I spent 13 years building systems for a farmed animal sanctuary. Then AI changed everything.

The long way round

I was born in South Africa to a British mother and a South African father. My mother was vegetarian, compassionate, and aware of animal rights long before it was common. My father was a strict businessman and an incredible networker. Between the two of them, I got a strange but useful combination: drive and heart.

University was a winding road. I changed courses more times than I changed clothes, eventually finishing with a double major in Human Movement Science and Finance. Neither would end up defining my career.

I left South Africa. Went to London. Met an Australian. Moved to Australia and fell in love with the place and stayed.

Once in Australia, I heard about a farmed animal sanctuary called Edgar's Mission, just outside Melbourne. I started volunteering. Within months, I was the first paid staff member. The team eventually grew to over 20 people.

Over that time I did every role. Farm cleaning. Maintenance. Animal care. Accounting. Vet runs. Rescues. Social media. Fundraising. Photography. Tour coordination. Donor management. There was no software designed for a nonprofit farmed animal sanctuary, so I built the digital infrastructure from scratch. Salesforce, Airtable, Slack, Make.com automations stitching it all together. My wife Kelly built the social media presence to nearly 3 million followers across platforms.

After 13 and a half years, I left. It was late 2023, right as the AI wave was hitting. I moved north to a little property in New South Wales, about 45 minutes from Port Macquarie. Beautiful beaches, rainforests, whales migrating through. Quiet and rural.

I started consulting for nonprofits on AI and automations. Good work. Real value. But a pattern kept repeating. I would build something, hand it over, and nothing grew from it. The people inside these organisations needed the skills themselves.

That is when everything shifted. I rebranded, relaunched, and built AI Impact Hub around one idea: education first. Not consulting that creates dependency. Training that builds capability.

What I keep seeing

Most organisations do not have an AI problem. They have a visibility problem. Staff are buried in manual tasks they have never questioned because they do not know an alternative exists. Leadership has not prioritised AI because they have not seen what it can do. And the people who would benefit most are too busy being busy to step back and look.

I see this pattern everywhere. Someone mentions a tedious workflow in passing — copying URLs into spreadsheets, manually logging media mentions, formatting donor data by hand — and when I stop them and say "that can be automated," the look on their face changes. That is the moment. Not when you show someone a new tool. When you show them that the thing they thought was just part of the job does not have to be.

The other thing I have learned is that the real value of AI is not doing existing work faster. It is doing things that were never possible before. A three-person team building an interactive web experience in an afternoon. A staff member turning an eight-minute voice note into a complete process document. An organisation querying years of institutional knowledge through a single conversation. These are not incremental improvements. They are fundamentally new capabilities.

But none of it happens without the right conditions. Leadership needs to set the direction — an AI policy, paid tools, permission to experiment. Staff need foundational skills and the time to explore. And someone needs to be in the room creating those moments where people see what is possible for the first time. That is the work I care about most.

Off the clock

I live on two and a half acres roughly halfway between Sydney and Brisbane. There are rescue dogs, seven sheep, cats, and a rooster that arrived recently. My wife and I have a teenage daughter who is far more sophisticated with technology than either of us.

My accent is a mix that belongs nowhere and everywhere. In South Africa, everyone thinks I am Australian. In Australia, everyone thinks I am South African. In Europe, people think I am from somewhere on the continent. I have stopped trying to explain it.

I still care deeply about animal advocacy. The thread through all of it, from volunteering at Edgar's Mission to building systems to teaching AI, is the same. Good tools and good knowledge in the hands of people doing meaningful work.