Hello Reader,
If you think that play is something you only do separately after work, I’d like to share this quote with you from the French diplomat and historian François-René de Chateaubriand:
Ever since I ran away and joined the circus, I've always seen my work as a form of play. The harder the work, the harder I have to play to get through it. This mental trick - to gamify work - enables me to accomplish spectacular things.
Projects are left undone, because we are ‘too busy’ to do the work that matters. Superficial relationships with distant co-workers are low-trust with poor communication. All the recent transformations in work culture have led to higher stress, without a release of that stress through deep communication or energetic collaboration.
Playing games can guide us into getting more out of limited resources of time and energy. Deeper connections within a team drive better business performance, and intentional play is how we can gamify our work.
If you’d like to learn how gamifying your work can lead to better results, I invite you to read my latest white paper, Gamify Your Work:
Weekly newsletter highlighting the latest AI news, with short video tutorials and copy/paste prompts you can use to improve your skills as an AI operator. As artificial intelligence moves from optional to operational, technical specialists no longer have the advantage. It is those who can supervise and coach AI to improve that will thrive in an AI-augmented future.
↠↠ 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...
⚖️ “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...
☀️ “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...