On paper, those disciplines can look unrelated. To me, they have always revolved around similar questions:
- What influences a decision?
- What assumptions does a system rely on?
- What happens outside the expected path?
- Where is the leverage?
That curiosity has shaped most of the work I’ve chosen to do.
Sales · social engineering
Human behaviour
I’ve long been fascinated by influence, persuasion and the gap between what people say drives a decision and what actually does.
Consumer sales gave me an unusually direct environment to observe that. Conversations repeated at scale, performance was measurable, and small changes in framing, timing or positioning could materially alter the outcome.
Robert Cialdini’s Influence became one of the most important books I read because it gave formal explanations to many of the patterns I had already learned experimentally.
That interest became even more useful in social engineering and physical security, where trust, authority, urgency and context could matter as much as the technical controls around them.
Offensive security
Adversarial problem solving
Offensive security gave me a rigorous way to approach problems without obvious answers.
The process is iterative: enumerate, test an assumption, fail, learn something, adjust and repeat until one small weakness changes the problem.
That might mean finding a business-logic flaw in an application, escalating through an internal network, bypassing an access control or developing a convincing pretext to gain physical access.
The techniques change. The underlying discipline does not: don’t assume the intended path is the only path that matters.
My work included enterprise consulting at EY across applications, APIs, networks, infrastructure, social engineering and physical security.
Marketing · automation
From channels to systems
The same way of thinking carried naturally into marketing and automation.
I’ve worked across technical SEO, link acquisition, outbound, direct-response copy, CRM architecture and marketing automation, but increasingly, the most valuable work sat in how those pieces connected.
That meant looking beyond individual channels to the wider operation: how opportunities entered the business, how information moved between systems, where follow-up or decision-making created friction, and which parts of the process could be redesigned or automated.
That is what pulled more of my work toward software, automation and AI-enabled operations.
Foundations
Technical depth
I came into AI and automation with a technical foundation built long before agentic coding made software dramatically easier to produce.
That includes networking, Linux, APIs, databases, cloud environments and programming, alongside hands-on offensive-security work involving payload development, defence evasion, Active Directory attacks and enterprise network compromise.
OSCP, OSEP, CRTP, CARTP and CCNA are useful signals of that background, but what matters more is what they required: technical depth, persistence and the ability to solve unfamiliar problems under sustained pressure.
AI · automation
Building now
Most of my attention today is on AI, automation and business systems.
Through Paloren and selected projects, I’m interested in situations where technology changes the economics or structure of an operation rather than merely making an existing task slightly faster.
That usually means understanding the process first, questioning whether its old constraints still apply, and then deciding what should be handled by code, AI or people.
I’m also writing about the broader implications of that shift: how AI changes organisational design, execution costs, management and what increasingly small teams can build.
Travel · business
Beyond the work
The freedom to operate internationally has been something I’ve deliberately worked toward for years, and travel remains an important part of how I spend my time.
Business has also been a recurring interest for as long as I can remember. One of my first experiments involved buying playing cards in bulk and reselling them at school and online.
The projects are more complicated now, but the underlying instinct is much the same: understand how something works, test an idea and see what happens.