Kia ora! Welcome to New Zealand’s weekly roundup of AI news and education.
Last week I shared a post on LinkedIn starting a build in public series: the wins, the learnings, and the weekly process behind building an AI-native agency here in New Zealand. Not polished recaps, just the real flow behind the scenes. I also posted recently about running an internal hackathon to build our own agentic project manager.
This week: build vs buy is heating up, a new customer win, and some learnings from an industry event on where AI products are headed. Sharing it here for others to follow.
We're also hiring a Lead AI Engineer at Allexive. Our work has moved past pilots, and we're now redesigning how work gets done and AI agents operate across the likes of Mitre 10, Petbarn (Animates brother company in Aus), Target Furniture, RealNZ, and Opes Mortgages.
That means rolling out Claude, Copilot and ChatGPT inside real businesses, and shipping product into Claude’s Agent SDK, Microsoft’s Agent Framework and Google’s ADK. If this is your world, or you know someone who lives and breathes agent infrastructure, DM me for more information, or apply here.
Happy reading ✌️
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🇳🇿 New Zealand News
Finance Minister Nicola Willis announced on 19 May that approximately 8,700 public service jobs would go by 2029, saving NZ$2.4bn, with AI and digital tools framed as a single pillar of the reform alongside agency mergers and a sinking lid on operating budgets. Three days later, Minister for Digitising Government Paul Goldsmith confirmed AI regulation would wait until the cuts were done, holding NZ's light-touch stance through a Crown-scale rollout. International coverage (The Register, 20 May) summarised the announcement as "AI will be a basic expectation for agencies".
4 min read
Our take: The order of operations is wrong. The government has set a headcount target before it has set a work-redesign answer, so the dollar number came first, the role number followed, and the actual question of how AI changes the work sits somewhere behind that. You cannot know what headcount you can do without until you know how the work itself will change, and that sequence is not optional. My POV outlined further here. For alternative perspectives, read Emily Broadmore’s (Beyond Logic) take or hear Mark Laurence’s (Ten Past Tomorrow) interview with John Campbell.
Seek's Employment Report for April showed NZ job ads referencing AI skills rose 4.1% month-on-month, with AI mentions in job ads more than doubling over the past year. Consulting and strategy roles led at 14.3% monthly growth; advertising, arts and media at 11.6%. Overall NZ job ads grew 0.8% monthly and 13.1% annually. Country manager Rob Clark framed it as a broader evolution in demand for AI-related skills, not just a tech-sector story.
2 min read
Our take: Consulting and strategy leading the growth tells us the demand is not for AI engineers, it is for people who can translate AI into operating decisions. That is a different hiring market, and most NZ recruitment functions are still wired for the first one. The shortage that bites first is the bilingual middle-manager who can hold a board-paper conversation and maintain an efficient operating system in Claude at the same time.
Facebook pages including "Red Knight Legacy", "Storm Surge Squad" and "Waikato Rugby Force" have amassed tens of thousands of followers spreading AI-generated disinformation about the Crusaders, Hurricanes and Chiefs since at least early April. Posts attributed fake quotes to players, used AI-generated images, and falsely claimed former All Black Brad Weber had stage-four glioblastoma. Weber denied it on X. The Crusaders called a page targeting Richie Mo'unga "completely fake".
3 min read
Our take: The business model here is engagement, which is what makes it hard to stop. These pages farm outrage and grief because the comment sections fill with people who believe the posts are real, and every reply trains the algorithm to show the next fabrication to more people. If sports brands with legal teams and official channels can be impersonated at scale, every NZ company is one viral AI post away from a fake quote, a fake recall, or a fake executive statement.
Minister David Seymour unveiled the Ministry for Regulation's first-ever map of NZ's regulatory environment on 20 May, identifying 267 regulators with 95 government departments and Crown entities sitting in the inner ring. The mapping work used AI to identify overlap and duplication. Seymour urged consolidation off the back of the findings.
