Weekly AI Briefing
Every week: one AI development that matters to people in professional services, explained in plain English.
No hype, no fluff. Only what's mature and implementable today.
Looking for a specific topic?
Your AI panel of experts (and how to build one in 10 minutes)
What if every piece of work you produced got reviewed by a panel of experts before anyone else saw it?
A tax specialist. A grant assessor. A contract risk reviewer. A plain-language editor. All on demand. No billing rate. No waiting.
Last week I worked with an Australian research institute. We worked on AI strategy, tools, automations, and risk. But we also spent a lot of time with hundreds of people on prompting techniques that genuinely improve workflows.
This is one of them. And while the example comes from research, the principle applies to every profession. Including yours.
The idea is simple: give AI a specific identity.
Tell it who to be. What they know. How they respond. Then give it your work to review.
That's called a persona prompt. And what you get back is not a generic AI response. It's feedback from someone who actually knows what they're looking for.
Let me show you what I mean.
Love AI. Don't Trust AI. Here's how to verify.
AI gets things wrong. We know that.
It makes things up. It hallucinates. It wants to please us, so it will answer a question even if it doesn't really know the answer.
You can tell it: don't make things up. Be accurate. Give me a confidence level. But that's still the AI telling you what it thinks. It doesn't actually check itself.
So here's what I want to explore with you: what kinds of problems come up, and what can we do to stay safe?
How do we make sure our team knows how to verify what AI gives them?
What do we do if someone shared the wrong thing with the wrong AI?
And how do we build a culture where people feel safe to speak up when something goes wrong?
Let me walk you through it.
AI Agents: How to Know If Yours Is Safe
We're all building AI agents.
There are different types of agents.
There are ones that just have a skill. They know how to do a certain task, and you can chat with them when you need help with that task.
There are ones that work in the background, with access to your systems, getting things done while you sleep.
And there are ones that work on your desktop or in your browser and can actually interact with the user interface of your apps.
What is it that makes some of them safer and others more risky?
That's an important question to sit with, so we know where to put our focus while this technology matures.
What Claude is Doing Today and What Copilot Will Do Next
Claude is making a serious play.
Not just to be the AI you chat with. To be the interface where you work. Where you start a task, finish it, and never need to jump between tools.
That's a big claim. So let me show you what it actually looks like.
Your AI Just Got Eyes on Your Business (and MCP is why)
What’s my next meeting today?
Who’s the client?
Have they paid their invoices?
Three different systems or one AI to rule them all?
Well, it’s starting to be the latter.
Let me show you how.
Your 2026 AI Tool Radar: What firms are actually using
My recommendation for the main AI tool you should use in your business has changed.
Not because of a new shiny feature.
Because two quiet things happened at the same time:
One: Copilot got smarter.
Two: Copilot became easier to roll out.
And when those two line up, the decision becomes simple.
When AI Gets Hands: A Claude Cowork Experiment
This week I gave Claude the keys.
Not to my thinking. To my computer.
I've been experimenting with Claude Cowork, Anthropic's new desktop agent.
We've seen AI work in the browser before, but this is different. This is AI operating the whole computer, not just a tab.
If you've heard me talk about the Three Bridges: Playbooks, Context, and Hands, this is Hands. Properly, finally, Hands (for the newcomers: Hands means AI that acts, not just advises).
Your AI curriculum for 2026
This year, AI is becoming part of our workflow. Not just a tool we chat with.
We are starting to see AI agents, AI flows that run in the background, AI chatbots that specialise in certain tasks.
We are really heading towards little AI employees that we can assign tasks to, or that can own tasks and workflows themselves.
And we need to learn how to make all of this happen.
So I prepared a curriculum for you. Two free webinars over the next two weeks. Two hands-on workshops in March and May.
Here's what's coming so that you can choose what you should attend:
AI Stories You’ve Seen, Explained: Moltbook & Rent-a-Human
Two AI stories have been everywhere this week.
One: the AIs have got themselves a social network called Moltbook, and they’re talking about their humans and conspiring.
The second: there’s a new website where AIs are hiring humans to do work for them in the real world. It’s called Rent-a-Human.
Is this it? Are they taking over?
When I hear big claims like these, I go and look at how it actually works, so I can understand what’s really happening.
And I did just that.
So let me tell you what these things actually are, what’s going on under the hood, and then what I think we should and shouldn’t do.
