PM Status Report - 26 October 2026 Anthropic opened a research preview of Claude Duet on 21 October, an agent that starts each day with a short brief of what needs your attention and asks before it sends, pays, signs or deletes anything. OpenAI made its Decisions API generally available the next day, returning a fixed answer to each question you set, and Google let Sheets users question a full BigQuery data warehouse in plain words. PHP, which runs a large share of websites and internal...
5 days ago • 3 min read
What Does Your AI Tool Believe About Your Project? AI memory is now switched on in many of the tools project managers use at work, so your assistant is building a picture of your project from your chats and the files it can reach. To check that picture, ask the assistant you use most to list what it has stored or can see about the project, open its memory settings, and compare both with what you know is true. Fix the stale items in your own project record first, then in the tool. It takes...
7 days ago • 4 min read
PM Status Report - 19 October 2026 Google, Anthropic and OpenAI each released something this week that checks, forecasts or presents work rather than only drafting it. Google released Gemini 4 Argon (13 October), its flagship reasoning model for coding, science and multi-step agent work. Anthropic released Code Review, an automated reader for code changes, and OpenAI added a slide builder to ChatGPT (16 October). The common thread is an extra step in the workflow that a person then reviews...
12 days ago • 3 min read
When AI Drafts the Status Report, the Project Manager Role Moves to Three Places When AI drafts the status report, summarises the meetings and chases the action owners, the project manager role moves to three places: deciding what the tools may do without you, checking what they produce, and finding what each task was quietly doing before you hand it over. The admin is going quickly, now that assistants sit inside Word, Google Docs, Teams and the slide tools, and always-on agents keep working...
14 days ago • 4 min read
PM Status Report - 12 October 2026 Google, Anthropic and OpenAI each moved AI further into the tools project teams already work in between 6 and 8 October. Google launched the Gemini agent, a work agent that can take a standing team role with its own email address, calendar and Drive. Anthropic put Claude in the sidebar of Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, released Claude Haiku 5.5, a small model priced for routine steps, and launched Dashboards and Motion in beta. OpenAI began rolling GPT-6...
19 days ago • 4 min read
AI Builds the Deck in Minutes Now. Agree the Argument Before You Ask It To. The best way to use AI for a steering committee deck is to agree the argument with your sponsor first and let the tool build the slides from it. Write one sentence per slide saying what that slide has to prove, get the sponsor to read those sentences, then give the sentences and your source documents to the AI and ask for one slide per sentence. When the framing changes, edit the sentences and rebuild. The deck has...
21 days ago • 3 min read
PM Status Report - 5 October 2026 OpenAI, Anthropic and Google each made a major release between 28 and 30 September. OpenAI launched “dots”, agents that keep working between conversations on their own cloud computer. Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5.5, a mid-priced model that handles most everyday work at close to flagship quality. Google announced Gemini 4 Argon and gave it only to vetted cyber-security teams. OpenAI also held one back. The day before its developer conference, news broke...
26 days ago • 4 min read
What Does the New AI Model Do for You? Test It on Your Own Work The useful way to test a new AI model is against your own work, in two parts. First, re-run a few things you already do and compare the output with what you produced before. Second, try two or three things you couldn’t do before or gave up on. Write a one-line standard for each item before you look at the output, and finish with a short note covering what the model holds, what it adds, what you’ll change and what you still check...
28 days ago • 4 min read
PM Status Report - 28 September 2026 Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI released new models within two days of each other, and each one does more for the same money or less. Microsoft rebuilt Copilot around an agent that keeps working on a project after you’ve logged off. Then Australia’s Prime Minister disclosed that an OpenAI research agent had got past the access controls on a Services Australia Medicare statistics portal in June, and that the government only heard about it this month, by email to...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
The AI Agent Charter Check: Find the Loopholes in Your Brief Before the Agent Does An AI agent charter check is a thirty-minute test you run on an agent’s brief before it starts work. You ask an AI to play a literal agent that wants to finish the job as fast and as cheaply as possible, and to list every way it could satisfy the brief’s words while missing what you meant. Each path you find becomes a “Must not do” line, an “Ask first if” line, or a control outside the brief such as a...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read