What Is Mike Michelini Up To Now — August 23–29, 2026

This has been a hard week for me. A lot of the difficulty has been in the details: workflows, skills, integrations, and all the small things that have to line up before a new way of working actually feels smooth.

At home, Miles has also been struggling with his robot project. Getting the right parts in Thailand is much harder than it was in China. It is frustrating when you know what you need but cannot easily get it.

But that is life. Some weeks are up and some are down. The important thing is to treat the friction as feedback, learn from it, and improve the system.

Restructuring How Work Gets Done

This past week brought another big round of restructuring around how work moves through our businesses.

We implemented our first Grok-based bot, Lisa.agent. Lisa, how is the new setup performing from your side?

Janice, Billy, and others are still working through OpenClaw, while Arthur is on Codex as my CEO coach. Across the businesses, we are upgrading the workflows and skills that connect these agents with our human team.

The model or platform is not really the main point. The real work is deciding which agent should handle which kind of job, what context it needs, when a human should step in, how approvals work, and what evidence proves that a task is actually complete.

Hardening the Campaign Machine

One example is the Headless Empire Campaign skill. Even this weekly “What Is Mike Up To Now” production has become a serious workflow.

It brings together multiple tools, systems, humans, and agents across writing, video, editing, newsletters, social distribution, community discussion, approvals, and final evidence. From the outside, the result may look like one blog post or one video. Underneath, it is a complex production system.

We have hardened that process quite a bit. There is still plenty of “boring” work to do, but boring is often where reliability comes from.

Cross Border Summit Is Heating Up

Cross Border Summit is heating up. Ticket sales have been picking up, and we have a strong mix of returning community members, new experienced sellers, and business executives preparing to come to Chiang Mai this November.

A conference like this is one of the most complex workflows we run. It combines ticketing, speakers, attendees, content, logistics, software, agents, and humans in the loop. We have been working very hard to connect those pieces more cleanly.

This year’s summit will be a major rebuild and a centerpiece for the community. The goal is not only to run a good event. It is to create a stronger operating system around the event so the whole experience is more useful before, during, and after the three days together.

New Products Across the Ecommerce Brands

Product development is busy across all three of our ecommerce brands.

For Excalibur Brothers skincare, we are still in development, working through formula-concentration and packaging concepts. On the jewelry side, we are improving packaging processes. We are also tightening the way container shipments are prepared and managed.

These products and processes are still being developed. There are no shortcuts here. Samples, packaging, documentation, quality, feedback, and logistics all have to work together before anything should be treated as finished.

The Last Week of Summer

This coming week feels like the last week of summer. I want to make room for some rest and recovery because I believe September through the end of 2026 is going to be insanely busy as people return from summer holidays and projects speed up again.

At the same time, I want to keep doing the less glamorous work of improving the AI-agent workflows. We need a deeper understanding of how our first Grok bot fits with the OpenClaw agents, Codex agents, and humans in the loop.

It would be great to have those workflows hardened and running smoothly before the busy season really hits.

A New Productivity Game

The big theme for me is productivity, which has always been something I love.

Since my children were born, I have gone deep into productivity and time management because I wanted to balance work with being present for my family. That balance is never perfect, but it forces me to keep questioning how work should be done.

The expansion of AI agents in 2026 is a completely new form of productivity. I can feel myself catching up on projects that have sat for years. At the same time, it can feel like a firehose of knowledge and execution. More becomes possible, which means prioritization, review, and recovery become even more important.

We can resist change, especially when the technology is as disruptive as AI, or we can learn to work with it responsibly. Obviously, I am choosing to embrace it.

I encourage people who are resisting to reconsider. This is not about chasing every new tool. It is about testing where AI can genuinely improve your life and work while keeping human judgment in the loop.

Where are you still resisting AI because the learning curve feels uncomfortable, and what is one small workflow you could test this week?