San Diego, California, United States
Sean Hughes is a forward-thinking AI strategist committed to building trusted, transparent, and policy-aligned AI systems. As Director of the Open Science Ecosystem at ServiceNow, he leads the company’s global strategy for open research collaboration and responsible AI engagement—bridging frontier innovation with enterprise and societal impact. He serves on the AI Alliance Steering Committee, co-leading working groups on foundation models, open trusted data, community engagement, and the development of agentic AI systems, with a focus on model transparency, trust and safety, training data policy, and policy alignment. Sean also contributes to global standards for secure and interpretable multi-agent AI communication as part of the ECMA TC-56 Natural Language Interaction Protocol. A co-creator of the BigCode Project, Sean helped operationalize its open governance framework and ethical licensing model in partnership with Hugging Face, empowering responsible development of code-trained LLMs. BigCode’s StarCoder model placed #1 in the 2024 edition of the Stanford Foundation Model Transparency Index. With a background spanning AI leadership roles at HP, HPE, and Intel, he brings a systems-level perspective and cross-sector fluency to support the mission of advancing ethical, scalable, and public-impact innovation.
Appointed as the inaugural Director of Open Science and AI Ecosystem to build and scale ServiceNow’s strategy for open AI research as a strategic advantage; aligning cutting-edge science with enterprise outcomes. I lead cross-functional and cross-industry efforts to embed openness, trust, and scientific rigor into the company’s innovation engine; accelerating frontier access, external collaborations, and global standards influence. I lead ServiceNow’s involvement in key global initiatives: - Lead representative to Ecma TC56 NLIP core team; founded and chaired the NLIP Security Working Group that authored the ECMA-434 - NLIP Security Profiles standard, formally adopted by Ecma International on Dec 10, 2025 - Member of Linux Foundation's Google A2A core technical steering committee, contributing to the development of the protocol through governance, community, and enterprise advocacy/adoption leadership. - Member of The AI Alliance 501c(6) Board, co-lead of the Open Foundation Models and Datasets focus area, and steering team member for the Open Trusted Data Initiative, as well as Community Strategy. - Ongoing co-lead for the BigCode Community. This work ensures ServiceNow leads not only in AI adoption—but in building the trusted infrastructure that underpins its future.
Jointly leading cross-functional AI ecosystem strategy and engagement for ServiceNow Research as a member of the Large Language Models Lab. Core member of the ServiceNow and Hugging Face team driving the BigCode Project where I coordinate the Working Group for Legal, Ethics, and Governance, facilitating the practice of Open Governance across the Machine Learning and Open Source communities towards the responsible development and use of Code LLMs. Additionally, as a member of the ServiceNow Outbound Product Management team, I have recently taken on ServiceNow Platform Product Enablement responsibilities for AI Search and the recently announced Generative AI platform capabilities including the NOW Assist for Search solution built on top of the Generative AI Controller. Supported the open source GTM and community enablement for Azimuth, an open source application that helps AI practitioners and data scientists better understand their dataset and model predictions by performing thorough dataset and error analyses. The application leverages different tools, including robustness tests, semantic similarity analysis and saliency maps, unified by concepts such as smart tags and proposed actions.
ServiceNow acquired Element AI. Led post-acquisition M&A integration playbook program management, supporting new hire onboarding, tech integration, and transfer of cross-functional operations to ServiceNow. ServiceNow sold the Finance Close Automation app to Trintech. Facilitated the transaction process, warm handover of source code, onboarding of Trintech as a Partner, and launch of Cadency Direct in the app store. Rationalized the business strategy for consolidating touchpoints and developing a cross-company omni-channel learning experience platform, clearing the path for the ServiceNow Learning Posts application development. Oversaw the development and launch of the Llama Awards, a peer-to-peer engineer recognition/award program to boost employee engagement, manager recognition, and senior leadership visibility of employee contributions.
Head of AI Ecosystem Marketing strategy and direction in support of Intel's $3.5B AI business revenue (as reported Q3 2019), supporting joint value propositions and get-to-market programs for AI ecosystem partners. Spearheaded the global Intel AI Developer Community program (including AIDC conference and summit series). Managed the cross-functional teams responsible for intel.ai website and blog, digital marketing and analytics, events, and marquee partnerships.
Head of product strategy, UEX design, and big data analytics developer ecosystem GTM programs. Managed a cross-functional team across product management, product marketing, and analyst relations, for Actian's hybrid-data integration platform, tools, technology, and services. (Actian was acquired by HCL Technologies and Sumeru Equity Partners in July 2018)
Head of developer marketing and evangelism for HPE Haven OnDemand machine learning Platform-as-a-Service. Built and nurtured the developer community from zero to more than 20,000 developers in under three years. In Q2 FY'16, HPE Haven OnDemand received the most press coverage across all of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and carried the most positive sentiment across all products. Please note: - HP split into two companies on Nov 1st, 2015, namely HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. - This role was a continuation of the previous role at HP, after the split. - HP IDOL OnDemand was rebranded as HPE Haven OnDemand around the same time. - The HPE Haven OnDemand platform technology was moved over to Micro Focus as part of the HPE spin-merge announced in September 2016.