Insights on AI written by humans.

ai in the real world

October 20, 2026

How the Big AI Companies Are Building Agents

By Steve Macfarlane, CEO of Syfre The other day, in a planning session with my senior developer, the conversation landed on AI agents. The term is everywhere right now, on the podcasts I listen to and at pretty much every networking event I go to, and I’ve noticed that most people, even some very tech-savvy […]

August 3, 2026

ai in the real world

House Rules

There's a rule in our house version of Monopoly called AI Abuse. We play the PlayStation edition most weekends, two humans and two AI players set to hard, and the rule usually gets called out or debated at least once per game. If an AI completes a colour set on its own, it keeps the […]

July 1, 2026

ai in the real world

Leadership in the Age of AI

In the midst of all the hype-driven talk about which jobs AI is “inevitably” going to replace, I have recently been thinking about the concept in more specific terms. I say it a lot and I stand behind it fully, the idea that AI capabilities shouldn’t be replacing any human roles, but instead be replacing […]

May 26, 2026

ai in the real world

Teenage Wasteland

Notes From the Dinnertable My teenage niece has decided she hates ChatGPT. She mentions it often, usually with some attitude. She's also thinking hard about what to study, and the thought process has been interesting to watch. Art and design were what she always wanted to do, but according to her, those industries are about […]

March 27, 2026

ai in the real world

AI Isn’t Just Being Built. It’s Being Negotiated

Despite the fact that Australia has always punched well above it’s weight globally (or perhaps in part because of that) Australians have still always kept an eye on American culture. US sports leagues, Hollywood entertainment, New York style…and for modern business owners and tech entrepreneurs that means keeping tabs on what's happening in Silicon Valley. […]

December 18, 2025

ai in the real world

Rick and Morty and the Human Cost of Artificial Intelligence

Rick Sanchez is probably the most accurate portrait of unchecked technological power ever put on television. The fact that he's a cartoon drunk seems to be the only thing stopping people from taking that more seriously. Rick and Morty doesn't get enough credit for what it actually is, which isn't simply science fiction. The show […]

GEO

October 7, 2026

GEO

What Is Generative Engine Optimisation, and Does It Actually Work?

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of structuring your website and its content so AI systems can retrieve it, understand it, and cite it when they answer a question. When a buyer asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews who does what you do, GEO is the discipline that decides whether your business […]

ai strategy

July 15, 2026

ai strategy

Adventures in Botsitting

A report came out last month with a term that I found pretty funny, and pretty spot on. “Botsitting.” It's from Glean's Work AI Institute, which surveyed six thousand workers about how AI is going for them, including a decent chunk here in Australia. “Botsitting” is all the work that happens after the AI answers […]

February 25, 2026

ai strategy

You Don’t Deploy Agent Swarms. You Grow Into Them.

If your existing processes are messy, adding AI agents to the mix will just make the mess run faster. That is the part of agent adoption most organisations haven't reckoned with yet, but it reshapes the key strategic question hugely. The instinct in most businesses is to ask which roles can be replaced. But the […]

December 4, 2025

ai strategy

The AI Metabolism Gap

In February 2024 Klarna announced that its AI customer service assistant was doing the work of 700 human agents. The bot was handling 2.3 million conversations in 35 languages, and the number became the case study every consultancy referenced when they wanted to talk about what generative AI could really do. But then fifteen months […]

ai intelligence

April 20, 2026

ai intelligence

Is it Philosophy or is it Product Design?

There's something very human about staring into a black box and deciding it must contain a soul. As a society, we've always done it. We looked at weather and found gods. We looked at the stars and found fate. We got a grasp on the financial markets and suddenly they became an oracle. Now we […]

February 15, 2026

ai intelligence

Is the AI Singularity Concept a Mathematical Mirage?

There's a curve in mathematics called an asymptote. It accelerates toward a line forever without ever reaching it, and the closer it gets the more effort each step requires. Nature is full of these patterns, really. Systems tend to grow fast when conditions are favourable, then slow down as friction builds in. Limits always assert […]

November 28, 2025

ai intelligence

Prometheus and the New Frontier of Physical AI

So, something interesting to note. Jeff Bezos's new AI company is co-run by a chemist. Vik Bajaj came out of Google X, trained as a physicist and chemist, and now sits across the table from Bezos as co-CEO of Project Prometheus. They launched the company in November 2025 with $6.2 billion in funding. In April […]

August 27, 2025

ai intelligence

Is Your Competitive Edge Disappearing Into the AI Blur?

The Human/AI Boundary Crisis Is Already Here Nate B. Jones spent years as Amazon Prime Video's product chief before pivoting to AI strategy. He has a useful way of cutting through the noise around the job market question everyone is circling. Not the question of if AI changes things, but how, and for whom. In […]

July 25, 2025

ai intelligence

How to Spot Your First AI Opportunity

Your first AI opportunity probably isn't hiding in a complex system or a cutting-edge use case. It's hiding in something much more familiar. Likely a workflow your team finds tedious, a decision that keeps getting bottlenecked, or a question your business answers the same way fifty times a week. Most businesses already know where the […]

ai security

March 5, 2026

ai security

Who is Accountable When An AI Agent Makes a Mistake?

In 2022, a customer asked Air Canada's chatbot about bereavement fares and the bot invented a policy on the fly. The customer booked the flight, claimed the discount, was refused, then subsequently sued and won the case. The tribunal's reasoning was simple. The airline owned whatever its AI told the customer. That case and other […]

November 18, 2025

ai security

Kimmi K2 and the Anthropic Breach: Two Headlines, One Message

Two AI stories landed within a week of each other recently, and they've been sitting together in my head ever since. On one side of the planet, Kimmi K2 was announced. A new open-source model out of China that, without a keynote or a glossy launch event, started outperforming some of the biggest names in […]

automation

November 9, 2025

automation

When Automation Met Hollywood

Before Trading Places became a cult classic movie about a hustler and a broker swapping fortunes, it began with a simple dinner bet between a flashy Hollywood producer and a methodical Hungarian engineer who was busy reinventing Wall Street. It was the early 1980s. Thomas Peterffy was sitting across from film producer Aaron Russo in […]

October 2, 2025

automation

Beyond the Org Chart: How AI Agents are Reshaping Workflow

There's a stat I keep coming back to from an IBM study late last year. Most office workers now use AI at work, but only one in four are using tools their company has given them. Which means there are a lot of people doing AI-assisted work that isn't formally sanctioned and isn't anywhere on […]

events

August 1, 2025

events

IBM Datastax and Syfre Real Estate Summit

In a world where data and insight is power, how much of yours do you truly leverage, monetise and control? As AI reshapes the way we interact with applications, join us as we provide a strategic framework for leveraging Generative AI, paired with AI agents and assistants, offering transformative capabilities for real estate companies, streamlining […]

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