Kia ora! Welcome to New Zealand’s weekly roundup of AI news, events, jobs and education.
Our first in-person event: December 15 @ academyEX in Grafton, Auckland.
If you're driving AI transformation in your organisation (or about to be), this is for you.
Maybe your pilots are working, maybe not. Maybe you have a strategy, maybe you're building one. Either way: how do you actually move the P&L?
Three executives doing this at scale: Stephen Morison (AI Adoption Lead, Fonterra), Paul Pritchard (Group CEO, Overdose & Allexive), Ana Ivanovic-Tongue (Chief Delivery Officer, academyEX). I'll be moderating the conversation.
No vendor pitches. Just an honest conversation about what worked, what didn't, and what they've learned spending real money on transformation.
If you're still deciding whether AI matters, skip this. If you're making it work at scale, this is where you need to be.
Limited to 40 Senior Leaders. $29. Drinks and nibbles included.
This week’s highlights:
800M+ people will shop inside LLMs
AI avatars learn 10,000 NZSL concepts
Bindi Norwell: smart people, dumb stuff
Best AI opportunity: traditional NZ SMBs
IT workers fear AI as unemployment climbs
Health NZ funds AI mental health navigator
Design your living room inside Perplexity Comet
OpenAI expands shopping research in ChatGPT
Agentic commerce to reshape B2B's $32.8T market
Your Leadership architecture determines AI success
My thoughts: Ignore the AI Bubble. Just Keep Building.
Happy reading and listening ✌️
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MIKE’S MUSINGS
Let Traders Debate the AI Bubble. Just Keep Building.
The AI bubble debate comes up regularly in conversation. I try avoid the topic because the answer is never clean.
Valuations are stretched in places, infrastructure spend is massive, and parts of the market are already pricing in a future that hasn’t fully arrived. Yet AI remains one of the most important technological shifts of our lifetime. Both things can be true. We can be early and still overpriced in pockets at the same time.
HEADLINE STORY
📊 One NZ and Hato Hone St John actually deliver AI value
📣 Word On The Street: Two of NZ's biggest organisations independently show how AI projects move from pilots to production at scale.
🔎 Zooming In:
OneNZ built a customer agent in 8 hours, now serving 500,000 customers with 400% higher engagement.
Separately, Hato Hone St John is automating clinical audits across 400,000 patient records annually.
Two different organisations, two different use cases, same result: freeing humans for higher-value work.
🏘️ Our Take: What connects these separate implementations is how both organisations reframed their constraints.
One NZ wasn't struggling with plan migration volume, they were struggling with customer preference. Traditional channels (outbound calls, retail visits) required customers to engage during business hours, often multiple times, to compare plans and complete migrations. The Salesforce Agentforce agent flipped this: customers engage when convenient, see visual plan comparisons instantly, complete migrations in one session, and get troubleshooting for unrelated issues in the same interaction. That 400% engagement lift isn't efficiency, it's customers voting with their behaviour for self-service done right.
St John's constraint was different but equally fundamental. Clinical audits require domain expertise, making volunteer hours the limiting factor. You can't simply hire more auditors when you're a not-for-profit ambulance service. The WatsonX LLM changes the economics entirely. Every one of 400,000 annual patient records can be audited against Clinical Practice Guidelines, identifying both compliance issues and care patterns that inform clinical training. The sovereign AI model keeps sensitive health data within organisational control while delivering real-time insights that were impossible at 5% coverage.
Both use cases demonstrate sophisticated LLM applications beyond chatbots.
One NZ's agent handles multi-turn conversations, visual content presentation, system integration for plan eligibility, and context switching between sales and service modes.
St John's system processes unstructured clinical notes, maps them to structured guidelines, identifies deviations, and generates actionable audit reports.
These are production systems touching hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders, proving LLMs work when applied to well-defined problems with clear success metrics.
💼 Business & Industry
IT workers struggle as AI fears spread. Cameron Harris on benefits despite decade's experience. Dan Carson selling his house. Headlines blame AI agents for replacing 4,000 Salesforce workers.
