AI
Building AI That Sells: Luminance CEO Eleanor Lightbody
Post on
May 15, 2025
Post on
May 15, 2025
Entrepreneurs often ask: When do I know it’s time to scale? Or, how do I lead when I wasn’t the original founder?
In this week’s Founded & Funded, Madrona Partner Chris Picardo sits down with Eleanor Lightbody, CEO of Luminance, who shares how she took a promising AI product and built a company culture, go-to-market motion, and product strategy that’s scaled 6x in just two years. Eleanor’s candor and tactical insights on hiring, selling, and navigating founder dynamics make this a must-listen.
Listen on Spotify, Apple, and Amazon | Watch on YouTube
This transcript was automatically generated and edited for clarity.
Chris Picardo: To kick things off, I think it would be great to just talk a little bit about your career journey. How do you go from a cybersecurity account manager at Darktrace to the CEO of Luminance?
Eleanor Lightbody: I think to understand that, it’s probably worth going way back. I was reflecting on this the other day, I grew up in a household where my mother was an entrepreneur. She started a small business that has grown massively and I saw that when I was growing up. And my father’s a lawyer. Reflecting on it, and looking back, I’m like, “Oh, matching, kind of mirroring entrepreneurship and working in the legal space.” It feels like a given now.
I started at Darktrace when I was fresh out of a post-grad, and I chose Darktrace for a few reasons. The first one was that it had some seasoned investors, and it felt like they had built and grown quite established companies before. I was going to be one of a handful of people in the London office. It felt like it was an opportunity to work for a company that had the potential to scale very fast because what they were offering was appropriate to every single company in the world.
I’m pretty glad that I did. I had a few offers on the table, but I’m very glad that I did because I joined when the company was super small, probably 50 of us globally, if that. I left just before the IPO, and recently the company was bought by Thoma Bravo for over $5 billion. I set up the African operations. I was the first one on the ground to open up that market. Then I went on to run a global division that looked at securing national critical infrastructure, and the investors of Darktrace were similar to those at Luminance.
I got a phone call over five years ago, and it was like, “Hey, our portfolio company’s doing something really interesting. Would you like to join them?” And I thought, “What do you mean? Join them? I’m like meeting the company.” I had to clarify that with them. I’d actually known the founders at Luminance from afar for a while. After speaking to them, I wasn’t thinking about leaving Darktrace, but actually,y it was a very quick yes and an easy yes, because the opportunity that Luminance had was absolutely massive. And so I thought, “You’d be crazy not to say yes to this.”
Chris Picardo: It’s so interesting. It’s got to be a great phone call to get to be like, “Hey, do you want to go do this really fun thing at another exciting company?” One quick question I wanted to ask that you mentioned, which I’m curious about, is you said when you joined Darktrace, it felt like it was ready to grow really fast. What does a company feel like when it’s ready to grow really fast? I know that sometimes you get that feeling, sometimes you don’t. What resonated with you when you were like, “Okay, this company is ready to go.”
Hear from Eleanor duringthe 2024 IA Summit.
Eleanor Lightbody: That’s exactly why I joined Luminance, because I was like, “They’ve got these foundations and they have this ability to scale.” I think it’s a combination of things. One, it’s like— how big of a problem are they addressing? Are they thinking about the problem in a different way? This is when I’m talking to founders. Is there deep expertise in the technical team, and do they have a real sense of what they’re trying to deliver? Those are the key elements that I was always looking at.
But fundamentally, ideas change, they permeate. I think any successful company experiments a lot. It’s not necessarily about the product today, but it’s about the team today and the way that they think about things. Then alongside that, it’s like, do they have that energy? You know when you walk into a room and you’re like, These people want to build, and they are competitive, and I feel like there is no Plan B, but success. Those are all of the things that both Darktrace and Luminance have shared.
Chris Picardo: It’s sort of like that drive that you are going to build this product because you want to win and you want to see it out in the world and fulfill your vision, and that is what’s motivating you as being part of the company.
Eleanor Lightbody: 100% and nothing’s going to stop me.
