Kia ora! Welcome to New Zealand’s weekly roundup of AI news and education.
For all my fellow fans of The Office, check out Claude’s first day at Dunder Mifflin.
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🇳🇿 New Zealand News
Small Business Minister Cameron Brewer used the Great NZ AI Roadshow on 15 May to expand the AI Advisory Pilot from 50 to 150 businesses and extend it to 31 January 2027. Eligible firms can now claim up to 50% co-funding capped at $15,000 to develop a tailored AI plan, delivered through the Regional Business Partner Network. The pilot was originally launched in January with a 50-business cap that hit capacity early.
3 min read
Our take: The interesting question is what counts as a "tailored AI plan" inside the Regional Business Partner Network, because the quality bar for that work is going to make or break the credibility of every future government AI subsidy. If the deliverable is a glossy document with no implementation backbone, the pilot will read as a stimulus payment to consultants rather than a productivity lever.
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner released the 2026 annual privacy survey on 11 May, with 67% of New Zealanders concerned about government and business AI decision-making using their personal data, up five points on last year. Children's online privacy led at 71% and social media data handling sat at 65%. Only 18% are extremely or very confident NZ law adequately protects personal information.
3 min read
Our take: 67% concern about AI decision-making is the customer-trust ceiling every NZ business deploying AI is hitting right now, whether they realise it or not. If two-thirds of your customers are worried about how AI decides things, the burden of proof for any AI-powered service falls back on the business itself rather than on the regulator, which means visible AI governance becomes a customer-acquisition move rather than a compliance afterthought.
Market research platform Ideally acquired Aether, an NZ AI startup co-founded by the former TikTok NZ boss, which turns spreadsheets, decks and brand guidelines into finished on-brand presentations and written narratives. Aether's technology will be integrated into Ideally's research platform. The acquisition follows Ideally's $16m Series A at a $100m valuation. Customers include Google, Nestlé, Bupa, Treasury Wine Estates, Goodman Fielder and Nando's. Value undisclosed.
2 min read
Our take: A $16m Series A at $100m last year, an acquisition this year, customers including Google and Nestlé. None of that is a fluke, and it suggests Ideally is on the trajectory that NZ commentators have been predicting for the better-resourced AI startups since at least 2024. The next test is whether the Aether team stays in Auckland or migrates with the customers.
NZ Herald's premium investigation into the Heidi AI scribe rollout across 16 emergency departments surfaced a transcription error in which "in the morning" was rewritten as "every morning", with clinical implications. Patient data is still being stored on Sydney servers while NZ infrastructure is built. A companion RNZ piece showed a separate Health NZ emergency department AI tool was jailbroken via a system-prompt change into renaming itself "Nexus", rewriting its own code, and producing a methamphetamine recipe alongside identity theft instructions.
5 min read
Our take: "In the morning" becoming "every morning" is the kind of error that looks small until the next clinician reads the note and acts on it, and it is precisely the failure mode that the human-review caveat is supposed to catch but rarely does. The advice from Heidi's clinical director to review notes contemporaneously assumes time that emergency department clinicians do not have, which is the whole reason the AI scribe is being rolled out in the first place.
ASB unveiled "Pathway to Productivity" on 13 May, bundling a free 12-week AI Bootcamp for Business co-built with Xero and delivered by academyEX (4,000 SME seats at $1,350 each, fully ASB-funded), a talent placement scheme via the NZ Product Accelerator, and subsidised consultancy for manufacturers. ASB is targeting 4,100 businesses, $5.1m of additional revenue and $44.7m in cost savings. Bootcamp registrations open 18 May.
3 min read
Our take: The Government's AI Advisory Pilot expansion to 150 businesses, announced two days later, lands as a footnote next to a bank-funded programme targeting 4,000. The numbers are not directly comparable, but the signal is the same: serious AI capability investment in NZ is being led by the private sector while the public-sector pilot is still proving the concept.
📚️ Mike’s Takes From The Week
Helping leaders and teams adapt, learn, and scale with AI.
1️⃣ If agents can read the database, what is the CRM actually for? Salesforce just shipped Headless 360, and a16z says gravity in the AI era comes from orchestration, not data accumulation. The System of Record stays. A new System of Intelligence sits on top, and the switching costs are about to stack, not disappear.
3-min read
2️⃣ Installed an AI legal team in 90 seconds, and it interviewed me before doing any work: Anthropic's Claude for Legal is free, open source, and 12 plugins deep. Vendor reviews, NDA triage, SaaS subscription audits, renewal tracking. The cold-start interview learns the business first, then reviews contracts against your tolerances, not generic ones.
2-min read
3️⃣ Tools get used, systems get tuned. Most enterprises are only doing half: Licences bought, agents deployed, context files loaded. Six months in, the team is are paying the same private editing tax in parallel with no shared record of what changed. The half almost nobody is building decides whether AI compounds or just slowly accumulates an editing bill.
6-min read
4️⃣ Five mistakes leaders make rolling out AI, from 30 calls in two months: Asking workers to redesign their own jobs. Plugging in the platform and hoping. Going cross-functional before one team works. Chasing the million-dollar use case. Treating context like a pile of files. Most businesses buy tools and hope they get operating systems.
3-min read
5️⃣ The new way to present information using AI (and the end of the template era): Docs, decks, and slides are becoming clickable artefacts. We’re now presenting information (proposals, client architecture reviews, etc.) as an interactive HTML system. The default deliverable does not always need to be a document anymore.
1-min watch
🛠 Latest Builds and Finds
Helping advanced builders stay at the frontier of AI.
