I'm Tee. It's good to meet you.

My full name is Chatchawan Lakkhananukun. I'm an engineer, a father of two, and someone who has usually had a business idea on the go alongside whatever else I was doing. These days I'm based in Bangkok, working with AI, data and the everyday operations of a chemical and life-science distributor.

I moved to New Zealand at eighteen and spent much of my early adult life there. I studied mechatronics, worked in machinery safety and co-owned a café while holding down my engineering job. Eventually I came back to Thailand, where family life and work took me in a direction I hadn't planned.

What I do now

I'm the Lead AI Engineer at Chemical Express. Since joining in 2019, I've built our technology, data and marketing capabilities and hired and trained a team of six. My work covers the software itself, the people using it and the business decisions around it. I also take part in partnership meetings, develop relationships and close partnership agreements.

The engineering started with connecting our operational records and customer relationship system, then building tools for purchasing, delivery and billing. It grew into sales recommendation models and AI agents that help prepare quotations. For those projects, apart from the collaborative OCR work on reading product labels and invoices, I handled the conversations with the teams, the design, the coding and the testing.

Working across those areas has given me a good understanding of how the business fits together. That's often what people come to me for: thinking through a problem, seeing what else it affects and helping decide how to move forward. You can follow those decisions in the work stories, including the technical details behind them.

A little more about my life

I once planned to move to London to study financial engineering. Instead, I returned to Thailand, became a father and later completed a mostly online master's in Business Analytics at Carnegie Mellon while working. My wife and our son came with me to the US for graduation. After all those lectures and team meetings on a screen, I finally got to meet my classmates in person.

There are quite a few turns like that in my life. I've started businesses, had ideas that went nowhere and changed plans when family needed me. I'm writing about those experiences here as well, including the parts I'm still trying to work out.

Read my story, starting with arriving in Auckland at eighteen.