Products and systems built for real work.
Each one documents the problem, the system built, the result, and what failed along the way.
Products
Company · Sales & client insightMindreader: AI sales intelligence for teams at AIA, CIMB and Manulife
Mindreader gave sales teams at AIA, CIMB and Manulife a read on each prospect before the first meeting, backed by ~SGD 500K in angel funding and IBF-recognised training.
Company · Running operations with AIThe Modern Shrine: running a production AI product as a one-person company
The Modern Shrine is a consumer AI product with a production app and paying customers, run by one person, with live workshops in Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Japan. This case study covers the constraint that shaped it, the design behind its self-checking report pipeline, how it runs day to day, and the results, including 341 reports generated from 365 assessments and 13 workshops across four countries.
Case studies
Case study · AI adoptionGoogle Crowdsource × Explore ML: teaching machine learning to 900 non-technical learners across Asia
Google's Crowdsource program partnered with Explore ML to teach machine learning to people who had never written code. Google picked 30 volunteer facilitators from 13 countries to deliver it. This case study covers the constraint the program faced, the teaching model that made the material land with non-technical adults, how the workshops ran, and what they produced, from about 900 learners to single sessions of 230 people.
Case study · Marketing & outreachA supervised AI team that earns attention one reply at a time
A supervised six-agent team that published 15,621 replies, lifted X impressions 298%, and reduced routine daily review to about 20 minutes.
Case study · Knowledge & retrievalA private search engine for AI agents over 13,000 Obsidian notes
Obsidian, a 66 MB local embedding model, sparse search, RRF and a shareable agent skill, combined into private retrieval without sending the knowledge base to an external embedding API.
Case study · AI adoption in an insurance sales workflowHow live UAT with insurance advisers reshaped an AI sales coach
At Mindreader, live UAT with insurance advisers showed where technically valid AI output became operationally useless, and the evidence became a narrower product and iteration plan.
Case study · Lead captureThe build was the easy part: a forward deployed engineer inside a financial advisory firm
A senior insurance director had a good idea for starting family-planning conversations, no developer, and about two weeks of runway. In about ten days we turned it into a live quiz funnel with 24 personalised referral codes, automatic routing to the right advisor, and analytics from first tap to confirmed slot.
Case study · One-off value did not become repeat use or revenueWhen usage data contradicted Mindreader's roadmap
At Mindreader, research, product behaviour and cohort data showed the real problem: turning a first insight into a repeatable, paid workflow.
Case study · Preserve operating capacity while reducing cost and operator loadWhen one person inherited a ten-person operation: an AI-native systems case study
How much of a real company can one person safely operate with AI? Not a demo. A live SaaS with a real P&L, paying customers, and years of accumulated context.
Case study · Knowledge & retrievalWhat my AI knowledge-system workshop for two insurance advisors got wrong
Two insurance advisors kept re-explaining themselves to ChatGPT and losing what they'd learned across old chats. I ran a workshop to give them a second brain they own. It produced real excitement but no proof it worked on the day. Here is what broke and what I changed.
Case study · Market & customer signalsA social-media signal finder for investment decisions, and the judgment AI couldn't replace
A Singapore crypto investing academy with more than 40,000 students asked me to build a system that reads investment chatter on X and flags opportunities early. We built it and it worked as designed. The bigger lesson was that the client's real edge lived in their own heads, and no amount of AI research could replace it.
Case study · Knowledge & retrievalA knowledge graph for the World Resources Institute, built by 40 volunteers with no manager
For the World Resources Institute, an Omdena team of more than 40 volunteers from 15+ countries turned the websites of three forest-restoration platforms into a knowledge graph of who works on which climate hazards, with which solutions and partners. The brief was vague, nobody assigned the work, and the off-the-shelf models fell short. This case study covers how the problem was understood, how the pipeline worked and what it left unsolved.