Introduce yourself — start here

This is the standing introductions thread. No format required — three lines is plenty.

To get you started, here's mine:

I'm Laurence. I work on getting AI into actual use across organisations in Singapore — not just into slide decks. At AI Singapore I built the AI Apprenticeship Programme and the 100 Experiments programme. The apprenticeship came from a stubborn belief: you don't just import an AI workforce, we need to grow our own timber. We took people from economics, biology, psychology — not just computer science — and turned them into working AI engineers. Everyone can learn to program; not everyone has a passion for data, and that passion turns up in the unlikeliest backgrounds.

The AIRI framework behind pAIRI and AI4E grew out of that work, and now runs as my own open, free initiative — released as an open standard because the same belief scales: AI readiness shouldn't sit behind a paywall or a job title. I wrote a book on it too, AI-First Nation.

And I try to practise what I teach. This site — the lessons, the assessments, and the plumbing behind them — was built with an AI coding agent working alongside me. After three decades in tech I still learn new tools the only way that sticks: by using them on real work. That is the whole point of this place — AI is not something to admire from a demo, it is something you pick up and put to work. The learning never stops, for any of us, at any level.

Your turn. A useful version:

• what you do (industry + roughly what your work involves),
• why you're here (the AI question that's actually on your mind),
• one thing you'd be glad to help someone else with — a tool you swear by, a workflow, a lesson learned the hard way.

That last line is the one that makes a community work. Everyone here knows something the rest of us don't.

-- Laurence