In conversation Vladimir Ajvaz, Head of Technology & Architecture at Fusion Practices
Vladimir Ajvaz was recently named Gen-AI & Innovation Champion of the Year. In this interview, he reflects on how the award has boosted team morale, inspired new AI-driven features in Fusion Practices’ data migration tool, and reinforced the value of collaboration, mentorship, and innovation within the company.
The Interview
Q: The reason OUG and OG decided to do this is because it’s been great that so many people got awards, but that meant there wasn’t a big opportunity for anybody to talk about why they won and share their story, so that’s what we want to do today – we want to give people the chance to put out their message. Let’s start with where you work and what your role is…
A: I work for Fusion Practices and I’m Head of Technology and Architecture. I joined from HSBC back in January, but I’ve known the Managing Director and other partners in the company for many, many years; decades even! So it doesn’t feel like a new environment to me. We’ve worked together in the past. And after many years working on different projects in different environments, I formally joined at the start of this year.
Q: You got quite a few awards, didn’t you – Fusion Practices?
A: Yes! Nikola [Aleksandra] got one, I got one, and we as Fusion Practices also got an award for ‘Managed Services Partner of the Year’.
Q: And how did you come about being nominated for your individual award?
A: I was nominated by the Managing Director within Fusion Practices and the reason for that nomination was from before I even joined… We had plans of how we were going to represent the artificial intelligence capability of the company – the tools that we used, and the benefits that they bring to the customers. That field of work was close to my heart for a long time. We’re talking about it… But essentially, Managing & Founding Director for Fusion Practices [Gyan Pandey] was really interested in how practically business knowledge can ‘AI’. We were discussing our approach for ERP implementations, machine learning capabilities and embed them into the existing Oracle products, so we started this journey a long time ago.
AI has now come to the forefront of people’s minds since ChatGPT gained popularity and people finally saw opportunity to use these tools for real life. But for us in Fusion Practices, everyone was a little bit hesitant about using machine learning within enterprise environments because of their nature from not being very deterministic.
“When I joined officially in January, we started to explore those ideas of how we can use AI to promote the business goals of Fusion Practices, and how to use them effectively within the Oracle ecosystem.”
So in that respect, I believe we are one of the very few companies within the Oracle ecosystem that has the right strategy of how to use AI tools not by creating new models, but by embedding tools that consume and leverage datasets produced by AI manually.
“AI means different things to different people. To us, AI is just a way of conversing with the enterprise systems in a natural language and more efficient form. ”
Q: And can you explain the exact title of your award?
A: ‘Gen-AI’ stands for ‘Generative AI’ and ‘Innovation Champion’ I believe probably relates to the efforts that we have put in, myself and my team. Yes, you can very quickly knock together AI models to do all sorts of things, but because of its sometimes-innate feature of ‘hallucinating’ and picking the wrong tools to perform a certain task, it is not always 100% reliable. That is where we are putting in and coming up with the measures to rein in those features, to make them deterministic and acceptable for enterprise environment use.
Q: How did it feel to win this award?
A: I was surprised, of course positively! The reason being is that it’s quite a competitive area – as I said earlier, even though Anil and I started this journey a long time ago before it was called ‘AI’ and used to be called ‘machine learning’, once the ChatGPT craze kicked in, everyone was at it! And so I was a bit surprised that I was chosen because it was quite dense competition and I’m very pleased that Fusion Practices, and me as a representative, was awarded that night!
Q: In terms of the OUG, how long have you been involved with them?
A: So, on and off because I’m also ex-Oracle, so I had involvement with the UKOUG for quite a bit. I also personally know some of the key members quite well, so it’s definitely not new to me, but I reconnected with the UKOG last year and I’m really pleased with the initiative and the work that they’re doing in various areas.
AI has now come to the forefront of people’s minds since ChatGPT gained popularity and people finally saw opportunity to use these tools for real life. But for us in Fusion Practices, everyone was a little bit hesitant about using machine learning within enterprise environments because of their nature from not being very deterministic.
Q: There has been some good work in rejuvenating the OUG – I know COVID did pose a bit of a tough time for many of these networking organisations. For you, what do you feel that you get out of being part of this OUG community?
A: Well, I would actually really like to get more involved with the initiatives, like Shine and similar mentoring initiatives that they put in place over the last couple of years. But we’ve been very busy!
AI has now come to the forefront of people’s minds since ChatGPT gained popularity and people finally saw opportunity to use these tools for real life. But for us in Fusion Practices, everyone was a little bit hesitant about using machine learning within enterprise environments because of their nature from not being very deterministic.
Q: Has anything particularly positive come from winning the award? Or is there anything in the future that you would hope is going to come from winning the award?
A: It’s definitely all positive, even just in the sense that it’s simply always pleasing to hear that you have won award – it’s a positive feeling and that’s an inherently human emotion, so I’m very pleased about it!
“In terms of the more concrete effects, and particularly on the overall work within my team, winning the award definitely gives us more motivation to work harder, to come up with better ideas for our products…”
And there was something very specific that came as an outcome as well! That being our data migration tool, which is proprietary Fusion Practices tool, incorporated a number of AI features in its core engine, and that was motivated by the award!
AI has now come to the forefront of people’s minds since ChatGPT gained popularity and people finally saw opportunity to use these tools for real life. But for us in Fusion Practices, everyone was a little bit hesitant about using machine learning within enterprise environments because of their nature from not being very deterministic.
“The award gave us a bit more encouragement that that’s the right way to go, and provided us inspiration to work on other things; it really motivated myself and my team.”
“It also gives Fusion Practices a great deal of visibility within the community, so that’s an important aspect as well!”
Q: It’s recognition of doing an absolutely great job! Then lastly, is there anything else you would like to add?
“I want to thank everyone at Fusion Practices – Anil Passi in particular, who gave me the opportunity to work within an amazing team, and also everyone else within Fusion Practices!”
Q: Fabulous! By the sounds of it, you have a great team, Vlad. You’ve talked about them very fondly, especially your friendship with Anil, so I wish you all at Fusion Practices very well for the future. Thank you.
