If you tried ChatGPT Voice before, and you were unimpressed, try it again. The previous Voice experience was interesting, but awkward. It interrupted pauses. It misread the end of a sentence. It responded too quickly when you were still gathering your thoughts. Talking to it felt like you had to manage an over-caffeinated friend, [...]
We've got 350 members in the AI Coaching Academy. This is an online community for ambitious professionals who want to practice using the tools of the future. For those of you who have attended my free community events, or used the resources in the AI Playground, thanks for participating! For those who joined the AI Campus, the $100/month premium [...]
The conventional wisdom has been: open-source models are 3-6 months behind frontier models. If you wanted best-in-class reasoning, you had to pay for your tokens through a Frontier model. You could pay through a subscription (all-you-can-eat) or via an API (pay-as-you-go). With the release of agent harnesses like OpenClaw and Hermes, you can switch models with [...]
There's been lots of releases in July 2026. First, Anthropic said after Fable 5 was (re)-released, it would go onto the API, and paid subscribers could only use it via API or usage credits (making it pay-as-you-go, instead of all-you-can-eat) after 7 July. Then, OpenAI released GPT-5.6, with 3 reasoning levels, and your choice of effort : [...]
The years I spent as a marketing automation strategist taught me to see the work move through a workflow, end-to-end. I find myself using those skills more frequently, as I hatch and manage AI agents for clients. To launch an AI agent into a business, 4 things have to go right: Picking the right model Teaching it [...]
Last week I taught a half-day workshop in partnership with the Regional Business Partner Network at Enterprise North Canterbury. We gathered dozens of entrepreneurs and business owners together for an afternoon of AI training. They had heard the hype, seen the demos, and played around with a few tools. But they were still trying to [...]
Xero recently published a report comparing how New Zealanders are using AI. They surveyed more than 1000 professionals, and they found that most people are still using AI like a random toolbox. They open ChatGPT, or Copilot, or Claude, or Gemini. They ask a question, get an answer, copy the useful bits, and move on. That’s [...]
Projects fail if they aim too wide. That was the central theme of last week's workshop in the AI Agent Accelerator, the 4-workshop sprint where we build, deploy, and fine-tune AI agents. Using my 4-step SAGE framework, every week we: SCOPE agentic projects AUTOMATE robotic work GENERATE skills and system prompts EVALUATE effectiveness Projects succeed and fail on their [...]
AI agents are changing the way work gets done. As agentic AI systems become more capable, our real advantage will not come from technical proficiency. Our advantage will come from knowing how to manage AI agents well. The ability to scope agentic projects, manage autonomous systems, evaluate their performance, and design the information environments [...]
↠↠ The velocity of learning has increased. ↠↠ As part of TechWeekNZ, I hosted the EPIC AI Conference in Christchurch on 21 May, 2026. There were a dozen speakers and panelists, and lots of practical takeaways. While we did record the sessions (big thanks to Daniel Panjaitan and Greg Dickson for volunteering!) it's a [...]