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One person. No team. No engineering background. And he's built more AI tools in six months than most departments have in two years.
Aden Vaughan-Williams ran people and culture at Informed Decisions, a 70-person B2B SaaS company. No CPO to bounce ideas off. No engineering resource. So he stopped thinking of himself as an HR person and started thinking like a product manager, with AI as his engineer.
That reframe changed everything.
In this episode, Aden and I talk about what it actually looks like when someone in a non-technical function picks up AI and starts building. Not theory. Not hype. Real tools, real results, built by someone who just got tired of wishing the software did more.
We cover:
- Why "product manager with AI as my engineer" is a more useful mental model than "HR person experimenting with AI"
- How Aden built an AI board of directors to pressure test ideas before the exec table
- What it means to train AI personas to be critical, not just encouraging
- The bias question: why unconscious bias training matters more now than ever
- Whether AI will replace senior leadership roles (and why Aden thinks judgment is the moat)
- The talent pipeline problem: Big 4 cutting grads by 40-50%, but what happens to the next generation of partners?
- The "build to enable" mentality and why the bottleneck used to be that you couldn't build it, but now you can
Aden has over a decade of experience in people and culture and tech recruitment at companies like Carsales and Informed Decisions. He's the kind of person who sat next to engineers and product managers every day, picked up how they think, and then applied it to his own domain. He's proof that you don't need a technical background to build with AI. You just need curiosity and a problem worth solving.
Connect with Aden Vaughan-Williams
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/aden-vaughan-williams/
- Email: adenvwcareers@gmail.com
Connect with Amit Singh
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/au-amitsingh/
- Website: amits.com.au
Work with Amit
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