Chris Picardo: Obviously, you’ve had that feeling twice and both stops have been quite successful, so it must be a great feeling to have. When we talk about Luminance, you’ve done something obviously a little bit different than a lot of people’s journeys, which is stepping into the CEO job. Talk a little bit about what that experience was like. The founders are still there. There have been a couple of other CEOs. How did you think about that? How did you navigate the dynamic? What was that broader experience like?
Eleanor Lightbody: When I first joined, it was a combination of a tiny bit of naivety, which I think is actually really good. As we grow up in businesses and get more and more experiences, one of the key things is to try and keep a bit of naivety because that can help you take on these hugely daunting tasks that in time we slightly get a bit wary of. I was excited, and I was daunted.
I look back on it and it’s quite funny. One of the pieces of advice that I was given from one of my mentors was, A, it’s going to be really hard. I didn’t think I knew how hard it was going to be, but I was like, “Okay, cool.” The second one was, “Look, you want to join a company and within the first few weeks you’re probably going to want to change so much. Get a piece of paper, write everything down that you want to change, put it in a cupboard, and don’t look at it for four weeks. Don’t change anything for four weeks and then revisit it. You’ll start to understand why some of the things you might not need to change or why they are a certain way.”
I didn’t listen to that very well, and I think for a good reason. Regardless of the circumstances, they’re bringing you in. The most important thing to set the scene is to have very frank conversations upfront to say, “This is what I can bring. These are the things I can bring.” For me, when I joined Luminance, there was so much that could be done to mold the commercial teams and to change the way that the company was thinking about how to go to market.
It felt like I could sit with the founders and say, “This is what you guys are doing, this is what you should be doing. Let’s do it today.” And they were like, “Oh, wow. Okay.” Then, having a few metrics to show early signs of success can help you bring the founders on that journey with you. From the outset, my piece of advice to anyone going in is, “Know where your strengths are. Don’t try to boil the ocean from day one.” They’re stuff from that list that I wrote, and I haven’t changed, and know where your finer strengths are. For the first few months, figure that out. Be very upfront in your conversations, be very transparent, and then you’ll start to build a lot of bridges.
Chris Picardo: It seems like when you bring in a new CEO, obviously, one of the reasons you might do it is because you want a change agent. You have to be nuanced and thoughtful about how you want to go about getting buy-in and team-wide enthusiasm about the change that you’re bringing.
Eleanor Lightbody: Yeah, exactly. Being thoughtful and mindful are really, really key things.
Chris Picardo: One thing I hear a lot from CEOs, people who’ve been CEOs, people who’ve worked with a lot of CEOs, is it’s kind of a job. There’s no job description around being the CEO, and it’s not like, “Oh, here’s this great training path to becoming a CEO because it’s a very different type of role than anything else in the company.” Is that your experience as you sort of transitioned into the seat, that maybe your expectations around what a CEO does or what people externally think a CEO does is kind of different from what they actually do?
Eleanor Lightbody: I think everyone thinks that a CEO does something different. If you were to take a general survey of the market, I’m not sure that you would get consensus at all. I don’t think I knew what I was getting myself into, and I mean that in a very positive way. The rate that we’re growing, a lot of CEO’s roles change and they morph. I used to say every month felt slightly different.
The rate of innovation and the speed of scale each week are the key thing, for successful CEOs are a few things. One is being able to understand the vision, being able to understand the 10,000-foot view, but also to be able to parachute in and understand the problems and think about things from the first principle basis to then help fix them. The second thing, and the most important, I have this opinion, very biased, but I think it’s — focus.
As a CEO you can be pulled in so many different directions. All the teams can benefit from having you in the conversations. What are the most important things that day, that week, that month, that year, the next few years? And to try and be very regimented in that. I also think part of my role is being a bit of the hype person for the business, you know? Like going in every day, leading by example. There are other CEOs who might not necessarily agree with that. It really depends on the company, what’s required at that given time, and adapting to it.
Chris Picardo: Being able to figure out what the company needs at any given time is one of the key things you have to be able to do. It’s probably a good time also to talk a little bit about that in practice at Luminance. You stepped in and were able to really massively change the growth trajectory of the company. I’m both very curious about how you did that? But also, I think it’s a good time to spend 30 seconds on Luminance and what it is and why you were so excited about it being able to really put the company on such an incredible growth trajectory.
