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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 [...]
One question for building your next AI agent (JTBD)
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 scope. A well-defined scope creates focus, sharpens judgment, and concentrates ambition to a precise outcome. The scope of a project is the minimum required to [...]
The SAGE Framework for Building AI Agents
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 that make agents effective - these are the skills of the future. These four steps make up the SAGE framework: Scope agentic tasks Automate workflows Generate skills Evaluate results [...]
How to Make a NotebookLM for a Conference [EPIC AI Replays]
↠↠ 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 lot of material to digest. You can watch all the replays at this link: https://christchurch-ai.com/epic-ai-conference ...or, you can use NotebookLM to quickly extract the best [...]
Lessons from ‘Leadership in the Age of AI’ [REPLAY]
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, change management, and knowing when enough is enough. The kind of judgment only a human can make. AI is not making leadership less human. It's actually [...]
[REPLAY] Managing AI Agents – The Next High-Value Skill Set
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 I build my own model and agent? How can you use AI agents safely? Are they expensive? How secure is an AI agent? How easy [...]