Kia ora! Welcome to New Zealand’s weekly roundup of AI news and education.
📢 Two things from us.
Last week's Claude Code coaching programme filled inside the day.
Thank you for the interest! Next intake opens in the near term for non-technical knowledge workers looking to move non-coding activities into Claude Code. Join the waiting list.
The AI Corner podcast is finally available on Apple Podcasts.
We’ve finally navigated the hurdle of creating an Apple Podcast account (don’t ask…). If that's your player, please subscribe, and a rating would help us enormously.
☕️ Starbucks launched a beta app inside ChatGPT: describe a mood or upload a photo, it picks your drink, you check out in the Starbucks app.
I wrote about this type of move from companies: a lot of brands are going to build experiences into ChatGPT just because they can, and most of it will be gimmicky. This feels like one of those.
Happy reading ✌️
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🇳🇿 New Zealand News
NZ-founded Allbirds sold its shoe IP and brand assets to American Exchange Group for US$39M, raised a US$50M convertible facility, and rebranded on Nasdaq as NewBird AI, a GPU-as-a-Service compute infrastructure play. The stock spiked 582-800% on the announcement, then fell more than 20% within 24 hours. Founder Tim Brown's NZ origin story is the local angle; the entity is US-listed and US-operated. 4 min read.
Our take: This is the purest "AI label on a struggling business" trade of the year, verging on meme stock territory. A company with a well-known consumer brand, a shrinking shoe business, and a retail investor base discovering its shares can go 7x overnight on three letters in the ticker. Expect an ever-increasing number of pivots like this moving forward, with the board-level question asked re: which struggling assets genuinely have an AI-adjacent reuse case (data, distribution, compute).
Westpac NZ became the first major NZ company, and one of the first banks globally, to deploy Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Centre with embedded AI, surfacing a customer's banking profile and relevant product information to agents in real time. Full rollout is scheduled across every contact centre by August 2026. An accompanying Westpac survey of 529 customers found 65% comfortable or neutral about AI-assisted service, and around one-third uneasy. 4 min read.
Our take: "Embedded AI in an agent's screen" will be one of the enterprise patterns of 2026. Not a chatbot replacing humans, rather a model whispering into a human's ear while they talk. The governance question shifts from whether the customer knows they are speaking to AI, but whether the human agent on the other end knows what the AI got wrong.
Auckland deep-tech startup Atomic Tessellator closed a US$11.3M seed round led by Crane Venture Partners with In-Q-Tel, Icehouse Ventures, Outset Ventures and GD1 at an estimated US$50M valuation. Founder Alain Richardt's six-person team designs rare-earth alternatives for defence, semiconductor and aerospace using quantum physics and AI. The same week, NZ-founded AI-native fund administration platform Caruso raised NZ$9.3M Series A at a NZ$80M valuation. Atomic Tessellator, 4 min read | Caruso, 4 min read.
Our take: Two NZ AI raises in the same week, two very different theses: Atomic Tessellator selling a defence-adjacent simulation moat to strategic investors, Caruso selling compressed middle-office economics to existing customers. Both are AI-native from day one, and both skipped the domestic capital-only path, pulling in In-Q-Tel and Dallas-based expansion capital respectively. The pattern to notice: NZ AI companies reaching Series A now are raising against global comparables, not local ones.
Watch competitors build momentum, or turn AI into action at the 2026 AI Roadshow [AI Corner readers get $50 off].
I’ve twisted Justin’s arm and secured AI Corner readers a $50 discount off Roadshow tickets. Use discount code AI-CORNER when you buy a pass to any Roadshow event.
📚️ Mike’s Takes From The Week
Helping leaders and teams adapt, learn, and scale with AI.
1️⃣ Claude Code vs Claude Cowork is a philosophy choice, not a feature comparison: Chat is a brain in a jar, Cowork is a concierge in a sealed workspace, Claude Code has hands on the actual machine. Cowork is seen as the tool for those who aren’t coders, and Code is for engineers. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
9-min read.
2️⃣ Claude Code is the must-learn skill for every knowledge worker in 2026: One workflow now fans a Fireflies transcript across eight systems with no human touching it: routing, debriefs, HubSpot, content mining. Custom GPTs and Copilot memory do not move between vendors. Markdown files in folders survive every model change, Claude Code is a valuable target end-state to future proof yourself in an AI world.
8-min read.
3️⃣ Brilliant principles to drive full AI transformation in NZ businesses: Successful transformation involves putting AI into people’s work organically without them having to actively introduce it. This is where providing AI tools and training alone isn’t sufficient. Works in a 500-person bank or a 5-person consultancy.
3-min read.
4️⃣ Committee consensus is the common denominator stalling AI transformation: Across 36 discovery calls this year, movers had one C-suite owner running pilots without committee consensus. One CDO stopped buying software and shipped three pilots by quarter end. The other still has a working group and no AI use policy.
3-min read.
5️⃣ Anthropic is reportedly building a Lovable-style vibe coding interface: Leaked screens show a full-stack builder turning ideas into production code in seconds. The armchair take kills Lovable and Bolt. The reality: easy wins are over, and the next generation of vibe coding wins by going deep on specific workflows with high retention.
2-min read.
Workshop: complete tasks faster & build real AI tools in 3-hours [no coding required].
You’ll learn how to:
Automate repetitive admin and day-to-day tasks
Build AI agents, apps, websites and internal tools without coding
Integrate tools and automate reports, quotes, and marketing assets
📅 Auckland — 6 May
🎟️ $299 + GST with code AICORNER
📅 Virtual (NZ-wide) — 7 May
🎟️ $199 + GST with code AICORNER
🎙️ The AI Corner Podcast
This week's guest is Andrew Dentice, Partner at Hudson Gavin Martin. Hear:
Why AI-built products can't come with a normal IP indemnity, and how to contract around it.