Eleanor Lightbody: If you think about it as we sit here right now, there will be teams in every corner of this world who will be receiving legal contracts. They’ll be reviewing them, they’ll be processing them, and they’ll be deciding what to do with them. As that stands, it’s very time-consuming, it’s expensive, it’s prone to human error, and it’s costly. What we do at Luminance is that we automate that process end-to-end.
Our customers are pretty much any company of any size, whether that’s someone like AMD or DHL or Hitachi, all different industries who are using us for every single interaction that they have with their legal contract. When I joined the company four years ago, Luminance was only selling to law firms and they had done a really good job. They’d sold to a quarter of the top hundred law firms.
When I came in, I was like, “This platform’s so powerful.” Their addressable market is so much bigger than just law firms. One of the things that we did very quickly was we used the underlying AI models and technology, and we built a whole new workflow and platform to be much more directed at in-house legal teams. That was one of the bets that really paid off because we saw that sales cycles were much faster, the time to value was much faster. That product in itself has grown its ARR 6x over the last two years.
And, again, going back to what I did very quickly when I joined Luminance, I’ve got a sales background. I came in and I asked the teams, “How many fast meetings have you got? How many POVs?” We do free trials. “How many free trials are you running? How many cold calls are you making?” All this stuff. There was a bit of a disconnect of what was expected from the sales teams versus what sales teams should be delivering.
The sales teams have been ex-lawyers. I was like, “Wait a second, we need a lot of lawyers in the company to help build the product, help understand the use cases, help be subject matter experts, but the one area that we do not need lawyers is in selling, because selling is slightly different. Give me a graduate who’s 21 and I will train them how to sell, as long as they understand what we’re doing.”
We changed the whole hiring process, the whole structure. I very quickly promoted two very young, at the time, account executives into more leadership positions, into mentor positions. I remember some people saying, “They’re very young, they don’t necessarily have enough experience.” And I was like, “Give me someone who’s young and hungry and I will help train them into what they need to be.” They’ve become two of the most successful people in the business. That was one of the moves. Adapting the product, it wasn’t really changing it was adapting it and totally changing our go-to market for two areas that were really important to do first thing.
Chris Picardo: You just gave a very condensed master class in both positioning your product and then figuring out how to sell it. One of the things we were joking about in our prep call, I guess a couple of weeks ago now, was people love to say, “If you’ve got a great product and AI, it’s just going to sell itself.” I think we were both laughing because that is definitely not true. Certainly, some companies have been able to figure that out, but I think for the most part, you have to map a great go-to-market strategy with a great product strategy, right? Those two sort of work together.
Eleanor Lightbody: I totally agree. By the way, any company that has been able to do that, hats off to you. Kudos to you. High-fives to you. I want to talk to you. Great, amazing. But that, as a founder, as a CEO, is not necessarily what you should be solving for. If that comes organically, brilliant, amazing. But there are still some key things that might not necessarily last till the end of time.
So understanding your product and understanding distribution, of course, you’ve got to have innovation at the heart of it. You’ve got to have a really solid understanding of the problems that you’re trying to address and how technology can help. If you don’t know how to go to market to it and you don’t know how to take customer feedback, and the key thing is that taking the right customer feedback and prioritizing it, again, is I think so important when you’re scaling business.
Chris Picardo: That’s an interesting point that you want a lot of customer feedback, but you also need to prioritize the customer feedback around what moves the needle and what is useful and interesting information, but maybe not as high on your priority list.
Eleanor Lightbody: Exactly. Everyone talks about customer feedback. It’s important that customer feedback is crucial, don’t get me wrong, especially depending on where you are in your product development cycle. If you’re early on as a company, then what we found super successful or to be super successful was choosing. We were very lucky that two very big companies, early on, were like, “We’ll become design partners with you.”
We said yes to them, but actually no to some others because we felt that the use cases that they were trying to address with our technology and what they were trying to build with our technology could relate to companies around the world of all different sizes. So we were like, “We’re going to go with you guys.” And I think finding some early design partners can be super useful.
Then obviously, as you get more and more customers, the key is two things. The first one is prioritizing customer feedback. I have friends in other areas and other businesses who, as time goes on, they remove themselves from the customer. For us, it’s so important to be even more ingrained with the customer because you get so much valuable information there. But, again, having a system where the feedback loops really fast and you can see if the same feedback’s coming across from all of your customers, those are the ones that you need to really focus on versus a customer saying, “Can I put my logo on it or can it be yellow rather than blue?”
