Panel introductions

I'm Colby, I'm a strategist at Microsoft, and I do a lot for the government and the AI for it.

I'm Martin, I think... We had Matt here, didn't we? Yes, you had Matt here. I recognise some of the faces in the audience too, so I'll pass.

Kia ora koutou, I'm Megan Salol, my company is Big Picture Thinker. I'm currently involved in a project called Parker Politics, Parker for Good. It's a, well, I'll tell you a little bit about it while we go on.

Kia ora, I'm Hayley Hoare, and I'm the CEO of Business Central and the home of Wellington and Porioa Chamber of Commerce.

I'm Tracey, I'm Head of Engineering at TradeMe, so thank you, Martin, and an advocate for Minitech.

I'm Jack, you've met me. Awesome, thanks, everybody.

Framing the challenge: urgency, adoption, and ‘AI for good’

So I was trying to think about what would be some questions that could bring together a little bit about what we've talked about and also your experience and expertise and one thing that we talk a lot about

is the speed of adoption and this like relentless need for organizations to get moving and to not get left behind and I think a lot of people are also feeling this this need not to get left behind we hear a lot about how AI is going to be the thing that solves the productivity problem this huge productivity problem in New Zealand it's going to solve all of these things and I'm just thinking it

In terms of some of the challenges that we've heard from the speakers, everything from what's going to happen to the next generation of people, how do we think about strategy in terms of what we're actually trying to do, and not just a little widget, and then all the lessons that you can have from really incorporating these tools into your life over the last year, cross that with the fact that we're all here to talk about how we can actually use this technology for good.

How do you kind of balance those things? Because I think a lot of you guys have done a lot of really practical work, and you've actually gotten practical tools out to people so i was really keen for anybody or everybody's perspective on how we balance all of those that that urgency the good angle that we're trying to

Democracy, governance, and civic infrastructure

to tackle with this so my particular um passion is democracy and it's an estate and so we're having a problem where the pace of technology is not giving up with our decision making

infrastructure which is from the Magna Carta about 600 years old hasn't really changed particularly and so I feel

like we need to get in front or at least speed up our decision making our civic technology

needs to ramp up so that it can match the pace of technology technology decision -making because the people who are deciding at the moment

are the people who are the tech pros, the billionaires, the nameless shareholders and that they're not really interested in who's paying the costs or and that they know who's getting the benefits but you know the costs the risks are being borne by the public the public are like whoa we didn't approve this and our

Our instrument for approving is our governments, and they're not matching the pace either. So I feel like we really need to invest in our civic infrastructure.

And that's the parker project that I mentioned before. That's a project that I'm working on. It's about increasing people's civic relationship with their decision makers.

So it's able to be working in local body elections, government engage local government engagement processes basically anywhere any place where a decision -maker needs to gather opinions ideas engage the sort of understanding or help bring people along with them and make everyone in the

the room, feel accountable for the decisions that remain on their part. So that's just one way in which I think that we should be working, you know, embedding values into our civic infrastructure.

What was the question again? It was a very long question. That's a fair point.

I guess I was trying to balance the the pressure that everybody's got to get moving not get left behind to use this technology with some of the questions that we've heard from our speakers and bringing that together with the whole idea of using wrangling this technology for good so how do you balance those things and

actually make some progress but do it in the direction that you want to push things so i'm

Jobs, juniors, and capability building

very quick to talk about jobs uh we've heard about the youth basically being stitched up a little bit you know some nods in the back of the room from the younger people volunteering

I think we need to be really clear about has the technology change hit the lull that we've had in jobs in Wellington right now or is that a result of other macroeconomic factors you know

we've seen with a lot of money printing sort of during the COVID period what ends up happening is it pulls demand forward and what that tends to do is you know let's say four years ago go, zero hires, 30 grads, because all of a sudden they've got so much more demand than they normally would.

Then next year, instead of hiring 10 like they normally would, they have too many, so they hire none. And then they hire none again in the next year. And so you sort of have this lack of jobs for younger people from what you normally would have.

