ProjxAI is built on a career spent inside Australian businesses — running marketing, building systems, owning the P&L. Founder Michael Collicoat started it after watching too many AI vendors sell solutions to problems they'd never had to solve themselves.
Michael started in technology in the mid-1980s — hands-on, production work. Networks, systems, the things that break at 2am and need to be fixed before the business opens. He spent the first decade learning how digital infrastructure actually works: not from a whiteboard, but from being the person responsible when it didn't.
The second phase was in senior leadership — GM-level roles in digital businesses, owning P&L, managing teams, and holding multi-million-dollar marketing budgets. He sat in board meetings defending technology investment decisions. He scoped and approved vendor contracts. He made the calls that consultants typically avoid: not “here are three options” but “here is what we're doing and why.”
The third phase — the last decade-plus — has been as an operator at the intersection of marketing, technology, and AI. Building production systems in-house rather than buying vendor promises. Running multi-channel digital operations at scale. Watching what AI can actually do — and, more importantly, watching the gap between what vendors claim and what gets shipped.
That arc — hands-on tech, then P&L leadership, then operator at the AI intersection — is the background ProjxAI is built on.
Operator, not adviser
Ran the businesses and owned the outcome — through hands-on production tech and GM-level P&L leadership.
Full P&L responsibility
Owned multi-million-dollar marketing budgets in-house — not consulted on them from the outside.
Production systems shipped
Multi-channel marketing automation, performance dashboards, custom integrations, AI tooling — built and run, not specced and handed off.
Industry breadth
Hospitality, B2B distribution, travel, and online services. Brisbane-based, working with Australian businesses.
Two things converged at around the same time.
The first was the capability shift. AI crossed a threshold — from interesting-but-marginal to genuinely useful for businesses that aren't Google or McKinsey. The question stopped being “can AI do this?” and became “is it worth doing for this business at this stage?” That's a different question. It's an operator's question.
The second was what Michael was watching in the market. A wave of AI consultants, agencies, and tools is being sold into the Australian SME market — by smart engineers and sharp salespeople who have never had to defend a marketing spend to a board, or make a technology call with their own budget on the line. They know what AI can do. They don't always know what's worth doing.
ProjxAI exists to close that gap. To bring AI to Australian SMEs through someone who has spent a career running the kind of business those SMEs are running — and who understands that the operator's job isn't to be impressed by what a technology can do. It's to work out what it's worth.
“Most AI consultants will tell you what's possible. I'll tell you what's worth doing this quarter.”
— Michael Collicoat, founder
A career inside digital businesses gives you three things that can't be taught in a course or acquired in a handful of consulting engagements.
He knows what a CFO will and won't approve, what a board will and won't underwrite, and how to frame an AI investment as a finance decision — not a tech decision.
Years of being the person responsible when things either work or don't. No tolerance for projects that show well in a deck and never reach production.
Hospitality, B2B distribution, travel, online services. He can walk into any vertical and orient inside an hour — not because he's read about it, but because he's run it.
ProjxAI is a registered Australian business (ABN 80 398 642 662) — professional accountability, proper contracts, and a business built to last.
Book a free 15-minute Clarity Call. No sales pitch — just an honest conversation about where AI can genuinely help your business and what it will take to get there.