1️⃣ Anthropic shipped Claude Design on April 17. Open Design cloned it in 11 days and hit 20,000 GitHub stars in six. Local-first, BYOK, auto-detects 16 coding-agent CLIs on your PATH, ships 72 brand design systems (Linear, Stripe, Apple, Ferrari) as single DESIGN.md files. The pattern matters more than the tool: every closed Anthropic release now spawns a permissive clone inside 48 hours that covers 80-90% within weeks. Plan stacks accordingly. Thread
2️⃣ Singapore's Foreign Minister is still shipping his own agents. A few weeks back we covered Dr Balakrishnan's OpenClaw work. This week: a second-brain-for-diplomacy he built on a Raspberry Pi with Claude and WhatsApp. His line: "You cannot govern a technology you have only been briefed on." The people setting AI policy at the highest levels are now writing the integrations themselves. Post
🌍 Tech Updates From Global
The selected top headlines from each major AI tech company.
OpenAI
ChatGPT Personal Finance launched on web and iOS, connecting bank, brokerage and credit accounts via Plaid across 12,000 institutions. (May 15)
Codex came to ChatGPT mobile in preview across all plans including Free, controllable from the phone via a connected Mac. (May 14)
GPT-Realtime-2, GPT-Realtime-Translate (70 input / 13 output languages) and GPT-Realtime-Whisper released for live voice apps. (May 13)
ChatGPT memory added a sources view and pulls more aggressively from past chats, saved memories, files and Gmail. (May 11)
Workspace Agents in ChatGPT moved to credit-based pricing (previously free); Business added Analytics and Agents to the admin console. (May 11)
CRO Denise Dresser told CNBC enterprise now drives 40%+ of OpenAI revenue, on track for parity with consumer by year-end. (May 11)
Reportedly preparing legal action against Apple over the Siri integration, ranging from breach-of-contract notice to full lawsuit. (May 14)
Anthropic
Claude for Legal launched with 20+ MCP connectors (Harvey, Thomson Reuters CoCounsel, Westlaw, Practical Law) plus six practice-area plugins. (May 12)
Claude for Small Business launched on Cowork with 15 prebuilt agentic workflows across finance, ops, sales, marketing, HR and CS. (May 13)
PwC alliance expanded to certify 30,000 PwC professionals on Claude, with Advocate Health (167,000 staff) as flagship build-out. (May 14)
Reportedly in talks to raise $30B to $50B at a $900B+ pre-money valuation, more than double its March $380B round. (May 12)
EU Commission confirmed Anthropic continues to withhold Mythos from European regulators after four to five meetings, while OpenAI grants cyber-model access. (May 11)
Google / DeepMind
Gemini Intelligence launched as a proactive AI layer turning Android into an agentic OS, on Pixel and Samsung this summer. (May 12)
Chromebook brand retired and Googlebook launched, a Gemini Intelligence-native laptop with Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo for fall 2026. (May 12)
DeepMind's Magic Pointer launched as an AI-aware mouse cursor that understands what users are pointing at and why. (May 12)
Gemini in Chrome shipped an auto-browse agentic mode that navigates sites, fills forms and completes multi-step tasks. (May 12)
Rambler-powered Gboard dictation converts messy speech into polished text in real time across multiple languages. (May 12)
Microsoft
GitHub Copilot launched a standalone agentic desktop app in technical preview for Windows, macOS and Linux with concurrent-session worktrees. (May 14)
Copilot Studio added agent nodes inside deterministic workflows, agent-to-agent comms and early GPT-5.5 Reasoning access. (May 11)
Outlook (Classic and New) rolled out a Copilot Prep card embedding meeting briefings inside meeting invites, plus auto-mapped teammate calendars. (May 10)
Copilot Calendar Agent moved from Frontier preview into broader May availability via plain-English rules to auto-accept, follow, decline or delete meetings. (May 10 to May 17)
GitHub Copilot CLI 1.0.48 shipped transparent token pricing ahead of the June 1 transition to usage-based billing with monthly AI Credit allotments. (May 14)
xAI / SpaceXAI
Grok Build launched in beta as xAI's first agentic AI coding CLI, gated to a new SuperGrok Heavy tier at $300/mo ($99 intro). (May 15)
Agent tool pricing cut up to 50% (max $5 per 1,000 successful calls) to undercut OpenAI and Anthropic on agent-heavy workloads. (week of May 12)
xAI added 19 more gas turbines at its Memphis Colossus site while being sued by the NAACP for the original 27 unpermitted turbines. (May 13)
Apple
Apple is reshaping App Store policy to let autonomous AI agents operate inside iOS, with possible reveal at WWDC June 8. (May 13)
iOS 27's "completely rebuilt" Siri will include a system-wide "Search or Ask" gesture toggling Siri, ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude as default. (May 12)
Amazon / AWS
Amazon retired the Rufus brand into a unified Alexa+ powered "Alexa for Shopping" agent across app, web and Echo Show. (May 13)
AWS previewed Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments, the first managed payments layer letting AI agents autonomously pay for APIs, MCP servers and other agents. (May 11)
Perplexity
Perplexity Computer arrived inside Microsoft Teams with Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, Excel and Azure DevOps connectors. (week of May 11)
Comet agentic browsing embedded in Samsung Internet, with Comet for iOS opening App Store pre-orders alongside enterprise Memory and SEC-filing audit. (week of May 12)
Perplexity API repositioned as a full-stack agent platform (Agent, Search, Embeddings, upcoming Sandbox), pitched as a one-key replacement. (mid-May)
✨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