Australia's practical AI guide for business that puts humans first

There's a particular kind of frustration that comes from watching people you respect get sold things they don't need.

I've watched it happen for thirty years. Different decades, different acronyms, same playbook. Vendor turns up with a slide deck full of fear and a pitch full of jargon. The buyer doesn't have the language to push back. They sign the contract. Six months later they're tied to a tool they can't make work and a consultant who's already moved on to the next mark.

There are people in regional Australia paying $50,000 to AI consultants who learned the buzzwords last weekend.

That's not advice. That's extraction.

So when I work with someone, whether it's a sole trader in the membership or a board running a 200-person organisation, the rules are the same. Plain language. No upsell. The strategy fits the business in the room, not a template I want to sell. And if AI isn't the right answer for the problem, I say so.

That's the “humans first” bit. It's not a marketing line. It's the whole job.

About the AI in this work

AI is part of how the work gets done. Declared, transparent, never hidden. Every piece of writing on this site goes through me before it goes out.

I was born on Gadigal Country, in the city now called Sydney. I grew up on Bundjalung Country, in Northern New South Wales. That is where I live and work most of the year now, on the Northern Rivers coast.

I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands and waters where I work and live. I acknowledge their Elders past, present and emerging. I extend that same respect to the Elders of every person reading this, wherever you have come from. Sovereignty was never ceded.

I grew up around water. A brother who was a surf lifesaver. A cousin who was mad keen on surfing. A family of anglers. They taught me to respect the water before anything else. To sit. To watch. To enter only when you knew what you were facing.

The analogy that runs through my work, the rips, the beach, the flags, knowing when it is safe to move, was shaped on the Northern New South Wales coast. That is Bundjalung Country. The Bundjalung Nation has cared for that coastline for tens of thousands of years. The knowledge of reading water, reading patterns, knowing when the current turns and when it is safe to cross: that is not a metaphor someone invented. It is ancient knowledge. It belongs to Country.

For me, AI is simply the next chapter in a story that started long before any of us were born. Our Traditional Owners have always known that knowledge lives in patterns. In the songlines that mapped an entire continent. In the weaving that encoded information across generations. In the stories that carried everything a community needed to survive, thrive and belong.

That is not so different from what a large language model does. It finds patterns. It connects knowledge. It guides our communication, our decisions, our creating.

The algorithm was always here. It just wore different clothes.

That is the philosophy my work is built on. Human-led. AI-leveraged.