Big, big news week for AI (plus post-TechWeek replays)

📊 "Generative AI is expected to give the average worker 275 additional hours per year to dedicate to high-value tasks, improving productivity 15.5% by 2038.”

- p.13 of Microsoft’s report, ‘Economic Opportunity of Generative AI in New Zealand’

Hello Reader,

Last week, I taught a bunch of workshops for TechWeekNZ. This was my 7th year teaching a workshop for TechWeek, but I taught more this week than ever before. In addition to the webinar Be More Human: Do the Work that Matters Most with Generative AI, I also led workshops for:

GenAI for Marketing
Prompt Engineering Techniques
Build A Bot Workshop: Make Your Own Custom GPT
Live Panel Discussion: Latest Advances in Generative AI

Big thanks to the hundreds of people who attended my workshops last week. We recorded the panel, and I'll share a recording when it's ready.

If you'd like to watch the webinar replay, you can do so here:

https://youtu.be/_PsEgVEzjoI

In the post-event survey, I asked, 'What was your biggest takeaway?' and the attendees gave this feedback:

The webinar highlighted the differences between human skills and AI, showing how we can use AI to boost productivity. It also stressed the importance of learning and adapting to AI to stay relevant.
It was all fantastic, I had several incredible insights. One that was relevant to my journey at the moment with a programme I am delivering was the 5 step creative process and which parts were human
phases of ai, capabilities and thought leadership :)
Ability to refine responses, to drill down on what I want, request a restart
How I need to better at prompting and think outside the box to ask chat GPT to look in.
I still hate genAI. I hate it so much
that AI is going to help me be better! Not be a force to compete with
The skill of discernment
The AI and Human partnership - and which bits of creativity employ one or the other.
The power of ‘power user’ and prompting.
parallel prompting

If you'd like to review an AI Summary of the event (because, hey, this is the future of work) you can read it here.

Did you notice? Someone who attended the webinar, stayed till the end, and filled out the survey, said they hated GenAI. So much.

I see this as a good sign. We are still so early.

The adoption of this technology is inevitable. But if the Luddites who actively hate this technology are showing up to be educated, that means they know it is inevitable, too.

🛠️ Webinar Replay

Watch Now

📰 New AI News This Week

Google I/O announced new Google AI Pro and Ultra plans, LearnLM and NotebookLM upgrades, and too many more updates to list - just chat with this NotebookLM
Anthropic launched Claude 4, with Opus and Sonnet setting new standards in reasoning, coding, and agent workflows (and they also activated AI Safety Level 3 protocols)
Microsoft is integrating MCP natively into Windows 11, demonstrating their shift from apps to agents with Foundry

In addition to TechWeek, I've been leading a lot of training workshops for Agentic Intelligence, where I have recently joined as their Head of Learning & Enablement. You can see some of the workshops I lead here: https://agenticintelligence.co.nz/training