Comparative advantage and the case for investing in junior talent

The other thing I'd mention is comparative advantage is sort of this economics principle where, yes, in the short term it could be true that you can lay off a whole bunch of juniors not invest in anyone at all and you might make more profits now if you have a principal agent problem and someone gets a bonus based on that there could be some very big issues there but actually if you have a medium of the long term whoever's actually investing in the younger people with these tools is going to produce significantly better products and services and to answer that

just sit down a 20 year old next to a 50 year old software engineer 40 year old sorry and watch them work you will be shocked at how effective the 20 year old is so that's my contribution yeah i'd

agree actually um i think uh bringing a junior mindset in i'm at my 50s but i can say i bring a junior mindset to coding because i haven't coded for 20 years and i started coding a year ago so the things that i'm doing i notice maybe a month later in our various um ai slack channels somebody go oh I discovered this thing that I could do I was like we've been doing that for a month but I didn't know you couldn't before and I think that um that sort of openness to doing things will really um we come through a junior mindset so we'll certainly still be hiring juniors

Overwhelm and learning by doing

um in terms of the question about the feeling of overwhelm I'll just take it to a more kind of personal level um it's it is overwhelming particularly in software engineering it's the skill in the industry that's perhaps being disrupted the most the first and it's impossible to keep up with the pace of change every day there's a new thing that comes

what i've learned through my journey is just don't think about it too hard just start using it it's actually in the using of it that you'll figure out what works and more importantly what doesn't work and that's how you'll learn to bring your critical mindset to a different thing and non -deterministic thing then you've bought it to before so I'd say just get started so I'm sitting here with a

SME reality check: fatigue, friction, and making AI accessible

small to medium business lens on I've literally traveled all the regions in the last six weeks and i sit with leaders of businesses that have 500 staff to small businesses that have three staff and fatigue is real i'm seeing two things uh one i went to every little

course that every new ai expert kicked off uh in the past two years so i think um there's enormous enormous fatigue, like I'm just not going to use it. I hear that from this.

I spent the money, everyone went rah, rah, showed me some nice little slides, and then I didn't really learn anything, and I went back to doing what I normally do.

Right through to we got insert product here, we gave it to all our 100 staff, and they're just not using it. I mean, I know you know all of this.

And the reason why I think this is important is because 97 % of employers in this country are small to medium businesses and I think they are hurting right now. They are tired. They don't have time to come to another AI expert course

and I'm really passionate about this because productivity in this country relies on our small to medium business engaging with technology. So AI for me and how we can reduce some of this

and I'm not a technologist so I thank you for the incredible presentations. presentations, make it accessible, make it frictionless, and stop charging small to medium businesses to learn about what you know.

I think that there's too many people out there trying to profit from a course, and I think what you said earlier on is we've just got to, and we do this as a chamber in Business Central, don't worry about the technology. What problem are you trying to solve and for whom? How do you just keep generating value?

How do you get over your kids earlier tonight i'm really passionate about that we want to help this country get people home earlier they don't need to be just busting out the way they are it actually breaks my heart when i go and see these customers um i'm like man i haven't can help you but i see you're fatigued

and i'm not going to sit here and try and talk you into it um so there's this kind of balance and i think why i love this room and why i love young people uh is that i think that if you can get into some of those small to medium businesses i know you probably want the big flash corp job um but i think the biggest value just just go and work for some of these small businesses and put your beautiful brains to work because they need you so that's what i would say to that um are we

Audience Q&A: education, opportunity, and guardrails

doing audience this afternoon we've got a few more but in the meantime yes oh great hi um i'm kirsty

Maintaining human integrity in AI-assisted learning

and i was wondering i spoke with simon a while back about um in the university's um ecosystem system um once upon a time when people were studying uh engineering they would go to their tutor with a problem and they would help them and then they'd go and implement the learning and that would happen again and again and each time the problem would get harder but now

in the educational setting people don't come to their tutor till the problem's too hard for the ai to solve and so my question is how do we make sure that when the young people come to their seniors that they don't think we're all idiots because they've waited till the point that the ai couldn't help them anymore so we need to maintain that human integrity to build the relationship. Anybody have a solution for that one?

I can't talk about an education setting but I think it might be comparable to talk about being a manager. So it's true that one of the amazing things about AI is that you can use it to help it teach you how to use AI and that's incredible. you do get an acceleration of learning which I think is something to be celebrated.

