This week I read a post on what it’s like to work in an AI native company. I loved reading her experience. It was so different to mine. So I thought I’d share my own of being a self-employed AI native in the wop-wops.
I use AI to help me juggle multiple hats and projects every day – from committees, advocacy and resilience research, to comms, web and event management, to rostering, registrations, and even to finance, investments, and property management.
Being an AI fluent resilient human hatstand in a remote community has its pros and cons.
The cons are I don’t get the enterprise AI experience, or the joys of collaborating with others in an AI native company, or the privilege of satisfying my inner-geek watching it connect dots with big datasets. But I can and do connect many smaller ones.
And the pros of this are huge and immensely satisfying.
Applying AI in diverse and human-complex projects gives me the opportunity, flexibility and empowerment to see where and how AI can make a difference. My smaller projects give me a tasty bite into every department of an organisation – from HR to marketing to governance and stakeholder management.
Through on-the-job experimentation, I’m also seeing how incredibly fast AI is evolving.
Every day, I’m reading, learning, brainstorming, asking what ifs and is this possible. When we hit on an idea and try it out, I’m realising new capabilities all the time and seeing potential across all my projects.
In the last week my role has shifted from typist to an orator. I am exploring and delegating by voice more. And, with systems and plugins requiring my authority, I’m still in control.
Last weekend, I created an app to simplify registrations. This morning we built the bones for a new holiday let website optimised for AI search and AI booking agents.
My AI is now charged with leading and then maintaining the project from here. It’s not a Google Site, nor a ChatGPT Site, nor is it a WordPress or any other CMS site. It is a site built and designed by AI for any AI or human to update.
The speed at which AI is evolving is crazy. I am acutely aware of the improvements and opportunities it can create …. and the work it is replacing. That, as well as rogue agents and dire predictions, are top of mind. This article isn’t ignoring that, if anything it’s confirming the speed of change.
Today, I’ve seen what AI can do by itself with a structured plan. It doesn’t need me anywhere near as much as it did. I’ve set things up so it can work for me, it knows where things are, I’ve briefed it well.
My present juggle is tightening what it produces. Poor direction easily creates overwhelming content and a time-wasting bottleneck digesting it. The challenge is defining the output and the goal from the start; the joy is realising you’ve created an efficient advantage in a very short time.
A year ago I gave my AI access to my GitHub and Netlify accounts, today it’s managing them. I am no longer the human bottleneck in the middle pushing PRs and commits. I’m talking with my AI, it’s handling the work, and it is keeping up with me.
It’s a valued team member in all my projects. We brainstorm, we agree a plan, and then we action it. And the more familiar it is with a project, the sharper it is at connecting the dots.
There are wide gaps and capabilities between enterprise AI tool use and personal AI. And there are differences between LLM tools and the way they manage our systems.
Not being embedded in one organisation or one technology stack has given me an unexpected freedom. Living in a small community means I encounter a remarkably wide range of problems, and AI gives me an increasingly capable way of exploring them.
The technology will keep changing — probably faster than any of us are comfortable with — and there are consequences of that change that deserve serious attention. But from where I’m sitting, one thing is already clear: AI fluency is not going to belong only to technologists or people working inside AI-native companies.
Sometimes it may grow from someone in the wop-wops asking, “Could we do this differently?” — and having the tools to find out.