A practitioner with a framework, not a firm with a brochure.

I am Michael Borck. I have spent the last several years building local AI infrastructure for small firms, writing books on how AI changes professional work, and watching the gap between what the technology can do and what most firms are actually doing with it widen rather than narrow. This practice exists for the firms most affected by that gap.

My day work is at Curtin University, where I lecture in AI (Strategic and Tactical), Cyber Security, and Programming in the Information Systems discipline, School of Marketing and Management. The lecturing role is a biographical fact, not an endorsement: this consultancy operates privately, on my own time and infrastructure, and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Curtin University.

Independently, I run an applied research lab — LocoLabo — which studies what privacy-first AI on consumer hardware can do for small firms. The lab is the place where I work out what is technically viable. The consulting practice is the place where I help small firms put it to use.

The intellectual centre of the practice is the Conversation not Delegation framework. I argue across two of my books — Conversation not Delegation and Partner Don't Police — that AI adoption in professional services is fundamentally a literacy problem before it is a technology problem. Both books were picked up onto the reading list at Kaplan Business School after an interview on AI use in education. The framework names a distinction — between using AI as a delegate and using it as a collaborator — that most firms do not yet have a vocabulary for. Once they do, the firm-level conversation about AI changes.

The practice's delivery methodology is structured around five strategic questions — Can we do AI? Should we? How do we do it? Are we ready? What's the value? — drawn from the AI strategy literature, particularly Upadhyay's Artificial Intelligence for Managers (2021) and Yao & Koidan's Applied Artificial Intelligence (2024). Conversation not Delegation is the operating principle; the five questions are the structure. Every AI Readiness Diagnostic places the firm on each of the questions and identifies the highest-leverage first move.

The practice is intentionally small. One person, fixed-scope engagements, one offer at a time. I work with regulated Australian small firms — law, medical, allied-health, accounting, financial-advisory — because that is where the literacy, governance, and sovereignty questions land hardest.