3-min read.
Our take: Journalists often frame AI as the cause of job losses, but unemployment was already climbing toward 30-year highs before GPT 3.5. Most sectors were still unwinding COVID hiring excess. Anyone building with AI knows it isn’t replacing whole roles yet. Coding becomes supervising models, not vanishing. What we’re seeing is market correction plus hiring discipline, not an automation collapse. AI shifts work, creates new roles, and expands output. The real risk is headlines convincing talent they’re no longer needed.
Mother builds AI health records app after son's surgeries. Arlene Goodwin launching mA.I Health November 28 after carrying ring binder of son Luca's medical records. App uses AI to scan reports producing clear summaries.
3-min read.
Our take: GP wait times and lost family doctor role create market opportunity. Subscription model ($3.99/month, free under-16s) monetises healthcare system failures and fragmentation.
7% of New Zealanders set family safe words against AI scams and 62% of Kiwis now check communications more carefully. Pre-agreed phrases verify identity when loved ones request money unexpectedly. BNZ survey shows 55% limiting online sharing, 50% fact-checking news. AI-powered phishing top concern at 64%, deepfakes second at 58%, voice cloning third at 53%.
3-min read.
Our take: Arms race between scammer AI and security AI accelerates. Shared responsibility spans individuals, government, banks, social platforms, telcos, but coordination lags behind threat evolution.
⚖️ Government & Legal
Health NZ funds AI mental health navigator tool to tackle mental health access barriers. Platform guides Kiwis to local support and online therapy after entering symptoms and location. One-third of young people cite "not knowing where to go" as barrier.
9-min listen.
Our take: Fragmented systems create market inefficiency: navigation solves discovery, not delivery. Question remains whether AI triage matches clinical judgement for crisis situations. First real test of Health NZ's AI frameworks under public scrutiny. Success hinges on whether technology accelerates access without compromising clinical safety protocols.
⚖️ Society & Education
Enchanted Christmas removes photo rights clause after backlash. Newmarket experience claimed rights to use visitor photos for advertising without opt-out. Business now removing term and promises opt-in approach for future posts.
3-min read.
Our take: Default data grab meets informed parent resistance. Privacy-conscious consumers force policy changes when terms overreach: opt-in model should've been baseline, not damage control.
AI avatars learn 10,000 Māori sign language concepts. Kara Technologies building 10,000-sign library for airports, transport, emergency services. National Foundation for Deaf partnering to ensure Māori concepts embedded from start. Technology fills interpreter gaps for 4,500 first-language users at gates, supermarkets, medical appointments.
4-min read.
Our take: Tech can't replace interpreters but fills critical gaps for 4,500 first-language NZSL users. Success hinges on authentic Māori concept integration, not just translation.
📚️ AI for Business
Helping leaders and teams adapt, learn, and scale with AI.
1️⃣ The Real AI Problem Isn't Technology, It's Finance Meetings. And it’s creating a two speed economy. Smart people pitch AI projects that die in budget discussions. The real question isn't "should we invest in AI?" but "why are we paying for unused Copilot licenses with less than 20% adoption?".
4-min read.
2️⃣ The Trust Infrastructure Blocking Agentic Commerce. Referral traffic from AI is up 2.5x in six months, but agents can't transact without native payments. Google, Mastercard, and PayPal are rebuilding commerce around the Three A's whilst traditional models assume humans press "buy".
3-min read.
3️⃣ Design Your Living Room or Try On Clothes Inside Perplexity's Browser (video). Nano Banana renders product screenshots into your actual living room or shows you wearing clothes, all inside Perplexity Comet. Pair that with Instant Buy via PayPal and ChatGPT's Shopping Research that curates rather than lists. The gap between "looking" and "purchased" is disappearing.
1-min demo video.
4️⃣ Leadership Architecture, Not AI Strategy, Determines Success. High performers have four advantages: leaders who own outcomes versus approve them, growth objectives versus efficiency traps, aligned C-suites versus fractured priorities, and workflow redesign versus bolt-on projects.
