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Price Drop – AI Campus is now $19/month
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 plan, I've upgraded you to the AI Seminar. This is now the $100/month plan. The AI Campus is now $19/month. When you join the AI Campus, you [...]
Open Source vs Closed Source AI Models
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 a simple slash command. The same agent will hold the same personality, and the same instructions, but between one prompt and another, you could switch [...]
☀️ / 🌍 / 🌙 Which GPT-5.6 Model should you pick?
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 : Fable 5 has been re-added to the subscription plan twice while Anthropic sees cancellations as users migrate to GPT-5.6. Sol, Terra, and Luna. Which one do you pick? [...]
Agents create 10x the results, if you can describe the work well enough.
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 the right process Providing the right context Establishing the right guardrails What I’m hearing from a lot of people who face the difficulty of implementing AI agents in [...]
Starting AI with the Foundations
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 understand how AI could actually help them in their own work. During our workshop, we answered questions like: How do I write better prompts? How [...]
The AI Maturity Ladder (& REPLAY of Hermes vs OpenClaw webinar)
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 fine. A toolbox is useful, but a toolbox does not do the work for you. It's just available at your workbench, and it can add [...]