2 min read
Our take: This is the first time this newsletter cycle we see AI used inside a Crown ministry on substantive policy work, not on a Copilot pilot or an internal-comms summary. Mapping 267 regulators is the kind of task that would have taken (I’d hazard a guess) a consulting firm twelve weeks and seven figures three years ago. The fact it now sits inside a ministry as standing capability changes what "policy analysis" means at the Crown level.
📚️ Mike’s Takes From The Week
Helping leaders and teams adapt, learn, and scale with AI.
1️⃣ How to create the perfect Claude skill: principles every AI user needs: A saved prompt in a folder is not a skill. Here is the architecture every real skill needs, the six structural parts inside the file, and the four-step audit any user can run.
12-min read
2️⃣ Uber blew its full-year 2026 AI tokens budget by April, and the CTO didn't see it coming: Once one team gets AI working, every other team wants in, and spend stops being a line item and starts curving north. AI is not software and not headcount. It's more like electricity, and most CFOs in NZ aren't ready for forecasting this cost into their financial statements.
3-min read
3️⃣ Training a workforce on AI without work redesign is the most expensive form of standing still: Training builds capability, whereas work redesign rebuilds the work. Read on for the five things work redesign needs that AI training doesn't deliver, and the three things to do this week to stop running training programmes and waiting for the magic to happen.
3-min read
🛠 Latest Builds and Finds
Helping advanced builders stay at the frontier of AI.
Jobs
1️⃣ Bob McGrew's framework via Garry Tan: the AI future has two jobs, the Lone Genius and the Manager. Genius = one person with taste, amplified 1000x. Manager = CEO of a firm where most employees are agents. AI doesn't concentrate those roles into fewer hands. It distributes them into more. The bottleneck was never talent, it’s always been access and capital.
Post
2️⃣ Dan Shipper's "After Automation" argues AI creates more expert work, not less. Every has automated everything they can across a 30-person team, and there's more human work than ever. AI commoditises yesterday's competence into sameness, which generates demand for differentiation only humans supply. Levie made a similar point: automating tasks doesn't kill the job; the role expands to higher-quality work.
Article
Design
3️⃣ tufte-viz is a Claude Code skill that generates Tufte-style data reports as standalone HTML files. The craft gap between "AI can make charts" and "AI can make charts worth reading" is exactly where skills like this separate newbies from skilled users of AI.
Gist
🌍 Tech Updates From Global
The selected top headlines from each major AI tech company.
OpenAI
Confidentially filed S-1 at $852B-$1T valuation (Goldman, Morgan Stanley), targeting a Q4 listing despite losing $1.22 for every $1 of revenue in Q1. (May 22)
Codex hit 4M+ weekly enterprise developers and shipped a Dell partnership integrating Codex with the Dell AI Data Platform and AI Factory on-prem. (May 18)
Ads Manager self-serve beta opened to US advertisers with CPC/CPM bidding, third-party measurement and no minimum spend, targeting $2.5B ad revenue in 2026. (May 21)
The Oakland advisory jury threw out Musk's suit in under two hours on statute-of-limitations grounds after 11 days of testimony; Musk's lawyer said "Appeal." (May 18)
Anthropic
Closing the $30B+ raise at $900B+ valuation next week, co-led by Sequoia, Dragoneer, Altimeter and Greenoaks at ~$2B each, surpassing OpenAI in valuation. (May 22)
Projecting first-ever quarterly operating profit on $10.9B Q2 revenue (up from $4.8B Q1), annualised run rate to exceed $50B by end of June. (May 21)
Acquired Stainless (the SDK and MCP-server platform behind every Claude SDK, also used by OpenAI, Google and Cloudflare) for $300M+. (May 18)
Claude Code added Agent View, Goal Mode and made Fast Mode default to Opus 4.7; on-prem sandboxes and MCP tunnels shown at Code with Claude London. (May 19)