Clawdbot is amazing! Don’t use it.
Everyone is talking about Clawdbot.
The whole Internet is on it. There are endless videos showing how it can do EVERYTHING!
Ready to jump in and be part of the revolution?
Well, I say: not yet!
This is very, very early days.
This tool is still in innovator territory. It is simply not safe.
Let me tell you exactly what it is so you're totally clued in.
Then I'll tell you why we shouldn't use it right now, and what we should do instead.
Who Is Really in Your Meeting? The New Power and Risk of AI Meeting Assistants
I love my meeting assistant. I don’t go anywhere without it! Tons of magic is happening now that I have a written repository of (almost) all my conversations from the past months and years.
And now, there’s a step jump. For good, and for bad. The kind that takes some deep breathing to get used to.
In this video, I show you:
How AI meeting assistants are becoming active, agentic participants in our meetings
How they can become risky, uninvited infiltrators too…
The 2026 AI Readiness Check-up: A Practical Checklist for Your Firm
Are you prepared for AI in 2026? This week we are taking stock. We will look at the foundations firms laid in 2025, so you can see where you are solid, where you have gaps, and what needs attention before the next wave of AI lands.
In 2025, most of the work was about foundations:
Aligning leaders so they pull in the same direction
Selecting secure AI tools
Creating and updating AI policies
Now, in 2026, those foundations meet the next phase: AI agents, smarter workflows, and tools that can act inside your systems.
Can AI Just Do My Tax Return? The Three Bridges That Make It Possible in 2026
Welcome to the new year!
I am so ready for AI in 2026, because this is the year AI stops sitting in a separate chat window and really takes over some tasks and does them for us.
We are this much closer to AI employees that can take over entire tasks.
In 2025 we laid the foundations. We selected our tools, created policies, trained our teams, and built an AI‑literate workforce.
Now those people are asking a new question:
When will it do my tax return for me? When will it annotate the contract for me? When will it prepare the case?
Why you need to understand AI Agents and AI Employees?
First, so you can implement what is ready.
Second, so that when people try to sell you AI agents or AI employees, you can tell whether they are offering something genuinely valuable or something you could build yourself in one prompt.
There are three gaps between today’s technology and AI Agents that can actually do the work for you.
We need to understand where each one is at, and what we can do today:
My Holiday Gift: So You Can Give Yourself More Gifts
Today I'm giving you a holiday gift. Because it’s the holidays and because it's summer here in Australia, that makes me extra happy.
It's a gift I gave myself a few months ago, and now I want to give it to you.
The gift? The superpower to create your own accountability tracker.
So you can design the best way for you to make those New Year resolutions really come true.
I'm not selling you an app. I'm showing you how I built mine so you can build yours.
Why Is AI Suddenly Good at Numbers?
AI can now do maths, not because it is getting better at predicting the next number, like it predicts text, but because it's become a reasoning layer that knows when to use tools.
Why Your AI Assumptions Are Costing You Time
This weekend I wasted half an hour redoing work I'd already finished—all because I didn't ask AI for what I really wanted.
OpenAI Released 220 Gold Prompts. Dig In.
Would you like to see great prompts used by different professionals in multiple industries, written by the best and most experienced people on the planet?
OpenAI just released a list of over 200 of those, with the entire prompt and all the attachments and how they were used.
It’s NOT a "list of 200 prompts you must use today". I don’t like those at all!
It is an insightful database to dig into, start a conversation and get inspired.s
Reading the Signals: Why Projects Beat GPTs and What's Next
Sometimes platforms offer two features that look identical, and we're left wondering which one to use. The answer isn't in the launch announcement.
It's in watching which feature gets the developers love: that is: upgrades, improvements, new capabilities
AI Can Systemise Your Work!
Every so often, I have one of those admin-type tasks I just don’t want to do myself.
Things like copying and pasting data. Updating details. Keeping track of long lists.
It feels like AI should be able to do it for me.
And well, some apps are starting to do just that for us.
Today I show you Notion AI.
Your First SharePoint Agent: Company Policy Magic in Minutes
Everyone talks about agents all the time and it sounds very advanced and very complex, but really it can be very simple.
In this video, you’ll see how to create your first SharePoint agent. I demo it with an agent that can discuss company policies, then I give some examples of what else you can use it for.
Get the latest developments in AI each week straight to your inbox!

