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 [...]
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 [...]
Last month at EPIC in Christchurch, I hosted a TechWeek panel on Leadership in the Age of AI with four local CEOs: Anya Anderson from RedSeed, Julie Ryan from CustomD, Ali Adams from ChristchurchNZ, and Brad Fraser from Agentic Intelligence. The conversation kept coming back to the human work of leadership: judgment, communication, trust, empathy, [...]
TechWeek in New Zealand is a festival for celebrating technology in Aotearoa. I hosted a lot of AI events. The first day of TechWeek, I delivered a sold-out webinar, AI Agent Management: The Next High-Value Skill Set When I asked attendees for a 🔥 burning question 🔥 they had about AI agents, answers included: How do [...]
It gives me no pride to say this, but when I look at the many hundreds (maybe thousands) of marketers that I know, there are three common characteristics all marketers share: they're smart they're creative and they're losers. Alex Bogusky took these photos because he learned the hard way. 💡 The Irony of Expertise Expertise [...]
Have you ever heard of the Diffusion of Innovation? It's a bell-curve distribution of how technology is adopted over time. OpenClaw is not cutting-edge technology. It is bleeding-edge technology. Using it is bloody and difficult. This is what the founder of OpenClaw, Peter Steinberger, published on his blog this week: When I had both of my [...]