Another mentor of mine told me early on, and I didn’t really get this because in sales you’re like, “Yeah, yeah, we can do this, this,” But when you’re running a business, the power of, no, when you’re talking to customers. Saying, “No, we’re not going to do this and there are some reasons why we’re not going to do this.” Most often than not the customers say, “Okay, cool, that’s fine. It was just an idea.” Actually, if you overpromise, then that’s when you find yourself in a bit of a wrap rate, like a hamster wheel of trying to always catch up and that’s not necessarily a place that you want to be in.
Chris Picardo: Then you’re customizing for every customer, and it’s a problem, right?
Eleanor Lightbody: Then the amount of when you’re upgrading, not somewhere that you necessarily want to be. The second thing is around, we have a team that focuses on customer feedback and product, but we also have our blue sky thinking team because sometimes customers can identify lots of things that they want and for you to kind of help them with. They might not necessarily see around the corner, they might not see the potholes. We’ve got a team very much focused on what can’t we do today that we might be able to do in six months time, in a year’s time.
The capabilities of these models are getting better and better and better. That’s no secret to anyone. They’re getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. How are we building for the future? Metaphorically, they’re carved out into a separate room because I don’t want them to get too distracted by the noise of the daily operations. I want them always to be thinking about innovative, cool, different end-use cases.
Chris Picardo: I was so curious to talk a little bit more about this concept that you have around, I think you call your innovation team, the jet pilot team. Then you’ve got the core team. I know a lot of founders and CEOs always try to think about how to balance innovation versus core product delivery and what are the ways to do it? You’ve been successful at doing that. How do you think about managing that on a day-to-day basis and having those two different groups working in concert with each other?
Eleanor Lightbody: It’s always a bit of a balancing act. For us, one of the pillars that a whole company is based off of is innovation and speed. I think that to be competitive in this market, you have to build very, very fast. You can only do that if you’ve got a team that really understands the impact of what it means to build slowly, actually. There are areas that you need to build slowly, don’t get me wrong, but there are new value-adds, features, use cases, and modules that you want to get out there. It’s seen as a classic like 80/20 rule. We’ll get it out there and see what the feedback is, choose a few customers to go live with, and then you can iterate on it and fly.
The way that we’ve got our teams to buy into this is that they’re the ones talking to the customers. They’re the ones who developers will build something, they’ll sit in and they’ll see the impact and historically they’re siloed away and they’re like, “Oh, but why do we need to build fast? Why does this matter? Let’s make sure that we’re getting it totally right before we push it out.” My argument always to them, and they only started believing this when they saw it, was you don’t know what’s going to really work. You actually have no idea.
We might think in isolation that something is going to land really nicely, but more often than not, sometimes the things that we don’t know are going to land are the ones that people really, really like. So just get it out there. A terrible analogy, but it’s like throwing mud at the wall and seeing what sticks. Throw as much mud and see what sticks, and then you can iterate really quickly on that.
Chris Picardo: Are you able to earn your ability to do that because you’re so close to your customers and able to gain that trust? I think you said something interesting, which is the 80/20 is okay to launch some of these things and be iterative and to get new product in front of customers quickly. Did you earn your way into doing that? Is that something you did? Then customers said, “Hey, this is great, right? Keep it coming.” What’s the nuance there? There are a lot of people who are like, “Hey, if I do launch something and it’s terrible, then have I blown up all of my trust?” Or do people now think it’s not a great product? I think clearly you’re saying, “Yeah, you might have a couple of those things that just don’t land.” But if you launch and you put stuff in front of customers, that’s the cycle to get the best product out there.
Eleanor Lightbody: It’s choosing the right customers. You don’t do this across all of your customer base. You say, right here, X customer. AMD is a great example. They came to us and they were like, “We love your AI for legal negotiation, but at the moment, I still have to review clause by clause.” The AI tells me whether I should agree to it or not. It gives me language that I can use instead. Still the human has to go through and say, “Yes, I agree.” Or, “No, I don’t agree.” They were like, “It’d be amazing if I could just click a button and it rewrote the whole contract for me.” We we’re like, “Okay, let’s do that.”
