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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 [...]
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 [...]