🤖 "If you don't learn to how to orchestrate agents now, you'll spend 2027 catching up to people who started today.” - Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google Hello Reader, 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...
8 days ago • 6 min read
🕳️ “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want to buy a quarter-inch hole.” - Theodore Levitt Hello Reader, 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...
15 days ago • 4 min read
💸 "AI Agents are a multi trillion dollar opportunity.” - Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA Hello Reader, 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...
22 days ago • 2 min read
↠↠ The velocity of learning has increased. ↠↠ Hello Reader, As part of TechWeekNZ, I hosted the EPIC AI Conference in Christchurch on Thursday, 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...
29 days ago • 2 min read
⚖️ “AI requires enormous judgment. Leadership requires enormous judgment.” — Alison Adams, Chief Executive of ChristchurchNZ Hello Reader, Last week 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...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
☀️ “Without exposure people don’t build trust, and without trust the conversation stalls.” - The AI Blueprint for Aotearoa Hello Reader, This week is TechWeek in New Zealand, a festival for celebrating technology in Aotearoa. I'm hosting a lot of AI events. Monday evening 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...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
🖌️ “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” - Scott Adams Hello Reader, 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 is not developed from natural talent. Expertise is...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
🌱 “If you aren't growing into the future, you are shrinking into the past.” - David Droga Hello Reader, 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 OpenClaw agents running on 4.29, they were...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
🤖 “By the end of this decade, there will be machines that can carry out most human professions at least as well as a typical human.” – Ray Kurzweil Hello Reader, There's a point on every skill curve where dabbling doesn't work. You've watched the demos. Read the articles. Tried a few prompts that sort-of worked. Maybe you've even paid for a subscription that you forget to use. And somewhere in the back of your mind, a quiet voice is asking: am I actually getting better at this, or am I just...
2 months ago • 3 min read
