Adptiv — Journey https://adptiv.com.au/journey Field notes and essays by Lachlan Gill on building production AI systems, agentic workflows, and private LLMs. en-au Wed, 01 Jul 2026 23:04:50 GMT What Does a Custom AI Agent System Actually Cost? https://adptiv.com.au/journey/what-does-a-custom-ai-agent-system-actually-cost https://adptiv.com.au/journey/what-does-a-custom-ai-agent-system-actually-cost Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Field Notes Lachlan Gill Treating AI less like a search tool and more like something you give a proper task to. Here's the workflow I've landed on for research, and the prompts that actually make it work. Three things I built in Claude Cowork in a matter of hours. https://adptiv.com.au/journey/three-things-i-built-in-claude-cowork https://adptiv.com.au/journey/three-things-i-built-in-claude-cowork Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Field Notes Lachlan Gill Claude Cowork lowered the setup cost for the kind of recurring tasks I knew I should automate but kept letting slide. Here are the first three that stuck. Your AI assistant probably knows more about your business than you think. Here's why that should concern you. https://adptiv.com.au/journey/your-ai-assistant-knows-more-than-you-think https://adptiv.com.au/journey/your-ai-assistant-knows-more-than-you-think Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Case Notes Lachlan Gill Most businesses using AI haven't read the terms. For sensitive commercial information, that gap is a real risk. Here's what I built instead. I built an AI-native CRM from scratch. Here's what actually happened. https://adptiv.com.au/journey/i-built-an-ai-native-crm https://adptiv.com.au/journey/i-built-an-ai-native-crm Fri, 15 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Case Notes Lachlan Gill CARM started as an experiment — a sovereign, AI-native CRM for a Melbourne consultancy. It became something I'm genuinely proud of. Here's what I built, how it works, and what it taught me. What happens when you turn years of consulting knowledge into a conversation? https://adptiv.com.au/journey/turning-consulting-knowledge-into-conversation https://adptiv.com.au/journey/turning-consulting-knowledge-into-conversation Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Case Notes Lachlan Gill Consulting firms are knowledge businesses. I spent months encoding a consultancy's methodology into AI agents that could actually think through a conversation. Here's what happened. What actually changes when you add AI to a business process. https://adptiv.com.au/journey/what-actually-changes-when-you-add-ai https://adptiv.com.au/journey/what-actually-changes-when-you-add-ai Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Field Notes Lachlan Gill Most AI projects either over-promise transformation or under-deliver as a chatbot. The interesting work sits in the middle — quietly rewriting how a process behaves. The case for sovereign AI infrastructure in Australia. https://adptiv.com.au/journey/the-case-for-sovereign-ai-in-australia https://adptiv.com.au/journey/the-case-for-sovereign-ai-in-australia Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Essays Lachlan Gill Where your data lives matters. For Australian businesses handling sensitive commercial work, the default of US-hosted AI is a decision worth examining. Why I stopped recommending Zapier for serious automation. https://adptiv.com.au/journey/why-i-stopped-recommending-zapier https://adptiv.com.au/journey/why-i-stopped-recommending-zapier Mon, 09 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT Field Notes Lachlan Gill Zapier is a great onboarding tool for automation thinking. It's a poor foundation for anything you actually depend on. Here's where the line falls.