What it was
I built and ran a software consulting firm in Malaysia for roughly a decade, growing it to a 12-person team at its peak. The work ranged from hands-on engineering and testing through architecture, delivery, hiring, sales, marketing, and client management.
The customer surface included major enterprise organizations in aviation, banking, central banking, energy, automotive, retail, and finance, along with long-term consulting engagements through Softworks. The company eventually kept running under employees in Malaysia after I returned to the United States.
Why it still matters
Consulting builds a useful kind of scar tissue. You learn that the software is never just the software. It is incentives, support load, timelines, budgets, politics, user trust, and the cost of being wrong in production.
That background is directly relevant to enterprise AI. Agentic systems need the same practical instincts: clear boundaries, observability, rollback paths, user controls, and a serious respect for messy organizations.