The first few times that we showed it to them, it didn’t get it right. We could have easily lost their trust, but it’s all about the framing and the positioning, which is like if you’re going to these development partners and saying this is a fully baked solution, then if it doesn’t work or if it doesn’t quite hit the mark, then of course you’re going to lose trust very quickly. It’s like, “No, this is something that we’re working with you on and we’re going to iterate. This is the first future version of it. Let’s continue this dialogue.” Then if you pick the right partners, they’re going to love being able to roll up their sleeves and help you with that.
Chris Picardo: You have a set of customers that are basically perpetual design partners that are happy to work with you on iteration knowing that some of it is going to be experimental and you guys will co-work on it together to land the final version of the product.
Eleanor Lightbody: The good thing is that most of the stuff, we eat our own dog food, it’s the best way to describe it. We test it out ourselves first as a legal team and we think, “Yeah, this is going to have legs on it and then we go to a few select customers. There is sometimes it doesn’t even pass getting past our legal team and we’re like, “This is a cool idea, but actually this is never going to work in reality.” Yeah, that’s how we come to that.
Chris Picardo: It’s funny because, obviously, you’re so focused on go-to-market, but you have tons of product insight on how to map the two pieces of go-to-market and the product roadmap together. That’s a hard thing sometimes for purely technical or purely product-focused founders and executive teams to be able to see how those two pieces work very closely together.
Eleanor Lightbody: It goes back to the earlier point, which is I think I bought in very much for distribution and go-to-market. Now I spend much less time thinking about that. We’ve got a really good repeatable machine and I dip in and out of it. Now my role is very much with product and thinking about, “Okay, what are the next use cases? ” I absolutely love that.
I was talking to one of the founders the other day, and I was like, “I’m not an AI expert and I always come up these ideas.” He’s like, “Eleanor, they’re not your ideas?” Really at a high level, oh, I’ve great ideas.” Building that respect and that trust has been so great and why we’ve seen so much success.
Chris Picardo: I wanted to circle back to that question, which is, how you think about working with technical founders. I’d imagined you still might not consider yourself to be ultra deeply technical, even though you clearly are pretty technical now on a lot of this. I think Snowflake is the example people often use about very technical founders and very commercially minded CEOs, but it seems like it’s a great working relationship that you have. Are there ways that you thought about that or culturally think about that to make it so effective?
Eleanor Lightbody: I don’t think either Adam or Graham, who are our founders will mind me saying this. The beginning part that was definitely, we had to work through a few things. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and they didn’t know what they didn’t know. The key thing is, again, I’ve done this. It’s understanding where your lane is when you start off. You’re in a room, all of you, because you are super strong at something you would hope.
We always talk about leaving egos at the door when we get together as a management team. We’re pretty blunt with each other. We give constant feedback and no one’s off the hook. I get bombarded and the founders get bombarded. When I first started I was a bit like, “Oh, wow.” Then you’re like, “No, this is exactly what success looks like.” Is that we’re constantly holding ourselves to higher standards, and we have really productive, sometimes heated, conversations, most of the time not, and that’s so key.
It’s starting where your strengths are, showing a bit of success, showing that you appreciate each other’s art. The other day I was reminiscing. When I came in, the founders didn’t really know what ARR was. They weren’t plugged into the monthly sales numbers and they didn’t quite understand that whole world. Now, the first people to text me on a monthly management call, end of the month, would be the founders. “How are our numbers this month?” They’re like, “How are the sales? What are the growth? Why don’t we win?”
I’ll be the ones asking them about new AI models. And I’ve got a bit of a competition where I’ll be like whenever this new AI model that comes out, I’ll text them, I’ll be like, “Am I the first one to know about this?” And they’ll “No, you’re still not the first one. There’s this appreciation now of each other’s worlds, and I love that.
Chris Picardo: Many of the things you’ve been saying have come back to mutually aligning the culture around a company that’s going in the same direction culturally, doing things the same way and has the guardrails up around what the culture is like. It almost goes back to the initial thing we were talking about, around feeling that energy and alignment at a company that is just, “Hey, we are scaling, we are going, this is awesome.” Iit does seem like an explanation under a lot of these topics is the cultural alignment that you’ve been able to drive and alongside obviously the founders and the team to set up this version of Luminance where it is.
