Hi Reader! Someone asked me to ring them back in half an hour last Friday. So I did a few small jobs first, felt the time was up, reached for the phone, and only fifteen minutes had passed. Half an hour's work done in fifteen, and my body clock was still reading thirty. This is time being compressed. Funny at the time. Less funny by Sunday, once I'd added it to the tiredness, the short fuse and the broken sleep and realised I was closer to burnout than I'd like to admit. Not there yet. Caught...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hello Reader! By the end of four Tuesday mornings you will be drafting client reports from raw meeting notes in minutes, and you will know exactly what you can and cannot put into an AI tool without creating a problem for yourself. That is what Core AI Skills is for. The autumn cohort starts on Tuesday 15 September. Most people arrive a little nervous. That is normal, and it tends to be the ones who arrive nervous who get the most out of it. What you leave able to do Turn raw notes and...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader! Two documents leave your office this week. Both drafted with AI. Both signed off in a hurry on a Friday. The first is an options report on a private commercial fit-out, prepared for a paying client. Perfectly fine. Internal-to-client work, no label needed, nothing to declare. The second is a public consultation statement for a council flood-defence scheme your firm is bidding on. Same tool, same engineer, same five minutes of polish. That one now needs a visible "AI-assisted" note...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader! Two documents leave your office this week. Both drafted with AI. Both signed off in a hurry on a Friday. The first is an options report on a private commercial fit-out, prepared for a paying client. Perfectly fine. Internal-to-client work, no label needed, nothing to declare. The second is a public consultation statement for a council flood-defence scheme your firm is bidding on. Same tool, same engineer, same five minutes of polish. That one now needs a visible "AI-assisted" note...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader! Two documents leave your office this week. Both drafted with AI. Both signed off in a hurry on a Friday. The first is an options report on a private commercial fit-out, prepared for a paying client. Perfectly fine. Internal-to-client work, no label needed, nothing to declare. The second is a public consultation statement for a council flood-defence scheme your firm is bidding on. Same tool, same engineer, same five minutes of polish. That one now needs a visible "AI-assisted" note...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Question, Reader,: If a competitor decided to make your life difficult next week, could they report your firm's AI use to a regulator? Under the EU AI Act, yes. Anyone can. You do not need to be audited, investigated or singled out. One complaint from a rival bidder or an unhappy client, and you may be asked to produce your records.What state are your records in ? Most organisations would find it difficult to produce them today. Not through carelessness, but because nobody realised they had...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader, You are Invited: Ignorance Is No Defence Someone in your organisation is already using AI on live work. Client data, staff records, marketing content, decisions that affect real people. Under the EU AI Act, how they use it is now your liability, not just theirs. And it's not just about what staff paste into a chatbot. The Act asks things most organisations haven't even started on: labelling AI-generated content, disclosing when someone is talking to a bot instead of a person,...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader! Last week the big news was that Demis Hassabis has stepped back from day-to-day responsibility for Gemini towards long term strategy and scientific work. Read it one way, and it's a step back from a race that Google is losing. I don't buy that. I believe that Demis Hassabis is getting off the CEO treadmill to chase an even bigger prize: a world model, one that understands, simulates and acts in the physical world. What a world model actually is We're all familiar with large...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Hi Reader! As we march sunkissed and bank holiday bound into August, can I ask you to stop a minute and spare a thought for the EU AI Act? When the high risk obligations were pushed out to December 2027 and August 2028, most people took that as permission to stop paying attention. The thing is, those deadlines that moved were never really ones that were going to impact most built environment firms as most are not high risk. The one that stayed, Article 50, applies to all the ordinary things...
2 months ago • 4 min read