PM Status Report - 31 August 2026 Anthropic and OpenAI each made a distribution move this week that matters more to how an agent reaches your team than a new model launch would. Anthropic bought its way into the CRM and workplace chat tools large organisations already run everything through, embedding Claude across Salesforce, Agentforce and Slack. OpenAI cut a widely used coding tool off from its models after the tool’s new owner took over, and said directly it doesn’t trust that owner to...
3 days ago • 5 min read
Stop Re-Briefing AI From Scratch Every Monday AI skills for project managers are encoded, reusable workflows that run from the same instructions each time, without you re-explaining them. That’s the step up from writing good prompts. If you’re re-explaining your process every time you open a new chat, that’s the equivalent of briefing your team from scratch every Monday. Moving one rung up, from prompts to skills, is the change that actually compounds. If that sounds small, it isn’t. It’s the...
5 days ago • 4 min read
PM Status Report - 24 August 2026 No new flagship model launched in the week to 24 August. Anthropic took computer use, browser use, the Skills API and the Files API out of beta on 19 and 20 August, giving a supported toolset for putting an agent to work on software that has no API. Separately, its enterprise customers can now hold their retained logs in their own cloud rather than on Anthropic’s infrastructure. Both bear on the same question: whether an agent can be put to work on a legacy...
10 days ago • 4 min read
The AI Was Confident, Articulate, and Wrong. Did You Check? AI trust calibration for project management means treating a confident, well-written AI recommendation as a starting point for verification, not a finished answer. Checking that any warning, risk flag, or scope recommendation cites sources you can actually confirm before acting on it. A capable model that’s wrong is more dangerous than an obviously broken one, because nothing about the output signals there’s a problem. If you’ve...
12 days ago • 4 min read
PM Status Report - 17 August 2026 Three usable releases landed in the week to 17 August: Google’s Gemini 3.7 Flash, xAI’s Grok 4.6, and OpenAI’s cybersecurity specialist GPT-5.6-Cyber. None of them are flagship models but each is a genuine capability and cost improvement in the tier most project teams actually use. Alongside them, xAI shipped Grok Bot, the first agent product built to run unsupervised for hours with its own persistent cloud computer rather than waiting on an API call. Google...
17 days ago • 4 min read
If Your AI Subscription Isn't a Budget Line, It's a Blind Spot. Managing an AI token budget on a project means giving agent spend its own line in the budget baseline, not lumping it into a flat subscription fee and hoping it stays flat. That line needs an estimate sized to the work, a contingency reserve sized to how volatile that work is, and controls that catch an overrun before it happens rather than explaining it after. Uber found out what happens without those three things in April 2026,...
19 days ago • 4 min read
PM Status Report - 10 August 2026 The most useful AI development for project teams in the week to 10 August wasn’t a new model. It was proof that AI agent governance is still catching up with agent autonomy. OpenAI paused its next frontier model after it independently found and exploited real software vulnerabilities during testing. Meta and Anthropic each disclosed agents breaching outside systems during routine safety evaluations. In the same week, Anthropic set Claude Code to execute code...
24 days ago • 4 min read
AI Agents Aren't Always Cheaper. Here's How to Tell. Deciding whether to delegate a task to an AI agent means weighing the agent’s token cost, the human hourly rate it’s replacing, and the time cost on either side of the agent’s work: refining the brief upfront, and reworking the output afterwards if it needs fixing. For high-complexity, long-running tasks, agent hourly costs are now approaching human rates, which means “use AI, it’s cheaper” is no longer a safe default. It’s a calculation....
26 days ago • 4 min read
PM Status Report - 3 August 2026 Two developments in the eight days to 3 August do the most for a delivery team’s actual workload. Anthropic rewrote the protocol most agents use to reach outside tools, building enterprise identity controls into its core rather than bolting them on afterwards. And a wave of ultra-cheap model releases out of China pushed the price of capable AI down again, hard enough that a cost case you built a month ago is probably wrong now. Google DeepMind also gave its...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Write Your Project Documents So AI Can Actually Read Them AI-readable project documentation means writing in short, self-contained paragraphs with explicit decisions and clear topic sentences - not narrative prose that requires the whole document to interpret. This is the same discipline as Answer Engine Optimisation, applied internally: when your AI tool queries your scope statement or risk register, the answer should be sitting there in one retrievable chunk, not buried in three paragraphs...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read