It’s really fun for me to listen to stories like that, especially because I think it’s unique to do it as the non-founder. To come in and say, “Hey, maybe at this point you’re effectively a quasi-founder or a true right founder of this version of Luminance.” It’s very unique to do it that way and at that time versus, “Hey, I’m going to try to start this from the beginning because I started the company from scratch.”
Eleanor Lightbody: It comes with a lot of challenges, but also it comes with so much potential. The fact that you can join, you can change things, and you can hopefully clearly see what needs to be improved, and also what has happened, that’s been amazing, and to remind people of the amazing things that they’ve done. Sometimes they get lost in that. Then slightly change things up to make sure, you guys, you’re on the right path to the next stage of growth. I love it.
Chris Picardo: You can tell. It’s fun talking about it, obviously. We’ve talked a little bit about it, but I want to ask you, is there anything that’s been particularly hard? I’m sure there’s lots of things. Is there anything that surprised you like, “Wow, that is hard. We’ve got to go figure out how to solve.” That maybe wasn’t on your list of things you thought were going to be hard as you scale the company?
Eleanor Lightbody: I mean, it’s all hard. I don’t know, if anyone tells you it’s not great, but I’m very honest. It’s so rewarding and fun and as I said, absolutely, you’re so immersed in it. One piece of advice I would give to anyone who is thinking about stepping into this role would be, there’s no such thing as work-life balance. Leave that at the door.
If you think that you’re going to join a company, you want to scale in and you want to be successful, it’s not just you that’s going to be immersed in it. It’s your spouse or partner or your friends, you family. You are all in it, whether they like it or not, you are all in it together. I think that is important. What have I found hard? What I have found hard is, and maybe this is a bit controversial for a podcast.
I’ll be very open, which is, you really hope that the team that you have with you will scale with you and that they will learn and they will grow. Sometimes, some people don’t. As you have to, as you go through that journey, manage that. That is probably one of the hardest things that I have found in the past. So that was quite a wide awake. I don’t think you know what it’s going to feel like until you have to go through that.
What is always interesting is making sure that you’re focused because you can spend a week feeling like you’re super productive and so busy, but have you really moved the needle or have you been focused on the things that are the most important part? The third thing that I found, I don’t want to say hard, but I just hadn’t expected it. We hear so much and you read so much about how hard it is or how exciting it is and how the teams are so important in innovation. What you don’t hear or I had heard less about, is how important having the story is, how important having a narrative is. Not just for you as a company and so that everyone’s aligned to it, but also for the outside world. I think in the U.S. Marketing is amazing, and I don’t think I had appreciated the power of it until I joined Luminance.
Chris Picardo: Sometimes the English major part of my brain comes out. In another part of my life, I work with a bunch of scientists here at Madrona, and I think one of the things we talk about a lot is telling your story in simple language that people can understand. It doesn’t matter what you do or even if you’re talking to people who are extraordinarily deep experts in your field, like that. The ability to do that and modulate how you can tell your story, I think, really sets apart a lot of very, very successful companies and founders and executives from people who sometimes struggle with that.
I do want to thank you for making the point around the difficulty of knowing that some people on your team won’t scale because sometimes you hear people talk about that from time to time. It is one of the conversations that certainly from our investor CEO relationship perspective and from, I’m sure, with your board members, that’s a conversation you have more than I think people generally talk about and it’s an important and hard thing for everybody involved. It’s nice that you mention that for the broader audience, that it’s a normal part of scaling a company.
Eleanor Lightbody: Exactly. Most often than not, people do massively surprise you for the positive and people step up and people grow. The counter to that is I really believe in giving . I took on Luminance when I was 29-years-old and, I mean, that’s maybe really old for Silicon Valley, but globally quite young. It’s so powerful to give opportunities to talent that might not necessarily be quite ready for it or the traditional experience for it.
We’ve seen some of our best employees rise up the ranks and be given tasks and responsibilities that might be slightly, at the time, felt like maybe too much. They have not only risen to the challenge, but they have absolutely accelerated in it. I have to sometimes remind myself that it’s like some of the best people that I’ve worked with are given opportunities young and to keep on doing that rather than to be like, “Oh, no, we need to make sure that they’ve got 20 years of experience.”
