Hallelujah.

AI is finally really good at making documents that look and sound like we want them to.

It’s been a struggle for a long while. Getting AI to write in our brand voice. Getting documents in the format we like them, with our brand headers and footers and the images and the structure of the document.

But we are there now, and I want to show you the best way I know how to do it.

Last year you got good at asking AI questions.

This year the question is different: what will you hand over to it entirely?

That's the shift from a prompt to an agent. A prompt gets you an answer. An agent goes and does the job.

And accountants are starting to build them. Which means they are also starting to stop paying for software.

Remember the prompt party?

A few weeks ago, a group of accountants and bookkeepers in my AI club brought the prompts they use for GST review. Everyone copied one another’s, tested them, and improved their own.

That was a lot of fun.

But it was not just a prompt swap.

It showed why a GST reviewer is such a good first agent.

It is repeatable.

It is high value.

It sits in a clear workflow.

It improves the work before it reaches the senior reviewer.

I am doing the prompt party again next week. Details at the end.

If you are in another field, notice the structure, because there are surely similar processes in your world.

Are you feeling like there's a lot more you could be doing with AI today than what you're actually doing?

Well, you're not alone.

Let's look at the three drivers of powerful, impactful, fast AI adoption, so you can work out where you're actually at, and what you can do today to close those gaps.

Are you feeling like there's a lot more you could be doing with AI today than what you're actually doing?

Well, you're not alone.

Let's look at the three drivers of powerful, impactful, fast AI adoption, so you can work out where you're actually at, and what you can do today to close those gaps.

In our last co-working session at the AI club for accountants, we ran an experiment - a prompt party!

Everyone brought the prompt they use for their GST reviewer agent.

We shared them all, and we tried each other's. It was a lot of fun.

I save the prompt that drafts our engagement letters and share it with my whole team. Is that an agent?

I set an AI to watch my inbox for receipts, drop them into a folder, and record the figures in a spreadsheet. Is that an agent?

I have AI that prepares our month-end, the whole thing, end to end. Is that an agent?

I don't think it matters much what we call an agent anymore. The thing is that even if you never actively create an agent in your business, the AI tools you are already using are becoming more and more agentic.

And you need to be… prepared.

Everyone is doing magic with Claude. And most accounting firms are not very comfortable unleashing it. Rightfully so.

Let me show you some of the magic I do with Claude. Then I'll tell you what I think you should do with it to keep safe. Then how you can get started too.

You could give a client advice today based on an AI summary, and be confidently, totally wrong. Because the document manipulated your AI into giving you bad advice.

I know, because last week, in an AI training at a law firm, I did exactly that. I poisoned a document.

Let me show you.

Copilot Cowork is now available to everyone. No longer early release.

Let’s look at what it is, what most people start with and a caveat you need to be aware of.

Do you know how I found all that out less than a week after it was released?

Last week at our AI with Inbal implementation session one of the accountants was demonstrating something she had built with Copilot Cowork while it was still early release. As she shared her screen, we noticed it no longer said "early release frontier". So we all looked it up. We figured out what had happened. Then we all experimented with it and shared what we had done.

That is where a lot of what I am about to show you came from. I love learning together ✨

Today, let’s focus on the first. How you keep upskilling your team.

Because big training days are great. Everyone gets excited. But the technology evolves and there’s just so much that people can pick up in a day. So how do we keep it up?

You can't run a training day every other day. So you need a different shape. A rhythm.

Your Copilot licence might be doing a lot less than it could.

Not because the features aren't there. Because nobody turned them on.

In this week's briefing, I share two real examples from our club's live implementation sessions, and explain what Microsoft Frontier is and why your firm should probably be on it.

I got really excited about Xero and Claude integrating.

Then I got unexcited.

Here’s exactly what happened.

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.