Ranked #1 on the 2026 CNBC Disruptor 50 list on 80x quarterly revenue growth, leapfrogging OpenAI. (May 19)
Andrej Karpathy joined the Anthropic pretraining team, flagged as the talent signal of the week. (week of May 19)
Google / DeepMind
Gemini 3.5 Flash launched as the new flagship, beating Gemini 3.1 Pro on coding (76.2% Terminal-Bench) at 4x speed for $1.50/$9.00 per million tokens. (May 19)
Gemini Spark launched as a 24/7 cloud-based agentic personal assistant on Antigravity, with deep Workspace integration and the ability to email Spark directly. (May 19)
Antigravity 2.0 launched as a five-surface agent-first dev platform (desktop, CLI, SDK, Managed Agents API, Enterprise) supporting Gemini 3 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-OSS. (May 19)
Gmail Live and Docs Live launched as conversational voice AI for inbox search and live dictation with Drive and chat context, summer preview. (May 19)
AI Mode crossed 1 billion monthly users (queries 3x longer than search, 16% multimodal), defaulting to Gemini 3.5 Flash across ~200 countries. (May 19)
Vertex AI rebrand finished: Console-level migration completed with Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform replacing Vertex AI in an agent-first hierarchy. (May 21)
Microsoft
Microsoft Build 2026 (May 19-20 ahead of June) brought GPT-5.5 Instant and Thinking to Copilot Chat, agentic enterprise browsing and Outlook email-context grounding. (May 19)
EY committed $1B+ over five years pairing EY consultants with Microsoft Forward Deployed Engineers, with 20 co-development engagements already underway. (May 21)
GitHub Copilot cloud agent added cheaper Claude Haiku 4.5 and GPT-5.4-mini options at 0.33x multiplier for simple tasks while keeping premium models for complex work. (May 18)
GitHub Copilot Chat on web removed all Gemini models plus GPT-5.2 Codex and GPT-5.4 nano from the selector, citing more consistent response quality. (May 20)
UK Competition and Markets Authority opened an antitrust probe into whether Microsoft 365 dominance plus embedded Copilot restricts competition in cloud, cybersecurity and communications. (May 21)
xAI / Grok
SpaceX filed a $1.75T IPO S-1 (ticker SPCX) disclosing xAI represents 60% of total capex, $18.67B consolidated 2025 revenue and a $4.94B net loss. (May 20)
The S-1 revealed Anthropic will pay xAI up to $1.25B per month for all of Colossus 1 (300MW, 222,000+ GPUs) through May 2029, $40B+ total. (May 20)
Grok Skills rolled out to all Grok 4.3 users on web, iOS and Android with persistent expertise plus native .docx, spreadsheets-with-formulas and PDF reports. (May 18)
Grok shipped third-party connectors for Vercel, Canva, Gamma and S&P Global, positioning Grok as a productivity hub rather than a chatbot. (May 22)
NVIDIA
Q1 FY27 revenue of $81.6B (+85% YoY) beat $78-79B consensus with $75.2B data centre (+92%) and $1.87 EPS, the largest quarter in company history. (May 20)
Meta
Cut 8,000 jobs (~10% of workforce) with 7,000 staff redirected into Applied AI Engineering, Agent Transformation Accelerator and Central Analytics; 2026 capex raised to $125-145B. (May 20)
Meta AI gained a personalised "For You" news feed based on prior prompts, plus a new AI assistant for WhatsApp Business developers. (May 19)
Apple
iOS 27 Camera app will gain a dedicated "Siri Mode" alongside Photo/Video/Portrait/Pano for point-and-ask Visual Intelligence on labels, business cards and receipts with Health/Contacts auto-sync. (May 20)
Apple Intelligence 2.0 near-confirmed for WWDC: standalone Siri, agentic app actions, on-screen and personal-context awareness, third-party model extensions. (May 22)
Amazon / AWS
Alexa+ launched Alexa Podcasts, generating full two-host AI episodes on demand in the US, with licensing deals across 200+ news organisations. (May 18)
Perplexity
Opened MCP custom connectors to Pro, Max and Enterprise, letting users wire Perplexity to any external tool via OAuth, API key or open auth. (week of May 18)
Added inline editing on Computer-generated assets: draw a box over any doc, deck, spreadsheet or PDF and Computer edits in place. (week of May 18)
✨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