Clifford Tan

Hi, I’m Clifford.

I’ve spent most of my career around business systems, operations and technology.

These days I’m especially interested in what AI changes, what it doesn’t, and how people and organisations can use it without making work more complicated.

I consult, teach, build small experiments and write about what I’m learning, drawing on a background in business systems, regional digital operations and applied AI.

What I’m exploring now

A few things have my attention at the moment.

Ambient AI

Exploring

What changes when AI can observe ongoing work instead of waiting to be prompted?

Agentic workflows

Active

Where should agents act, what should remain human, and how do we keep the workflow reliable?

AI economics for SMEs

Exploring

Where does AI genuinely change the economics of existing work rather than merely save a few minutes?

Teaching AI to working adults

Ongoing

Teaching keeps showing me that using AI well is often less about prompting and more about judgement, workflow and confidence.

More about what I’m working on

Notes

Observations, arguments and things I’m still working through.

Judgement is becoming the bottleneck

AI can generate and analyse faster than organisations can decide what is good enough, what matters and when to intervene.

Process thinking matters more, not less

Better AI makes it easier to automate badly understood work.

The AI absorption gap

Many organisations can buy AI faster than they can absorb it into everyday work.

Agents need boundaries

The useful question is not whether agents are autonomous, but where autonomy belongs and how humans stay in control.

Read all notes

Experiments

Small things I’m building, testing or trying to understand.

Some will become useful. Some won’t.

  • Ambient AIExploring
  • Agentic workflowsActive
  • Local AIExploring
  • SME OSEvolving
See all experiments

Teaching

Teaching AI keeps showing me where people actually struggle.

The challenge is rarely the first prompt. It is using AI repeatedly, knowing how much to trust it and fitting it into real work.

I teach practical generative AI, agentic AI, workflow design and human review.

More about teaching

Work

I work through Harvest Point Consulting on business systems, operational improvement and practical AI adoption.

I also take on selected advisory, teaching and collaboration work.

A bit about me

I started in infrastructure and software, then moved through projects, systems and business analysis.

Over time, I realised the difficult work was rarely the technology alone. It sat between people, decisions, processes and systems.

AI has pulled me into another transition.

I’m interested in what becomes possible when software can reason, observe and act, and in what still needs to remain distinctly human.

That is partly why this site exists.

More about me

A few working principles

  • Understand the work before automating it.
  • Keep important human judgement visible.
  • Prefer useful systems over impressive demos.
  • Do not confuse faster output with better decisions.

These are working principles, not doctrine.

Get in touch

If you want to compare notes, collaborate on an experiment, discuss a piece of work or invite me to teach, feel free to reach out.