There is a new AI model in town. And this one shows us where things are heading.

It is called Interaction Models. It comes from Thinking Machines Lab, the company founded by Mira Murati, who was CTO at OpenAI. It is in research preview right now.

It’s not in your tools yet, but let’s have a look so that we understand what’s coming.

We've all learned we have to verify everything that comes out of AI.

It hallucinates. Hallucination rates are coming down, but we still review everything, because it's our name on it.

But something else is starting to emerge. Quite the opposite.

Every AI conversation I have now starts from where the last one ended. That’s a massive leap in how AI works with me.

My AI knows my clients, my KPIs, my coaching patterns. It knows what we talked about last time. It updates itself as we go.

That's because I've given my AI a Second Brain.

And if you have’t already, I think that you should do it too.

Last Friday I spent four hours online with 50 accountants developing AI agents.

Here’s what’s real with agents, in accounting in May 2026, Australian and New Zealand.

Inter-entity loan reconciliations done in minutes, saving hours a quarter.

FBT calculations cut by 40 minutes per client.

A budget vs actual analysis that used to be skipped, now done in 90 seconds.

This is what’s here. Working in firms. Today.

And I want to tell you about how you can (and should) get it.

Microsoft just shipped AI agents in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.

Until now, Copilot could suggest things or take small actions like add a row, make a pivot table or create conditional formatting.

Now it can take multi-step actions, think through a problem, develop entire workbooks with multi-step reasoning.

But hey, Claude has had this capability for months now.

And for all this time, I fielded questions from firms wondering if they should be on Claude instead of Copilot. These capabilities are so powerful, and it felt like we were missing out in very real (and painful) ways.

Is AI making us dumber?

We've got some official results on this.

It's a real concern. We're all shifting from doers to reviewers. In every part of our work, AI does something and we check it's right.

But how can junior people review work they've never done themselves? And how will they even learn the profession if AI does the work for them?

If you've heard me speak, you know I'm optimistic about this. I teach myself through personalised podcast episodes with expert knowledge applied to my own circumstance. What a life hack!

My 13-year-old son, this week, built himself apps with simple AI prompts. One to learn world flags. One to prepare for a French exam he doesn't enjoy. One to figure out how to design a 3D object he wants to print.

He chose those projects. He wanted to learn. AI just made it faster.

That's my optimism. But what does the data actually say?

Do you have an AI lab in your business?

If you don't, you should. Whether you're a one-person firm or a hundred-person firm.

Let me tell you what I mean, and why it matters right now.

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.