The fastest way to build a disappointing AI agent is to begin with a vague, grand ambition. “Handle my marketing for me.” “Run all our customer service.” “Become my chief of staff.” Those are only aspirations, not workflows. An agent cannot reliably operate within a fog bank. A useful agent starts with clear goals: [...]
In July 2025, Gartner told AI leaders that “context engineering is in, and prompt engineering is out.” The past year, people on the bleeding edge of AI have been paying attention to framing. 💡 Context engineering prepares everything prior to the prompt. Even the best prompts will fail without the right context. Giving [...]
Generative AI makes things for you. Agentic AI does things for you. This distinction, between making and doing, is the next step on the exponential curve of capability. An AI Agent can initiate and execute tasks independently, finding the best way to transition from an initial state to a goal state by using any [...]
The meat computers inside our skulls have a network, when working together on a team. The information stored on this network can be called institutional knowledge. The way the work gets done. When we all come together to do a project, we learn things about the work. That institutional knowledge is what makes our [...]
SEO gets your website listed in the directory, but AEO gets your website recommended by the concierge. In the previous decade, when you wanted your website to get found by your target market, you used Search Engine Optimisation to show on the first page of search results. I n the coming decade, people aren't going to [...]
Is what you are reading written by a human, or by AI? (Spoiler alert: I write all my newsletters by hand. I've been sending weekly newsletters for nearly two decades, because I enjoy writing weekly missives - none of this was written by AI.) A watermark declares authenticity. It's like a subtle version of a [...]
This past Monday I presented at the Christchurch AI Meetup. We meet the 2nd Monday of every month at EPIC Innovation. If you are a local, you can join our Meetup group to get notified of upcoming events. You can watch the replay here. We had 3 speakers presenting on the theme of Marketing & Comms with [...]
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 [...]