The thing that managers can do is bring sense to why you're solving the problem so to help you to think contextually about what um what what's the reason that you're doing this thing and how does this thing connect to that thing and join the dots for them i think i'm imagining that an education of setting that might be similar any other questions yes i'll front row

Where are the big ‘AI for good’ opportunities?

I was a developer for a couple of years, I understood code, but not full back -end, but was able to get a product off the ground with some help with AI.

They used AI to help small and medium businesses reduce the cost of their marketing by analysing massive data sets and pulling it out into something manageable that they could do. It was awesome.

Since then, like, most companies have been a third of their virtual marketing. I've got a dashboard for my company that does 100 hours of highly skilled labor in four hours now. Like, it does all the data analysis for them.

I kind of thought that we were building machine learning so that it could look at these massively complicated systems that humans have made and now no longer understand fully, like the the entire economics, like the Wellington homelessness situation, it's immigration, it's housing, it's influx, it's council policy, it's all these different data sets that no one person has visibility over. AI and machine learning were supposed to help us solve those problems, right?

Anyone's using agentic AI to manage their inboxes. So where do you see the big opportunities to use AI for good that are not being taken up yet? And I know we're in the awkward phase, we're in the beginning bit, but I feel so frustrated that were underutilising the most powerful and amazing tool he's ever had.

Great question. I think this is awesome. I see so much opportunity everywhere.

The reality is that, you know, how long ago was the first kind of chat GPT? Two years. Two years. It's nothing, right? And because things are changing so fast, so much, right, Everybody, and this also speaks to the pressure question as well. Things are moving fast. Things will settle down.

But the thing is that there's all this opportunity, right? And you're going, well, we're only managing our inboxes. We're writing some code as well and doing a lot of other stuff.

But the thing is, and my kind of background sweet spot is in innovation and startups and entrepreneurship and I see a mind which is should be looking around and going great what can I do right and I think that's my challenge for you is to say right

everybody else is using it for these seemingly trivial tasks this is what my big vision about what AI should be able to do I need to start figuring this out right because we're all in such a new spot thought that nobody's got all the answers nobody's going to figure this out for you

every innovation starts with somebody asking the question i wonder if i could do this and you know when i've heard you know often speaking and i'm hearing these things right but that's my challenge for you right and any everybody else here who's got some crazy idea about what ai could do or or what you think it should do, what's in your mind and what your vision is, is start tinkering and have a go.

That's a great prompt. We either answer your challenge with one of the things that we're actually doing.

So a big customer of ours is Master Electricians, and they have a problem where every member on every single job has to do this awful PDF. If they don't do it right, and they get caught, they go chow. So it's a pretty high -stakes thing.

However, electricians, by and large, with great respect, are often dyslexic. And they fucking hate paperwork, right? They hate it.

So one of the projects we've done is we've taken this form and turned it into a phone call. Now, they've gone from 30 minutes to fill in this form, if they do it, if they do it right, or big this, to nine minutes.

And it's a three -minute phone call. It's a text afterwards. They check it. Oh, yeah, that's sweet. That's cool. Done.

Add some photos. And now, you know, I don't have to stress about holding this for seven years, which was my legal requirement, and knowing that that building that I did four weeks ago on the right thing, you know, it's not going to burn down, I'm not going to go to jail because I've done my documentation properly, and that covers the insurance and the legal aspects.

So, you know, what I would sort of add to Marva's point is the problems aren't new. We have the same problems, we just have a lot more power with which we can use to solve these problems. And, of course, great power, great responsibility, so, you know, we want to do it right.

I would just like to build on that idea of, you know, I feel like my kind of brain looks out into the world and sees problems and loves that, you know, because I trained as a designer and so the designer mind is like, you know, I can solve that.

