I’m flying to San Francisco on Saturday for Microsoft Ignite 2026, and I’m looking forward to a week of talking about data, AI and what happens when people start relying on the things we build. Ignite runs from 17 to 20 November at the Moscone Center. I’ll be speaking three times, spending time with the …
Manchester United’s problems extend beyond Michael Carrick. My reading of the evidence is that the board and owners carry the greatest responsibility for the prolonged underperformance, while Carrick and the players share responsibility for the current results. The manager is the most visible person to change. Replacing him is also an easier decision to explain …
A question I’m hearing in almost every Copilot Studio session right now: “Should this be an agent flow or a workflow?” Both sit under the same Workflows menu, both automate a process, and most makers simply pick whichever button they click first. That’s worth avoiding. Choosing between Copilot Studio agent flows and workflows decides how …
Copilot briefing for 20 to 26 October 2026: five developments that matter to IT leaders and enablement teams. Copilot Code is beginning to roll out through Frontier, bringing application creation to more business users. Other updates cover agent architectures, departmental workflows and adoption measurement. Here is what each one means and what to do about …
Picture a Tuesday morning. It is 5:40am. One of your drivers is on the M6 heading for Birmingham Airport, a flight from Alicante has landed 50 minutes late at Manchester, and there are three unanswered WhatsApp enquiries from last night. If you run an airport transfer business, that probably sounds familiar. Here is my take. …
Every Agent Builder session I run reaches the same moment. Someone has built an agent that answers questions about their team’s documents, it works, and then they ask it to produce the Friday update. In the right format. With the right headings. From the same sources. Every week. And they discover that an agent that …
Every few weeks someone asks me whether their organisation should have web search switched on in Copilot Chat. The question usually comes from a security or data protection lead, and it usually arrives with a worry they can’t quite pin down: something about Bing, something about PII, and a suspicion that the green shield isn’t …
The week of 20 to 26 October 2026 was a busy one for Anthropic. Claude chat and Cowork became a single Enterprise experience, Claude Security gained continuous vulnerability monitoring, a new API version introduced breaking changes, Claude Duet previewed always-on personal agents in the US, and on Monday 26 October the company publicly filed for …
Microsoft data and AI briefing, 26 October 2026: five developments that matter to anyone running a data and AI estate on the Microsoft platform. This roundup covers updates from 19 to 25 October alongside an earlier Copilot billing announcement that deserves attention now. Here is what they mean in practice. The thread running through all …
Time saved is not value. Reinvested time is. AI time savings do not automatically create business value. The value comes from what the organisation does with the time it gets back: the work it chooses, the person accountable for it and the outcomes it measures. This sounds obvious, and yet almost every AI business case …