Chris Picardo: It’s also so important that you say that. I think about that from time to time sitting here in Seattle, we can all name some famous Amazon, Microsoft, et cetera, executives. Almost all of them were given opportunities at those companies really young and were able to scale into those jobs. They didn’t just emerge out of nowhere. I think you giving people those opportunities to be able to do that is, I’m sure, massively beneficial to the company, but also just amazing for the people. It’s such a great cultural piece.
Eleanor Lightbody: Also everything for you as a leader. You get to watch people mature, grow, and believe more in themselves. That is, I think, one of the funnest part of my role, is seeing someone who was a 22-year-old, now 26 and just so capable and even I thought, that they were going to be.
Chris Picardo: Those people are in your network forever. I mean, we’ve met so many CEOs that you’re like, “Wow, there are hundreds of people who have worked for you, been in your organization, been given opportunities that have then gone on to do incredible things. A lot of them can point that path all the way back to those opportunities they got or being at Luminance right at the right time to be able to get an opportunity. That’s got to be an incredible feeling.
Eleanor Lightbody: Yeah.
Chris Picardo: This has been such a fascinating discussion and there’s so many other topics we could have talked about, including, we probably could have spent an hour on the topic of design partners, which I find to be endlessly fascinating. I wanted to talk about a couple of quick questions to end it. The first one is, where are we in the hype cycle? What’s your take of AI? Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? What’s real? What’s noise?
Eleanor Lightbody: Depends on any given day that you’re asking me — my mind might change. I’m kidding. Fundamentally, there is so much that AI can do for good, and there is so much impact, and I think we have only scratched the surface. But I think where we are is, historically, up until today, I think people have seen kind of two X three X productivity gains. To change behaviors, you need to see 10x productivity change. We’re about to start seeing that, and that’s going to be absolutely massive.
So, where we are in the hype cycle, everyone’s got a different opinion. Do I believe that we are only starting to see the potential and we’re going to see more and more potential? Absolutely. The conversation that I think has moved on hasn’t hit. Now people are like, “Okay, cool, this is really useful. This could have a huge amount of impact.” Now people are like, “Okay, what are the return on investments? How am I driving adoption? Why am I actually using this?” Those are the really interesting places to be.
Chris Picardo: What’s a belief you had a year ago or last week, I don’t know, about AI that you think turned out to be totally wrong?
Eleanor Lightbody: It goes back almost to the point I just made, which is like, I always thought that if you could do something and save 50% of time or if you could save X amount of costs and if you had something that gave your customer two X productivity gains in some shape, way or form, that would be enough for adoption and it’s going to be totally ingrained.
To change human habits, it always has to be much more than two X. A few years ago, I was like, “Oh wow, this is not about being more efficient or being more productive. What is the real intrinsic value?” If you don’t have value, then you might be like a one-hit wonder, essentially. People use you but then get tired of you and move on to the next thing.
Chris Picardo: If you look out into the future, what has you the most excited or what do you think we should all broadly be really excited about?
Eleanor Lightbody: I think today the human is still in the driving seat with AI. The human’s still putting the inputs in. It’s still most often than not, they’re not checking the outputs. That’s going to inverse and the AI is going to be massively in the driving seat and the human’s going to be there to slightly tweak levers and to put some guardrails up. I’m so excited for that.
From the humanist point of view, AI negotiating against AI, I think we’re going to live in a world where most legal contracts are the first pass, second pass, third pass, done by AI either side. Also beyond legal, like drug discovery, the impact that we can have on personal medicine, the impact that we can have on curing some of the diseases that we’ve been trying to cure for years. That is going to be, and again, we’ve only scratched the surface there, but it’s going to be so, so positively beneficial for society as a whole.
Chris Picardo: Yeah, that’s the other part of my world. I, 100% agree with you. Eleanor. This has been so fun and we could have talked so much more about so many of these topics, but I really appreciate you joining us on the podcast.
Eleanor Lightbody: Thank you so much for having me.
Tune in to the next episode on May 28 to hear from Microsoft CVP Charles Lamanna.
