01/09/2026
I live in Griffith, NSW. Over 500km from the nearest tech hub.
Most weeks that means I'm not in the room. Last week I made sure I was, I travelled to Sydney for a bunch of events and managed to attend the and event, the kind of room where the conversations that shape what's coming next ๐ข๐ค๐ต๐ถ๐ข๐ญ๐ญ๐บ happen.
My read on Grok that night was blunt: not secure enough for how our systems run. No logins, no data, no access, full stop for me.
I didn't adopt it.
BUT I love a good workaround, and I wanted to see how far I could make it flex without ever touching anything of ours or passing a login or 2FA code.
In one day I worked out how to tailor Grok's search using hunter and gatherer logic, feeding results to my AI Head of Staff at Grok called "Icebreaker", who then feeds my Head of Staff at the CanTicket Command Centre aka Candy for sales and lead gen. No logins. No data access. Just a filtered signal moving one way.
Has it worked? So far, yes. Two seats and a panel invite to present, off usage I wasn't even allocating or paying for.
That's the part of this business nobody sees from Griffith. The distance doesn't make me cautious about showing up, it makes me hungrier for it. I don't get to bump into these rooms by accident, so when I'm in one, I don't leave with a badge and a LinkedIn connection. I leave with something I can actually use, built safely, on my own terms.
Neat tech, used safely. Not "adopt the shiny new tool." Not "reject it because it's new." Work out exactly what you can extract from it without inheriting its risk.
If you're building something serious from somewhere unusual, let me know where in the comments below! ๐
Ps written by Cass AI