An invited guest at Anthropic’s annual conference.

Why it was worth the day

AI capability moves faster than any other technology we have worked with. A limitation that shapes how you design a system in March can be gone by June, and a business that commissioned the March design is left paying for a workaround nobody needs. The only defence is to stay close to the people building the models, and an invitation into the room is the shortest route there.

Three things worth passing on

The centre of gravity has moved from chat to agents. The interesting work is no longer a person typing questions into a box. It is software that breaks a task down, calls the right systems, checks its own output and hands a person a decision rather than a draft. That is the shape of every system we have put into production this year, and it is now the shape of the tooling too.

The hard part is still the last mile. A capable model is table stakes. Getting it to work reliably inside a real business, connected to the ERP, respecting who is allowed to see what, handling the order that does not fit the pattern, is where the engineering is. Nothing at the event suggested otherwise, and that is reassuring: it means the discipline we bring is the part that keeps mattering.

Nobody has a monopoly on the good ideas. A room of engineers and founders solving the same problems in different industries is worth a quarter of reading. Several things we saw in London have already changed how we build.

What it means if you are the client

You are not buying a model. Every consultancy has access to the same ones. You are buying judgement about which capability is ready for production, which is still a demo, and which problem in your business is worth pointing them at. That judgement has a short shelf life, and keeping it current is part of the job.

If you want to know what today's capabilities could do in your operation, start the conversation.

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