And I think that there's a lovely story in this nation about the number eight wire. and I feel like you know we have this amazing opportunity to kind of see ourselves and our role in the world is creating a solutions economy we've got

intractable problems problems that are surfacing all over the world but we also have this incredible kind of shared value and it's a shared value that you'll find no matter where you are on the spectrum it expresses itself slightly differently at different times depending who's talking but it's

fairness and you know we have utilized that particular value in solving all sorts of problems like going up against giant forces and finding ways to do that

so for example you know there was a story about women not really being appropriate to vote because hysterical and and not educated there was a reason for that uh but but you know we went up against that story and and turned things around and you know and create solutions for women that you know were fractal they went all across the globe and i

think we went up against the u .s um nuclear power and we went uh something like that you know and they were um you know they're like well you kind of want us to be on the side don't you because you want us to protect anywhere we don't want to identify as you know as a nuclear power we don't want to do that we are we want fairness this world doesn't need that and so that was our

our you know us confronting and i think that um you know every every era every technology

produces with it around a new realm of possibility and opportunity so i feel like i want new zealanders to go, let's grab a bit of that numbering wire, let's grab Claude and go and start solving some of these intractable problems, let's become a solutions economy, because let's

face it, you know, like shipping very heavy things over, you know, to vast reaches of this planet isn't a good strategy for us. Lightweight, nimble, you know, zeros and ones, basically, that's a good trade for us.

So, you know, shifting our economy into that kind of realm where we're like, yeah. And everyone can solve a problem that is relevant to you and your life and you have to solve the problem.

It's just like you see a little piece because every single one of us has an amazing lens, you know, and it has a very intimate relationship with a problem.

So, thank you. Awesome. And there, Tracy. Yes.

Hello everyone, my name is Su, and I was an AI developer and AI solutions consultant for several years.

And my question is, what is the industry that New Zealand AI was landed for New Zealand, like customer service or use AI for SDLC process or like business, like business for example the lead generation or other industries that's my question.

Does anybody want to take that one? Any ideas about what New Zealand industry is most impacted? Is.

All the above.

Regulation, security constraints, and fears about unemployment

My name is Ahif, so I work in cyber security and I don't know if anyone who works in cyber security knows that that there are certain level of encryption data that not supposed to be exported outside of U .S.

Under the regulation, do you think that at some point, maybe by the middle of next year or late next year, there's a possibility that the regulation will come in place that will force the civilian usage

of AI to a certain limit to prevent that unemployment and force companies to bring young talent in the pool? Do you think that possibility exists on the horizon?

I just don't think it's going to happen. In the short term, we might see some job losses, but again, is that AI, is that macroeconomic stuff?

But I suspect what will happen is that, again, it's a comparative advantage. It's sort of the innovator's dilemma. Will the big incumbents be able to invest in these new technologies in such a way where they can produce,

cannibalize their own business but produce a great new product and service some will, some won't, the ones that won't will be beaten by new entrants who will be funded by the MOVACs of the world using all sorts of different AIs to basically outcompete the existing ones and I think there will be

a surge in employment because people are far more productive and we're starting to see that with software development roles in the United States already

Do you think that regulations will... Regulations?

I mean they already are sitting on the best stuff and they're not giving it to us if that's what you're asking like for example that we'll say that the industries uh the that kind of ai is okay for civilian use for example the language model that translate the different languages but for example in future there would

be a possibility any ai which has to do with maybe something other than software development is off -limits because we want people to have jobs and have GDP growth of countries?

We've been told it's all over. But I would ask Michelle that in the networking session. You can carry on with this question from here. Look over at me.

New Zealand’s adoption gap: decision-making and leadership

Sean, I work in the AI industry, so I'll ask the question from that perspective. We have a problem in New Zealand. The problem we have in New Zealand is a decision -making problem.

We actually lead the world in developing new AI products. We have lots of big AI companies that have created stuff here in New Zealand We have an adoption problem

New Zealand businesses, especially the small medium businesses, and I said I'm one of the panel providers for MB's SME AI consulting practice They're waiting They're waiting for the big vendors from overseas to come over and basically hand them a solution

So they don't have to think about it and then so my question for you as a panel is how do we get businesses to start making decisions rather than sitting and waiting for somebody to come and do it for them and it's not just the

smes it's across the large enterprises as well there i the number of times that i've sat in a meeting with someone and they're like man it's twenty thousand dollars i need to go to the board of directors before we can make a decision about that and their competitors are coming from overseas are going to eat all of their business if they don't do it but but New Zealanders seem

to not want to make a decision and to wait maybe it's a tall poppy syndrome obviously you can go by the stupid accent I have I'm not originally from New Zealand but I've been here 13 years now and I am a New Zealand citizen so it matters to me how do we get you know leaders in these businesses to start making decisions to do things and by the way deciding not to do AI is perfectly

perfectly legitimate. Deciding not to decide is a terrible decision. I'd like to say that very quickly.

