When businesses first roll out AI, the wins usually look the same. People get their emails written quicker. Reports land faster. Reconciliations take minutes instead of hours. Tobias Zwingmann calls these “Faster Horses”in his latest article****(brilliant analogy).
They’re handy. They take the sting out of everyday work and give people the confidence to keep trying new things. But they don’t change the game as you’re still running the same playbook, just moving a bit quicker.
The real shift comes from “Teleporters”. These don’t speed up the old system, they skip half of it altogether.
Support tickets that never reach a human because the AI resolves them first.
Finance that reconciles itself in real time, instead of waiting until month-end.
Tourism campaigns that launch in multiple languages and markets instantly, without adding staff.
Same outcome, with a different system, and different performance.
The Problem Today with AI Implementation
Walk into almost any company right now and you’ll see one of two camps:
Camp 1: Frustrated that AI isn’t transformational enough. They’re giving people Faster Horses but expecting Teleporter results.
Camp 2: Overwhelmed with too many AI use cases. Every department wants something, but they can’t tell the difference between Horses (quick wins) and Teleporters (system redesigns).
Neither camp gets results that make executives happy. One ends up disappointed, the other paralysed.
The Ceiling Problem in NZ
A lot of NZ businesses are stuck training Faster Horses. Rolling out Copilot or ChatGPT is treated like job done. But that’s the same mistake made in the early internet days when having a website was seen as the finish line.
The winners weren’t the ones who put their brochures online. They were the ones who rebuilt distribution from the ground up.
The danger is that if you only apply AI to speed up old processes, it’s like strapping a rocket ship to a train. Sure, you’ll go faster, but only along the same tracks you were already on because the system itself never changes.
That was the point in my #1 Mistake article: businesses think they’ve bought transformation, but all they’ve really done is laid more tracks and called it progress.
The Real Difference Between Horses and Teleporters
Tobias’ point is that you actually need both. They matter for different reasons, and they must be managed differently.
Faster Horses are the quick wins. They’re bottom-up, easy to roll out, and they build comfort with AI. You measure them in time saved or quality improved.
Teleporters are the rewrites. They’re top-down, cross-functional, and riskier. They need executive sponsorship, cross-team design, and change management. You measure them in throughput, cycle time, and steps eliminated.
Confuse them, and you'll run into trouble. Leaders expect Horses to deliver Teleporter-level ROI. Or they get swamped by use cases without knowing which ones are incremental versus transformational. That’s when momentum stalls and budgets get cut.
Horses in Practice
Examples of Faster Horses:
ChatGPT for email drafts
Copilot for code suggestions
AI note-taking in meetings
Document summarisation
These help individuals. But as Tobias points out:
Sales teams write faster emails, but still send the same number.
Developers code quicker, but still follow the same dev cycle.
Analysts produce cheaper reports, but the insights are the same.
The business spends more on AI but doesn’t see P&L impact. That’s the natural limit of training a Faster Horse.
Teleporters in Practice
Teleporters redesign how work is done:
Customer Support
Horse: Agents use AI to draft responses faster.
Teleporter: Redesign around AI-first triage. Issues get classified and resolved automatically, only escalating in complex cases.
Finance
Horse: Accountants use AI to speed up reconciliation.
Teleporter: Continuous reconciliation. Real-time matching, instant alerts, and month-end as confirmation, not firefighting.
Product Management
Horse: AI helps PMs write specs faster or pre-fill Jira.
Teleporter: Vibe coding a prototype with AI. Collapse idea → demo into days, not weeks.
That’s not just faster work. That’s different work.
The Opportunity in NZ
New Zealand's strength isn’t in building foundation models. It’s in applying AI to our industries: agriculture, tourism, logistics, and health. These sectors have lean teams, unique processes, and thin margins.
That’s perfect ground for Teleporters. Imagine:
Vineyards scheduling harvests with live soil and weather data.
Freight companies rerouting shipments automatically before delays hit.
Tourism operators launching multilingual campaigns overnight to capture demand from Asia or South America.
That’s system-level change rather than incremental an upgrade.
How to Manage Both
Horses: Bottom-up. Workshops, training, broad enablement. Focus on adoption and quick wins. Measure time saved and quality improvements. Celebrate early progress, even if it doesn’t move the P&L.
Teleporters: Top-down. Run AI opportunity scans to identify bottlenecks. Redesign workflows cross-functionally. Measure throughput, cycle time, and eliminated steps. Expect longer timelines. Celebrate milestones.
The NZ companies that win won’t be the ones writing faster emails. They’ll be the ones who move past training faster horses and build teleporters.
Passionate about all things AI, emerging tech and start-ups, Mike is the Founder of The AI Corner.
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