The Groundwork Is The Advantage

I haven't written a Field Note in a while.

That wasn't accidental.

Field Notes was never meant to become another system.

It was never designed to land in your inbox every week just because a schedule said it should.

If I've got something worth saying, I'll say it.

If I don't, I won't.

That's how this was always meant to work.

Lately, I just haven't felt the need to force one.

Partly because Catalyst has been flat out.

Partly because I've been deep in the work.

And partly because I've been sitting with a lot of thoughts around AI, business, and where I actually want to make an impact in all of this.

I'd been in China for just over two weeks when this really clicked.

And honestly, the biggest culture hit I've ever had happened the second I crossed the border from Hong Kong.

I've been to places before where English isn't really spoken.

That's one thing.

This was different.

Getting into a car and realising the driver couldn't understand what I was showing him through a translation app.

Walking into a supermarket and not a single thing being in English.

Taking photos of labels, signs, packaging, menus, buttons, just to understand what I was looking at.

It takes you right back to a very basic part of being human.

Can I communicate?

Can I understand?

Can I function here?

And weirdly, I was grateful for it.

Because we take that layer of life for granted.

The ability to explain ourselves.

The ability to ask simple questions.

The ability to move through the world without friction.

When that gets stripped away, even briefly, you feel how foundational it really is.

Shenzhen is one of those places where you're not just seeing another city.

You're seeing a version of what other countries might look like in 10 or 15 years.

Not because it feels flashy.

Because the groundwork is already there.

That's the bit that hit me.

What's impressed me most here hasn't actually been the AI side of things in the way most people talk about it either.

A lot of the most advanced work happens quietly, behind closed doors.

What hit me harder was the groundwork.

The basics.

The way life works when systems actually talk to each other.

The way one or two apps can handle most of what you need.

The way speed becomes normal when the foundations are already there.

That's the part I don't think New Zealand and Australia fully appreciate yet.

We talk a lot about innovation, automation, and AI, but a lot of businesses still operate across scattered systems, disconnected tools, duplicated effort, and no real central source of truth.

No holistic understanding.

No clean operational backbone.

Just layers of admin, workarounds, and people holding things together manually.

China, at least from what I've seen here, has done a lot of the foundational work first.

Then built upward from there.

And that matters.

Because AI on top of a messy business doesn't create magic.

It usually just creates faster mess.

I've met some seriously impressive people over here.

People working in AI inside government.

People building hardware.

People building things that genuinely make you stop and go, alright, this is moving faster than most people realise.

You can feel the intent here.

Especially in this part of China.

There are a lot of people in Shenzhen because they are here to build something.

To solve something.

To push something forward.

That energy is hard to ignore.

It's not performative.

It feels purposeful.

And that's probably what I've respected most.

The robotics side of this place is wild too.

But not in a staged demo way.

In an everyday-life way.

I've been in robot taxis.

I've had coffee made by a humanoid robot.

I've nearly been run over by a mall cleaning robot and a street cleaning robot, both of which had better sensors than I had awareness.

That's the interesting part to me.

Not the stuff people are filming because it feels futuristic.

The stuff that's already been absorbed into normal life.

The things no one is taking photos of because, to them, it's already just part of how things work.

That's always when you know something is real.

Not when it's being shown off.

When it's quietly in use.

Even the EV presence here says a lot.

There are brands everywhere that most people in New Zealand or Australia haven't even heard of yet.

Whole towers wrapped in automotive logos I didn't recognise, and I love cars.

That alone tells you something.

A lot of what's happening here either isn't being covered properly in the West, or it's being framed too narrowly.

And while I've been here, I've also been building.

Over the last month or so, I've built what is basically a living operating system for Catalyst.

Something I can talk to daily from my phone.

It understands what's happening across the business.

But here's the important part.

That didn't happen because I plugged in a magic AI tool and got some overnight win.

It took real work.

A lot of it.

It meant extracting what was in my head and turning it into something structured.

I had to document it.

Build it.

Refine it.

Test it.

Break it.

Rebuild it.

That's the bit people keep missing.

There is no fast win in AI.

Or at least not the kind people think there is.

If something looks like an instant win, it's probably surface level.

The real value tends to come later, once the groundwork is done.

Funnily enough, that feels true of this place too.

That's probably the biggest thing I'd leave you with from where my head is at right now.

Not use more AI.

More like:

Get your foundations right first.

Because the businesses that win over the next few years probably won't just be the ones using AI the most.

They'll be the ones with the cleanest thinking, the clearest workflows, and the strongest operational base underneath it.

On our side, we've had a big few months.

March was heavy on audits.

A lot of sitting inside businesses, talking to people for hours, understanding how work actually flows.

Why is it done like that?

Where does it break?

Where does time get lost?

What's manual that shouldn't be?

What's being tolerated because that's just how it's always been?

That kind of work matters.

Because before you automate anything well, you need to understand it properly.

That's led into some exciting builds on our side too.

At a high level, we've been working across:

That's also where I think the shift is happening.

A lot of people still think in terms of can AI help me write this email.

Which is fine.

But the more interesting question now is:

What should this business actually become when software is no longer the constraint?

Because we're now at the point where you can build proper internal tools, proper web apps, proper operating systems around a business without needing to approach it the old way.

That's where things get interesting.

And behind the scenes, we're working on a few things I'm genuinely excited about.

Things I haven't really seen done properly yet.

Things that I think could be genuinely useful for helping people understand, access, and use AI in a more grounded way.

More on that soon.

This isn't a perfectly tied-up ending, and I'm good with that.

I think I'm just in a season of seeing more clearly what matters.

Systems matter.

Groundwork matters.

Context matters.

And the future usually arrives a lot quieter than people expect.

Not with one big moment.

Not with one flashy announcement.

But through infrastructure, habit, integration, and people who are already building what others are still only talking about.