Those who will win in the GenAI era are not those who move the fastest, but those who move the smartest. AI is a commodity — everyone will have it. Your advantage is what you do with it. I help businesses understand their business problems, and deliver scalable, secure AI solutions that work.
Trained, shipped, and studied here
Each engagement is built around one business problem. I discover where you stand, recommend what's worth building, then stay with the work until your team owns it. No deck, no pitch — just a written deliverable at each step, in plain English.
Stakeholder interviews, data and vendor inventory, baseline numbers captured. The deliverable is a written ten-page audit — easy to read, easy to act on — ranked by what will move the number.
Discovery · written · you own itThree use cases, ranked. Honest about edge cases, model limits, and what to kill. No upsell on the call. If the work is small, I say so. If there's nothing to do, I say that too.
Plain English · ranked · honestI attend the hard calls, pressure-test the build, and vet the vendors and the hires. The engagement ends when capability is owned in-house — not when the invoice is paid.
Until your team owns itA decade across AWS, Deloitte and Snowflake — and three markets along the way: Dublin, Sydney and Melbourne. Each one has its own regulators, its own culture, its own definition of "enterprise-ready." The work has been advising, developing and delivering for digital natives, SMBs and FSI enterprises in all three — one operator across every step, not a hand-off between strategy decks and delivery teams. My method starts with the business problem, not the technology. What are you trying to achieve? Where do you want to be in six to twelve months? From there, we work backwards — every milestone earning its place against the outcome. The discipline comes from AWS Professional Services (Consultant of the Year) and Deloitte NZ, where I led the cloud practice. Most recently at Snowflake, on a nine-figure strategic account, I unblocked a year-long stalled platform initiative in a single quarter — work that underpinned an 18× contract step-up at renewal. Every engagement is freelance and independent. Fixed scope, written contract, monthly cancel — we agree the shape on a call before anything starts.
Vendor short-lists. Hire-vs-buy calls. The decisions that determine whether the programme actually ships.
The audit I run for every new client. Two weeks to a written, ranked view of the gap between where you are and where the number needs to be — and the work worth doing first.
Reference architectures, runbooks, on-call coverage, model and vendor changeovers. The ugly middle of the work — written down and owned.
ICP, sales motion, pricing, partner ecosystem, enablement. Built from inside one of the largest GenAI sales motions in ANZ — not from a deck on a flight home.
Independent AI advisor · Melbourne
A decade of shipping cloud and AI from inside the companies people benchmark against — AWS, Deloitte, Snowflake. Started in Dublin: security analyst, then AWS engineering, then a Solutions Architect supporting 350+ SMB customers. Four years across enterprise FSI in Melbourne — Enterprise Solutions Architect across 12 Tier-1 ANZ banks. Most recently Snowflake, on the firm's largest non-North-American account, where I scoped 50 GenAI use cases and shipped 31 of them with a named business owner. Anthropic certified. Harvard Business School — AI for Leaders, completed May 2026.
I started theybuild.io because the gap between "AI is going to change everything" (91% of executives) and "we've actually integrated it" (21%) is the single most expensive gap in Australian business right now. Closing it doesn't require a vendor. It requires somebody to do the work honestly.
25 minutes on a call. You tell me where you're stuck. If I can help, I'll say so and scope it on a follow-up. If I can't, I'll point you at the person who can. Either way, you'll leave with one thing to do on Monday.
Prefer email? dean@theybuild.io · LinkedIn