I first used AI properly sometime in late 2022, back when OpenAI had a playground interface that most people hadn’t heard of yet. I remember typing questions into it and getting responses that felt different from anything I’d experienced with technology before. Not better than Google, exactly, but different in a way that was hard to articulate. It felt like talking to something that understood context. I kept coming back to it, testing its edges, trying to figure out what it was actually good at and where it fell apart.
Then ChatGPT launched and the world caught up. Suddenly everyone was talking about it. I watched the discourse shift from curiosity to genuine concern. Business leaders, scientists, technologists, all saying variations of the same thing: this is going to change everything, and most people aren’t ready. I was studying Economics, Statistics, and Information Systems at the University of Auckland. Every lecture felt increasingly disconnected from what was actually happening in the world outside the classroom.
The Rabbit Hole
The thing that really shifted my thinking wasn’t a headline or a TED talk. It was stumbling across AI agents that were running businesses. Not hypothetically. Actually doing it. I saw autonomous systems posting content, managing workflows, making decisions. I read about projects where AI agents had been given a small amount of capital and told to figure out how to grow it. Some of them were doing it. Not perfectly, but they were doing it.
That led me deeper. Instagram, Twitter, Discord servers full of people who were building with AI in ways that felt actually new. Not just using ChatGPT to write emails, but deploying agents that could handle complex multi-step processes autonomously. I started to feel something I hadn’t felt before about technology: pressure. A growing, uncomfortable sense that the world was moving faster than I was and that the gap between people who understood this and people who didn’t was widening every week.
I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of that gap.
Why Web Design
When I decided to actually build something, I wanted it to be practical. Not a side project that lived in a GitHub repo and never saw a customer. Something that solved a real problem for real people and generated real revenue. I started looking at what AI tools could do well right now, not in theory, and one answer kept coming back: they were exceptionally good at accelerating design and development work.
I also started paying attention to the businesses around me in Auckland. Cafes in Mt Eden, restaurants in Ponsonby, bars in Takapuna. Incredible places with real character and great food. But when you tried to look them up online, half of them either had no website at all or something that looked like it was built in 2012. When I asked a few owners why, the answer was always the same: agencies quoted them $3,000 to $7,000, and they couldn’t justify that kind of spend. So they stuck with an Instagram page and hoped for the best.
The economics were obvious. AI tools let me do in days what used to take an agency team weeks. That lower cost base meant I could offer a properly custom, high-quality website at a price point that a small restaurant could actually say yes to. Not a drag-and-drop builder. A real site, individually designed for their specific personality, for $695 with ongoing maintenance at $49 a month.
That’s how Sterling AI started.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers. But sitting in a lecture theatre studying market theory while the market itself was being reshaped felt like watching from the stands. I’d rather be on the pitch.
If you run a restaurant or cafe in Auckland and you’ve been putting off getting a website sorted, drop me an email. Happy to chat, no pressure.