I've sold hundreds of deals around the world. I've dealt with UK, Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand, and the answer to give quick decisions is to sell offshore if you have a product.

That's the unfortunate thing. I don't know about the other side of the fence. I'd love an answer to that, but yeah, if you're building something, sell offshore.

sure yeah I guess I have a bit of a different view um you know and again I'm gonna say the lens to which I look through is the small to medium business that I'm going to say kind of normal businesses and um by the way I love that example around the electrician paperwork I would

say that um put yourself and some people in this room will be in this position you've got 10 days to pay your mortgage your cost just went through the roof you don't know what's going to happen in the next three days let alone the next three months if someone turns up on your doorstep with a magical little wand called AI and you

kind of go so what I would say there is a third of our small to medium business and not the ones with $20 ,000 in leading board that are just completely in in survival mode the best way to get them out of survival mode is all those people that i just

recently read some research they have just lots of money in their bank and they don't want to spend it because i'm not sure who's going to get a next spend your money buy the coffee go on a damn holiday and reduce the stress of the small to medium businesses if you can't afford it do it

and so i would say there's a truckload of fatigue and i was talking to henry the other day they bring out this great insight small sole traders and i'm obsessed with it and they use it as an advocacy tool in australia and of course i'm obsessed to be doing the same here and that is

that the first uh signal is a sole trader they get hit first the second shock absorber as i like to call them is the smaller medium business with this fuel shot who's standing up for them right now all the big leaders i know i'm on the big leader calls talking to the big leaders not one person

on late calls kind of get hurt worry about their mortgage or not be able to put food on the table so i know this is probably not the answer you want but i would say spend your goddamn money if you can and look after your neighbor and we're just going to reduce some stress on it on our people

so that's what i'd say thanks haley i think we've got time for one more audience question if there is anyone in the crowd you've already heard i've had one but it's a good one

I'm sure I had listened at a previous event. This is for Martin. Would you like to talk about the role of empathy and how you've talked about that before as like a good guiding principle?

Well, I see you and I feel you. Sorry, I couldn't help. We needed some German online in the evening. Oh, right. Right. So just pose the question again, just so, because I just got lost in my own thought there. That's okay.

I guess, like, what's, do you see a role in empathy? And I guess it kind of builds off what Hayley was just saying, and how we bring AI into this ecosystem.

Oh, damn straight, right? And, you know, the one thing that has, you know, if I went back 20 years when I first started being an entrepreneur, and I've been in technology, I've been in computer science here from Vic, and technology was going to solve everything, and everything was about technology and what we could do with technology. I didn't really think a lot about people, to be fair, right? If I'm just to be perfectly honest, as I got into business, as I started businesses, as As I grew, you know, worked with other people's businesses, founded my own business, that's when I really started to appreciate how important people are no matter what, right?

And as I've, you know, spoken before, there's been all of these, you know, technological, you know, periods that have gone through, you know, the internet, right? I'm old enough that there was a life for me before the Internet and a life for me after the Internet. But the thing is that it always comes back to people.

And when I see what's going on and people are talking and I'm fearful about whether they're going to be replaced, I'm fearful about, you know, I was talking earlier about AI music, right? I love music. I play music. My son's a musician. and it absolutely appalls us that this creativity is somehow being taken away.

But the thing is that if you bring it back to people and you bring it back to how we feel and you start thinking about if people are our primary resource and the one thing I'm hearing very passionately is that people are under pressure and I totally get it, right? right?

And that's why as we go through this transition, if you like, or this adoption of this new technology, this great technology that we've got to work with, is keep the people in mind.

Because without the people, the AI doesn't really do anything. We don't start it on anything. We don't initiate agents. We don't get it to code for us. If people are too damn busy, or they're literally fearing for their their financial lives, then it's all for nothing. So keep in mind the people, people are business.

