Sean Williams

Sean Williams is the founder and chief executive of AutogenAI, a company whose software helps businesses write bids, tenders, and proposals for government and corporate contracts. He studied philosophy, started his career as a proposal writer, and founded AutogenAI after selling his first company.

Three careers

His first career was in bids. In the employment support sector he worked up from researcher and proposal writer to proposal director and corporate development director, he told The Chief AI Officer Show. He went on to design and manage large public service contracts, according to his personal site.

In 2016 he founded Corndel, a management and technology training company, and grew it to 350 people. He sold it to THI Holdings in 2020 for $60 million.

Three weeks of retirement

He retired in September 2021 and lasted three weeks. “I’m either too busy or too quiet, but I can’t cope with being too quiet,” he said. His best friend Andy, who works on DeepMind’s protein folding team, called and told him to look at large language models. Williams tested them, kept thinking how much they would have helped him as a 22-year-old proposal writer, and launched AutogenAI.

About half of his first team were proposal writers and the other half data scientists and machine learning engineers.

A working definition of truth

He brings his philosophy background to the problem of AI models inventing facts. “We came up with a definition of truth, which was something is true if you can show where the source came from,” he said. That idea pushed AutogenAI toward retrieval and cited sources early, with a person deciding whether to believe each source.

He describes the company’s edge as focus. “We’re definitely not smarter than the folks at OpenAI or the folks at Google, but we are single minded and we do what we do best.” By 2025 he had moved to New York.