Starting my career in multinational organisations such as Oracle & Salesforce, having worked within Cloud Infrastructure, Integration, Data, Automation, & Analytics, today I run a Gen AI Customer Experience implementation firm based out of Sydney, Australia.
Here is my story.
I was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, and lived in a small neighbourhood in the North East of Melbourne.
Since I was young, I always had two distinct interests. Technology and Psychology.
Technology Growing Up
As a kid, I started learning how to write batch scripts so I could play pranks on people, one script I wrote many years ago was a simple loop that created the beeping sound that computers used to make in the early days when you turn it on. Enabling the script to run on loop, I could create the most annoying sound that you could never get rid of, and would run it on my friends PCs to drive them mad. (Of course removing it shortly after).
I was also born and raised in the era of MSN Messenger, and I found that I could crash PCs by overwhelming them with long messages over MSN Messenger, that would eat away at their CPU and essentially crash it.
Even though I loved to play pranks, it was never for malicious intent, but really more to satisfy my craving to understand more about technology around me. I had no money to buy all the cool gadgets that everyone had, but I could only experiment and tinker with what I had.
By the time I was 17 years old, I had already discovered that I could repurpose all my tech hardware and manually upgraded my playstation by harnessing some adapters and some old harddrives I had laying around. Nothing groundbreaking, but I would spend my hours understanding the components within and how they were pieced together.
Psychology Growing Up
I also had a massive interest in psychology. I was often the black sheep in school, having come back from years of staying in Malaysia and Singapore, I was simply different to the other kids. It took a long time for myself to adjust to the Australian lifestyle and habits (even though I was born here), and really felt like I was a stranger to my own country most of the time.
Growing up, I would often ideate about the different truths about personalities and behaviours, always creating my own theories of the mind, whether or not they were valid.
I studied psychology as an elective in High School, and went on to pursue my Bachelor of Psychological Science at La Trobe University thereafter with the aims of becoming a Neuropsychology Researcher.
However, I fell off the rail with psychology. Knowing that there was another 10 years in front of me before I would even be considered to become a full fledged psychologist, I decided to depart, and follow my other passion which was technology.
Why Artificial Intelligence?
Having worked for some of the most esteemed vendors in the technology world, although I enjoyed the technology I worked with, I always felt it was too “overhyped”.
In the technology industry, we hit a certain level of maturity many years ago, which essentially lead to people around the world to essentially rebuild the same core logic again and again.
I felt that the technology at Salesforce and Oracle where I worked, was overvalued and overpriced, and never really brought the amount of impact to businesses as they ever claimed.
However, during my time at Oracle in 2019, one of my core products was the Oracle Digital Assistant, which proved to be this intelligent technology that would help to service customers. This kind of technology was very early for its time, and was severely undersold and underutilised by businesses across Australia.
Irregardless, I was always fascinated by how technology and psychology, my two passions would integrate, to build intelligent-like software, and wanted to pursue to join an Artificial Intelligence focussed business by 2020.
There were none.
I looked everywhere high and low, and no business had the maturity within the Artificial Intelligence space that I was looking for.
So in early 2023, when Salesforce had gone through their final round of retrenchments, I started Automation Consulting, with the core of the business to leverage my life’s work into one singular business offering.
A solution and service that would emulate customer service and sales, leveraging both my knowledge of technology & psychology.
And that’s the essence of my story.
Why I started this blog?
I started this blog along my journey of becoming an entrepreneur, as a place to share my thoughts, teachings, learnings, struggles, celebrations, and the entire rollercoaster of it all in the hope that I can inspire others who perhaps come from less fortunate backgrounds to learn from my successes and mistakes.
I truly believe that everyone has their own unique value to offer to the world, and I am lucky enough just to have the opportunity to enact on it. I hope others can follow the same direction, and together we can create a better world for us all to live in.
If you follow my blog – I aim to be very frank about my ideas, my concepts, how we look to offer value to businesses, and the impact we want to leave behind when we’re old and grey. Hope you enjoy.