Meet our co-op innovators: Senan and James
With fresh perspectives and technical prowess, Senan Gaffori and James Yu have been instrumental in developing AI solutions that serve thousands of Revvity employees worldwide. "I've always been deeply interested in large language models and their applications," shares Senan, a fourth-year Management Engineering student from the University of Waterloo, Canada.
Working alongside him is James, a second-year Biomedical Engineering student who sought "hands-on experience building something that could actually impact a lot of people." Together, they've helped shape Revvity's AI landscape through their internship experiences.
Senan Gaffori and James Yu
The team faced the exciting challenge of deploying large language models at enterprise scale. "LLMs are fascinating—but getting them to do useful things at scale is where the real challenge lies," Senan explains. "The space is still evolving rapidly; new tools and frameworks seem to emerge every week."
The RevvityAI journey
Their approach embraced agility over perfection. "We built fast, deployed quickly, and tested with a real audience," notes Senan. With 11,000 internal users providing constant feedback, the team could rapidly iterate and improve their solutions.
Lessons learned
The journey hasn't been without challenges. "It is super rewarding but also kind of intimidating since every change can impact thousands of people," James admits. "It feels amazing when I add a feature that users love but not so great when the entire site goes down and I am scrambling to figure out what went wrong."
Senan emphasizes the importance of rapid iteration: "With tech that's moving this quickly, the best approach is to experiment, gather feedback, and iterate."
James adds wisdom he's gained: "Be more patient and ask more questions. Things almost never work right the first time, especially in AI, and that is just part of the process."
Transformative projects
For Senan, working on RevvityAI, the company's internal LLM-powered assistant, proved most rewarding. "It was exciting to build intelligent bots and agents that could support employees across the company," he reflects, appreciating the blend of technical challenges and strategic thinking.
James found his calling in the Global Search Project, connecting various Revvity resources to Amazon Kendra. "Before working on it, I thought this kind of large-scale integration was way out of my comfort zone, but I ended up learning a ton and collaborating with multiple teams to make it happen."