Sean Hughes

Sean Hughes is the AI Ecosystem Director at ServiceNow where he helps drive adoption and value from ServiceNow’s AI Search and Generative AI capabilities known as Now Assist by evangelizing the use of AI for transformative enterprise solutions. Sean is a champion for the responsible development and use of generative AI.  His leadership role as a member of the ServiceNow Research group extends to co-leading the BigCode legal, ethics, governance working group, co-leading the AI Alliance Foundation Models working group, and co-leading the AI Alliance Community core team.

Sean helped formulate and operationalize the BigCode project research partnership between ServiceNow and Hugging Face and contributed to advancing the responsible development and commercial use of large language models for code by empowering the machine learning and open source communities through open governance, responsible AI licensing, and giving agency to developers through a mechanism for them to opt-out of having their data being used for model training. Sean has published and co-authored a number of significant papers including The BigCode Project Governance Card, The Stack: 3 TB of permissively licensed source code, SantaCoder: Don’t reach for the stars!, StarCoder: may the source be with you!, and most recently, StarCoder 2 and The Stack v2: The Next Generation. His proactive stance on AI ethics, security, compliance, and advocacy for open innovation underscore his vision where technology advancements and principled stewardship go hand in hand.

With a career that spans across prestigious companies like HP, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Intel, Sean has held leadership roles in program management, product management, product marketing, ecosystem strategy, and AI-enabled innovation.