Khalil Khabibullin.

Now

What I'm focused on right now. Updated monthly.

This is a now page. Last updated: April 2026.


Work

pi Leading AI enablement and business architecture at HSBC Global Insurance in Hong Kong. Current focus areas:

  • Rolling out the AI adoption strategy across 8 entities — moving from ideation to production-grade use cases
  • Designing agentic AI governance frameworks for enterprise deployment
  • Operating model work for underwriting workflows and bancassurance distribution

Building

  • Personal AI assistant — calendar and to-do management via n8n + Telegram + Notion. Working on adding voice interaction and persistent “memory” (RAG over personal documents with Qdrant)
  • Family Bot — WhatsApp/Telegram orchestrator for the household. Document retrieval, reminders, image handling
  • Homelab — Ubuntu server, Docker Compose stack (Plex, Radarr, Jackett, rclone, VPN). Keeping the infrastructure lean

Reading

  • Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (re-read)
  • Working through the Iain Banks Culture series backlog
  • Recently finished: David Goggins — found it motivating but slightly unhinged (in a good way)

Training

  • Preparing for Hyrox pairs with a 2-month structured programme
  • Trying to maintain consistency over intensity — the perennial struggle

Family

  • Planning a family trip to Australia (April — school holidays)
  • Kids: Robert growing fast, Olivia and the youngest keeping things chaotic and wonderful
  • Based in Discovery Bay, Hong Kong

Exploring

  • Corporate agentic AI — what does real governance look like when agents act autonomously?
  • Document intelligence architecture — embedding strategies for heterogeneous document types

Interests — what I care about beyond work

Things I spend time on when nobody’s paying me to.

📖 Sci-Fi

Heavyweight, philosophical, preferably bleak. Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun is the peak. Peter Watts (Blindsight, Echopraxia) writes the hardest sci-fi I’ve found. Neal Stephenson (Anathem, Snow Crash) for something dense but more fun. Iain Banks’s Culture series for the best AI characters in fiction. I also read in Russian — Cixin Liu in translation, classic Soviet sci-fi, and the occasional Dostoevsky when I’m feeling masochistic. Running list with short reviews on the books page.

🏃 Hyrox & Running

Currently training for Hyrox pairs — running plus functional stations. Having a race on the calendar turns out to be the only reliable discipline hack I’ve found.

🤖 Home Automation & Self-Hosting

A home server (Ubuntu, Docker Compose): Plex/Radarr/Jackett for media, n8n for the Family Bot and personal AI assistant, rclone/rsync for backup, VPN for remote access. I used to run a smart-home blog; the blog is dormant, the hobby isn’t.

♟️ Chess & Poker

Recreational, not competitive. Chess as applied game theory, poker for honest risk. Decision-making under uncertainty is a better model for strategy than most business books.

🏛️ Stoicism

Practical, Roman, not academic. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius as daily operating principles — the dichotomy of control, negative visualisation, response over event. Not platitudes.

🧩 Minimalism

In design, tools, and lifestyle. Things that do one thing well. My website is text. My phone home screen has one page. My wardrobe is boring. Not dogmatic — reducing options just reduces friction.