The split between "intelligence work" and "judgement work", and what it means for junior lawyers.
How NZ tech exporters should weigh the EU AI Act before chasing the European market.
* This episode may take a little while to show on Apple, depending on when the RSS feed updates.
🛠 Latest Builds and Finds
Helping advanced builders stay at the frontier of AI.
What I'm building
1️⃣ I've been hooked on Claude Design all weekend, using it to rebuild The AI Corner website (coming soon).
Moving off Beehiiv's template onto Next.js + Vercel, with the new site as a multi-pillar hub. The interesting bit is the workflow: I pre-built a full brand kit, page briefs and voice doc as markdown, then fed the whole thing into Claude Design with a 250-word "Notes" paragraph encoding the hard rules. First run produced a hi-fi homepage with every colour token correct and the tagline on-voice. Biggest surprise: output quality is almost entirely a function of how much structure you feed it upfront. Less a design tool, more a brief-compiler with taste.
What I'm reading and thinking over
2️⃣ Harrison Chase's "Your harness, your memory" and Sarah Wooders' "Why memory isn't a plugin (it's the harness)": Memory isn't a service you plug into a harness. It is the harness. What survives compaction, how AGENTS.md loads, whether the agent can rewrite its own prompt are all memory decisions that live in the harness. Chase's point: closed harness behind an API means you don't own your memory. The clearest case yet for keeping memory portable: markdown on your filesystem, readable by any harness.
🌍 Tech Updates From Global
The selected top headlines from each major AI tech company.
Anthropic
Claude Opus 4.7 shipped GA with 1M-token context, 3x higher vision resolution, a new "xhigh" effort tier and automatic cyber safeguards at unchanged Opus 4.6 pricing of $5/$25 per million tokens. (Apr 16)
Claude Design launched as a research preview for Pro/Max/Team/Enterprise subscribers, turning prompts into prototypes, pitch decks and UI mockups. (Apr 17)
Claude Code desktop redesigned for Mac and Windows with Routines in research preview, moving execution to Anthropic's web infrastructure so tasks keep running when the laptop closes. (Apr 14)
Enterprise seat pricing dropped bundled tokens, leaving the $20/employee/month seat as pure access and pushing customers toward usage-based billing at renewal. (Apr 16)
OpenAI
Codex desktop on macOS gained computer-use across any Mac app, gpt-image-1.5 image generation, persistent memory, scheduled tasks and SSH devbox connections, directly targeting Claude Code's dominance in agentic coding. (Apr 16)
GPT-5.4-Cyber launched as a restricted cyber-defence model (including binary reverse-engineering) with a tiered Trusted Access program scaling to thousands of verified security professionals. (Apr 14)
Agents SDK added native sandboxed workspaces (Blaxel, Cloudflare, Daytona, E2B, Modal, Runloop, Vercel) plus a model-native harness with configurable memory so agents survive container failures across multi-day tasks. (Apr 15)
Sam Altman's San Francisco home targeted in two separate attacks; 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama charged with attempted murder after a Molotov cocktail incident and a later firearm discharge. (Apr 12-13)
Microsoft
Claude Opus 4.7 rolled out across GitHub Copilot Pro+, Business and Enterprise at a promotional 7.5x premium request multiplier through April 30, replacing Opus 4.5 and 4.6 in the picker. (Apr 16)
GitHub Copilot CLI auto model selection reached GA, routing dynamically between GPT-5.4, GPT-5.3-Codex, Sonnet 4.6 and Haiku 4.5 with a 10% multiplier discount for paid users. (Apr 17)
Copilot Chat removal from Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote for unlicensed users deferred from April 15 to May 16, 2026. (Apr 16)
Google / DeepMind
Workspace admin console added a "Generative AI" subsection for dedicated Gemini Enterprise access controls. (Apr 17)
Google Vids gained 30 new expressive AI voiceover options across 24 languages, powered by the Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS model. (Apr 17)
Perplexity
Personal Computer launched on Mac for $200/month Max subscribers, integrating with local files, iMessage, Mail, Calendar and other native Mac apps via the Perplexity Mac App. (Apr 16)
NVIDIA
Launched Ising, the world's first family of open AI models for quantum error-correction decoding, claiming 2.5x faster and 3x more accurate performance with Harvard, Fermilab, IQM and LBNL as adopters. (Apr 14)
Shares climbed 18% over ten trading days (longest winning streak since 2023) as Jensen Huang reiterated more than $1T in GPU orders through 2027 across Blackwell and Vera Rubin. (Apr 14)
xAI
Apple threatened to pull Grok from the App Store over sexualised deepfakes of real people generated by the Imagine feature, violating App Store policy. (Apr 15)
Grok Business (self-serve SMB tier) and Grok Enterprise (SSO, SCIM, Vault) subscriptions launched in parallel with the deepfake controversy. (Apr 14, date unconfirmed)
Meta
New Muse Spark-powered shopping upgrades rolled across Meta's apps with outfit suggestions, room styling and gift ideas. (Apr 16)
Analysts pegged Meta's 2026 AI-related capex at $115B-$135B, nearly double the prior year, as the NVIDIA infrastructure deal landed. (Apr 15)
✨A few people have asked…
It’s Mike here, I run The AI Corner.
I’m not just into writing about AI. I run Allexive, and we help businesses grow without adding headcount by implementing AI platforms, and building AI systems.
👋 Mike & Erin