1-min read.
5️⃣ More Than 800 Million People Will Shop Inside LLMs. Back in March, 41-46% were researching products inside ChatGPT and Gemini. Both platforms have since doubled their user bases to 800M weekly and 650M monthly. Most retailers are sleepwalking into this shift.
2-min read.
6️⃣ Agentic Commerce Will Reshape B2B's $32.8T Market. Everyone's focused on B2C whilst B2B sits there: bigger, more complex, and more agent-ready. When AI agents democratise product data and eliminate information asymmetry, distributor advantages evaporate just like record labels and travel agents.
2-min read.
7️⃣ The Best AI Opportunity in NZ is in Traditional SMBs. No-code micro apps eliminate dev team requirements. Small data beats big data. Deploy AI in your own environment to kill security fears. Traditional businesses want local partners who understand their industry, not Microsoft workshops. The pitch isn't headcount reduction, it's profitable growth without adding staff.
1-min read.
🎙️ The AI Corner Podcast
This week's guest is Bindi Norwell, Group CEO of Procare. Hear:
Why Bindi says smart people in healthcare are still doing "dumb stuff”, and the AI tools changing that.
How Heidi Health saves seven minutes per consult, transforming the patient experience.
The playbook for building an innovation culture: partner with experts, empower teams, and celebrate failures.
🌍 Tech Updates From Global
The selected top headlines from each major AI tech company.
OpenAI
Expanded shopping research capabilities in ChatGPT, delivering detailed buying guides with top products and up-to-date pricing.
Admitted in an internal memo to falling behind Google in the AI race, particularly due to Gemini models' stronger market foothold.
Reportedly working on developing its own GPUs alongside competitors to reduce reliance on third-party chips.
Outpaced OpenAI with Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana Pro models, establishing significant competitive advantage through superior execution and coherent AI strategy.
Launched Aluminium OS, a unified platform for PCs powered by Gemini models to perform demanding AI tasks, rolling out in 2026.
Support page indicates Assistant will be replaced by Gemini in March 2026 on Android Auto, though full phase-out details remain unclear.
Anthropic
Launched Claude Opus 4.5, achieving 80.9% on SWE-bench Verified and outperforming competitors with enhanced coding, reasoning, and agentic capabilities whilst cutting token use by nearly half.
CEO Dario Amodei set to testify about Claude Code's involvement in a cyber-espionage case, marking significant event in AI's cybersecurity role.
Microsoft
Launched Fara-7B, a lightweight AI system designed for web automation and research, enhancing capabilities in the AI sector.
Set to discontinue support for its Copilot application on WhatsApp, requiring users to switch to alternative platforms.
Amazon
Announced $50 billion investment to expand AI and supercomputing capabilities for U.S. government customers, supporting the Trump Administration's AI Action Plan.
Faces internal concerns regarding its aggressive AI expansion strategy as employees raise alarms about initiative impacts.
xAI
Planning to implement solar farm to power its Colossus data centre, aiming to support growing AI resource needs.
Reportedly pursuing autonomous pixel-driven AI system operating through raw video inputs, executing commands without needing APIs.
📅 AI Events in New Zealand
12 AI events happening across the country this week.
This week’s featured event:
Success Workshop - The Future is Now: AI Update - Tuesday in Welly. This is a lunchtime session from Yes for Success covering how to use AI for job hunting, career planning, and positioning yourself well in the market.
A smart one to attend if you want practical direction and immediate tools for your next move.
📅 Promote your event with us. Reply to let us know.
💼 AI Roles Around Aotearoa
Picklist of 🌶️ HOT 🌶️ new roles in AI this week
Business Analyst AI Insights,Deloitte: Wellington
Senior/ Tech Lead - AI Development, Datacom: Christchurch
💼 Promote your job with us. Reply to let us know.
🤦 ️ AI Funny Of The Week
We all love AI, but it’s certainly far from perfect 🤔 …
👋 Mike & Erin