That's very true. I've got one last question. I'm going to pass it back over to Chan to close us.

What Wellington can do next for AI for Good

But I was reflecting on, we have a lot of conversations about what's special about New Zealand when it comes to AI. And I think that conversation has changed over the last months and years.

It's less about we have to build our own frontier model here and more about how are we going to use this technology in a way that we are happy with, both from the ethical perspective but also the things that it's going to accomplish.

But then I thought, even in Wellington in particular, we have a bit of a unique cross -section here when it comes to business and government and education. So what's one thing that you think we should be doing

as Wellington to help advance the cause that we're all here for again, which is to progress AI for good and not just for having a cleaner inbox if

Intentionality, values, and who gets to decide

anybody has an idea I think I like to start with intentionality because I feel like if we are prompters we have to kind of investigate you know with self awareness what are we prompting for what is the future that we're prompting for and so you know that's a bit of an abstract idea but if you're in a city

that is the intersection of you know arts and community and business and enterprise and sports and arts and creativity and government like you know we have this unique kind of smell you know like we've got this this melting pot that is just, you know, it's got a really unique chemistry.

But there is something really powerful about it, and that is the government is here. And so I often, because I'm a changemaker, I'm always coming back to power, where the power sits with AI.

And the concept of decision -making and who makes the decisions is, to me, the fundamental question that we should be asking. It's like, who's deciding what this will be like?

And we need to be deciding together, humans coming together, deciding what values are carried forward, what parts of our economy we want to be working on, what solutions we want.

I feel like, yeah, that's why AI for Good, a room full of people, perhaps working and co -creating these solutions together, together, deciding, deciding and choosing with all of our very, you know, our very diverse kind of, this is a really, really diverse room.

And if there are a few more poets in here and a few more clowns, I think we'd have it just about right.

So I absolutely love this room and I love what James Fuller says, that we're a 10 -minute walking city. Like it's 10 minutes to get to Parliament, 10 minutes to get anywhere.

Hands-on local use cases: hacks over lectures

And again, coming into small -to -medium business, we've done a bunch of surveys and we've got got the top five use cases for hospo tradies retail hr and marketing very interesting to hear

about your marketing and i've said this to the mayor and i say this to anyone that listened to me we've got the brightest minds let's get the use cases let's get the businesses in the room and let's hack um two outcomes not in a lecture theater um when i was at microsoft prior to this

one of my proudest moments was working on ai hackathon with tay for queensland and having teachers who were so into it realize it wasn't about the classroom it was about making their their business, TAFE Queensland, more profitable so they could have more resource in their classroom.

That had to come from them hands -on tools. You can't force people in. Forget about the technology. I said that for six months when I worked on that project.

Get the IT people going, yeah, we'll use this. Don't care about it. What's the problem we're trying to solve?

How much money are you going to make if you solve it? Let's get to the money. Let's get to the commercials. I reckon one of the best things we can do is hack those

those problems for businesses and and bring all these gorgeous minds to it and i love what you say about government but the one thing i've learned and spent a little bit too much time talking to politicians the great thing is their ears and eyes are open and their minds a little bit uh empty in this regard solve the problem and tell them how to solve it and you'll get support and the power will come solve the problem the power will come awesome um any last minute yeah

Representation, bias, and getting the right people in the room

AI for good. For me, AI is created by people working in technology.

12 % of AI engineering researchers in the world are women, and only 14 % of AI engineering leaders are women. Even last year, a report showed, despite all of the media around this,

that a woman of colour is about 35 % likely to be, there's an error rate for them being recognised as about 35%, and a white man is about 1%.

Last year in Washington, they did a big study that showed that candidates for a particular role, 89 % of them were male candidates selected.

So we have a problem to solve, and the way that we solve it, I believe very strongly, comes back to a similar point that's been raised which is make sure the

right people are in the room when the decisions are being made and that means that we need more representation of women in the rooms where decisions are being made particularly in the technical rooms making technical decisions so that's what I think we need to do.

Closing remarks

Thank you so much to our panelists that was an absolute great discussion and thank you for everyone who asked a question.