And I think many people struggle to grasp the difference. However, there is also a considerable crossover with more traditional development: after all backend integration, security, release management, testing etc. are all still essential skills in the development of conversational assistants.
Usability is also a common skill but has a different angle to it: in web apps, it’s all about colours, fonts widget positioning and mouse clicks — for a conversational interface those challenges are now down to words, tone of voice and number of conversational turns.
So for me most of my software development skills were still important, others had to evolve and topics like conversation design was a new fun topic to learn.
Q3 — Were there any specific resources, tools, industry experts, that helped you along the way?
Grant: Understanding the specific challenges of conversational assistants, for me, was easier when I got into a community of people asking the same questions. I got much more from that than reading a book or going on a course. So for me, I engaged with a lot of great people and communities through channels such as LinkedIn. There are some really smart people who are do-ers, not just talkers.
Q4 — In a sentence or two tell us what your role entails
Grant: Make people build better bots! My team look after product deliverables such as documentation, training and certification exams. But we also are building bots on a daily basis, helping customers, debugging issues — everything! On top of that we’ve developed a Digital Assistant Center of Excellence to research, share and validate best practices — simply stated: to help people build awesome chatbots.
Q5 — What do you enjoy most about your role?
Grant: I literally can do anything. In the morning I can be debugging code with a developer, lunchtime I’m presenting conversational strategies to a bunch of CTOs, in the afternoon I’m writing feature specs for the platform before wrapping up by spending a few hours knocking the rough edges off some product features and writing up some cool new tips and tricks.
I also love the fact that this industry is based heavily on both technical software development but also the more human aspects of linguistics and human psychology. To me, that is a really interesting mix.
Q6 — What is the most challenging part of your role?
Grant: The fact that I can literally do anything!! The job never finishes. There is always something to do! That’s a challenge for me personally. As conversational developers as a group, I think the challenge is living up to the hype. Those of us in the industry know that understanding language is hard and our users can be unforgiving.
Q7 — What excites you about the future of this industry?
Grant: Speaking with computers is the stuff of Sci-Fi — and more achievable than time travel or food replicators. But it's not just the conversing in natural language but the fact that natural language can also be understood. You no longer have to work out how to use a website — just say what you want!
Q8 — What is one piece of advice you would give to other people looking to enter this industry?
Grant: Connect with great people and listen to them.
Techires’ takeaways:
- Software development skills and experience is a great baseline for Conversational AI, but be prepared to learn some new skills!
- Conversational AI isn’t for the faint-hearted. No two days are the same, so if you enjoy this you’ll fit in well within the industry.
- Want to learn more about this domain? Connect with people, join in on the conversations and you’ll be spoilt with industry knowledge and expertise!
Thank you for reading! A special thanks to our guest, Grant. We really enjoyed hearing Grant’s insights, and hope you did too! Click here to follow Grant on LinkedIn!
If you’re keen to hear more insights and advice from industry experts in the Conversational AI space, don’t forget to click the follow button to be notified of future posts!
You can also head over to our socials for more tips and advice from the team at techire ai and if you’re looking for roles within Conversational AI check out our jobs page and website.
And if you’d be interested in taking part in our blog series get in touch, we’d love to hear from you!
Allys Parsons — Conversational AI Recruiter @ Co-Founder @ techire ai
Leigh Smith — Conversational AI Recruiter @ techire ai
