I’m writing this from Bangkok as I prepare to teach AI Automation.
Slightly dazed, properly caffeinated, and genuinely happy to be here, which is more than I can say for how I felt approximately 36 hours ago, standing in Dubai Airport at an ungodly hour with no sleep, realising I had a ten-hour wait ahead of me that I absolutely did not sign up for.
Here’s what happened:
I checked in at Lisbon. The connecting flights were already set. I didn’t look closely enough.
The airline had changed my schedule at some point, silently, without making much of a fuss about it, and I only discovered the full extent of the damage when I was already through security in Dubai with nowhere to go and nothing to do except find a corner of the terminal that was marginally less uncomfortable than the rest and wait.
Ten hours.
In Dubai. Without sleep.
I couldn’t even complain properly… it was my own fault for not checking. So I didn’t. I just waited. 🤦♂️
By the time I landed in Bangkok I was, to use the technical term, completely dead. The kind of tired where you’re not sure if you’re still thinking or just simulating thinking. I got to my accommodation, slept as I’d never slept before, and woke up ready for what I actually came here to do.
What I came here to do
For the next three weeks, I’ll be teaching a course called Build Your AI Agents and Automated Flows — No Coding Required at Harbour.Space University’s Bangkok campus. It runs from 27th April to 15th May, and the students will walk out having built things that actually work.
The course covers the full stack of practical, no-code automation: Make, n8n, Zapier, Airtable, and the AI layer on top: ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini (I’ll use a few others not-so-known as well), integrated into real workflows. Not theory. Not slides about what automation could theoretically do. Actual systems that classify, route, generate content, qualify leads, and make decisions autonomously within defined parameters.
The three weeks are structured deliberately.
The first week is on foundations: understanding how triggers and actions work, why deterministic automation often beats AI-powered decisions in terms of cost and reliability, and how to design data architecture in Airtable so it actually holds up when you connect it to everything else.
The second week is where the AI integration comes in: prompt engineering for automated contexts, using LLMs for classification and routing, content generation at scale, and the move from automation into genuine agents. The third week is systems thinking and the final project: a “Marketing Team Amplifier” where each student builds an individual component that connects into a group-wide marketing system. By the end, the whole thing runs as one cohesive machine.
I’m genuinely looking forward to it.
Every class I’ve taught has sharpened how I think about this work, because explaining it to people who haven’t built these systems before forces you to get honest about what actually matters versus what’s just unnecessary complexity. Bangkok students, in my experience, ask good questions and push back on examples that don’t fit their context. That’s exactly what I want. 🙌
How any of this is possible
Three businesses.
Multiple clients.
Several newsletters.
Ongoing projects.
And I’m spending almost a month in Southeast Asia.
This is not a coincidence, and it is not luck.
It is the direct result of spending years building the infrastructure that makes it possible: automating the administrative layer of everything that doesn’t require me personally, and putting the right people in place to handle what does require human judgment and relationships. The engine that runs the boring but necessary parts of three businesses didn’t build itself. It took time I didn’t always feel I had, and the returns on that investment are moments like this one.
I’m not saying this to sound impressive. I’m saying it because it’s the most honest argument I know for why automation matters beyond productivity statistics.
When you build systems that work without you, you get your life back, instead of losing your role. You get the freedom to say YES to things that actually energise you. For me, one of those things is teaching. For someone else, it’s something entirely different. The point is you get to choose.
That’s also, roughly, what I’ll be telling the students in that classroom for the next three weeks.
What you’ll see from me over the next month
I made a commitment before I left that I was going to use this trip as a forcing function to finally be more consistent with video.
I find it deeply uncomfortable to see myself on camera and to speak naturally in a language that is not my first. Bangkok, somehow, makes that feel less like performance and more like documentation, and that’s the mental shift I apparently need to press record.
So I’ll be sharing daily video updates across my social channels covering what we worked on in class that day: the key concepts, the practical takeaways, the things that surprised even me in the room.
If you’re curious about AI automation but not ready to book a course in Bangkok, following along will give you a real sense of how this material actually lands with people building it for the first time.
Follow me on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram for the daily updates. And if you want the full picture of what the course covers, the outline is all there on the Harbour.Space course page.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a class to prepare for and a city to explore.
In that order, probably. 😉
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