That was the message from governance, tech and legal experts during a New Zealand Privacy Week privacy and data security session focused on how organisations manage personal information in practice, particularly when resources are constrained and operational complexity is high.

“We wouldn’t ignore our finances. I think we need to think about privacy in the same way.”

While the session was aimed at not for profits, the privacy and data security issues raised – from access control to incident response – apply equally to other organisations.

Leadership and governance consultant Jo Cribb says boards frequently underestimate the extent and sensitivity of the personal information their organisations hold, including client case files, donor records, staff files and even information relating to health, children and family circumstances.

“From a governance and leadership perspective, you don’t need to be a technical expert. But we do need to ask the right questions and get assurance that actually, we are looking after the data and information incredibly well,” Cribb says.

She likens privacy oversight to financial oversight, noting that boards routinely scrutinise accounts and funding use, and should apply similar rigour to privacy and data – something that is often the engine enabling organisations to run and have impact.

“We’re really interested in terms of what’s happening with our accounts and how we’re using our resources. We wouldn’t ignore our finances. We need to think about privacy in the same way.”

Privacy she says, should not be ignored simply because organisations are busy keeping the lights on or operating with limited capacity.

The questions leadership expects tech to answer

From a governance perspective, Cribb outlined a set of questions boards should be asking –the same questions CIOs, heads of IT and security teams are being asked to answer:

• What personal information does the organisation hold?
• Where is that information stored?
• Who has access to it and why?
• Are staff and volunteers aware of their responsibilities?
• What happens in the first hours after a privacy or security incident?

Cribb says boards should be demanding visibility of privacy incidents and near misses and should receive regular reporting on privacy matters – with it on the agenda at least once, if not twice a year – rather than relying on ad-hoc updates when something has gone wrong.

Where everyday tech decisions create privacy risk

Anthony McMahon, Lancom chief customer officer, says many privacy incidents are not the result of sophisticated cyberattacks, but of common technology practices that organisations have normalised.

He highlighted shared log-ins as a well-intentioned practice which is creating privacy risks, particularly in organisations that rely on volunteers or have high turnover. Generic email accounts and shared system credentials make it difficult to control access when people leave and remove visibility over who has accessed information. While shared log-ins can feel convenient, they also create a single point of failure and significantly increase exposure.

He also warned about the use of spreadsheets to store sensitive personal information, particularly when access is broad or files are tied to individual user accounts, raising the potential for data to be lost when someone leaves and organisation and accounts are deleted. In other cases, information remains accessible to people long after their role has ended.

Louisa Joblin, principal at Moran Law, says she’s seen cases where spreadsheet data has been ‘weaponised’ by disgruntled former staff, creating ‘big issues’ for the organisations involved.

Minimum controls, maximum return

McMahon outlined a baseline set of technical controls organisations should be working toward. These included individual user accounts, multi-factor authentication, particularly for administrator accounts, and role-based access to ensure people can only see the information they need.

“Do people you’re bringing in need access to all your data or do they just need a very small subset? Don’t give them everything by default,” he says, noting it is a ‘simple mistake’ he sees a lot of organisations – not just not-for-profits – make.

He also discouraged attaching sensitive information directly to emails, instead recommending sharing links to files stored in systems that enforce access controls.

“That way, if it accidentally goes to the wrong person, I’ve already set the permissions. They could click on the link, but they’re not going to get access,” he says. “It takes it away from being a privacy breach to a simple ‘whoops, we sent an email to the wrong person’.

Best practice extends to areas including getting NFP licensing from the likes of Microsoft and Google, knowing who to call when something goes wrong – an issue he sees for commercial organisations as well as NFPs – and never using ‘free’ versions of tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini. “The data you’re putting in there is being used to train the AI models themselves, so if don’t use the free ones. If you have to, don’t put any personal or sensitive data from your organisation in there.”

Policy as an operational control, not a checkbox

Joblin noted the need for privacy policies which reflect how organisations actually operate, rather than existing solely to meet compliance requirements.

“It’s not meant to be a tick box exercise where you just put up a policy on your website and say we do these things and now we’ve complied,” she says. “It’s actually a real opportunity to work through how you collect, handle, store, use and disclose. Let’s communicate that in a language that works for our organisation and communicates our brand and commitment to our people.”

From a governance perspective, Cribb encouraged boards and leadership teams to ensure policies are understood by all staff and volunteers and followed in practice, not just approved and filed. This includes asking whether staff and volunteers have been trained, and whether day-to-day behaviour aligns with written standards.

She also urged attendees to ensure their organisation has a privacy officer – “if you don’t have one, create one at your next board meeting” – and ensure you’re getting regular reports from them, including whether they’re getting the support and everything they need in order to implement the policy.

The post Getting privacy governance right at the board level appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

That’s according to Deloitte’s 2026 Global Technology Leadership Study, which surveyed more than 660 senior technology executives globally, with 31 percent APAC based.

“The gap between a tech leader’s expanded mandate and their organisation’s ability to execute is where competitive advantage can be won or lost.”

It says a new era of technology leadership is here, but warns that expectations have reset faster than organisational structures. While the tech leaders find themselves being held accountable for shaping strategy, leading change, building AI-ready teams, turning tech ambition into business results and driving enterprise-wide outcomes, many enterprises are still operating governance, funding and operating models designed for an earlier era of IT. That mismatch is leaving tech leaders caught between the ambition of an AI-driven world and the structural reality of legacy operating models, talent and budget.

While it might all sound like a headache in the making, the respondents aren’t despondent. In fact, more than seven in 10 say they’re inspired or determined about the future of their role, recognising that, while creating additional complexity, AI also creates an opportunity to step forward as ‘architects of enterprise advantage’, Deloitte says.

Driving outcomes, driving business

The report shows 79 percent of the tech leaders surveyed said driving measurable business outcomes was a top priority for 2026, reflecting a decisive move away from traditional operational metrics.

Within that shift, leaders identified growth, productivity and customer impact as key outcomes areas shaping how success is measured. These priorities now sit ahead of the traditional focus on infrastructure stability, availability and delivery performance that previously dominated tech leadership.

Other strategic priorities also featured prominently. Ensuring compliance with evolving digital regulations and embedding cybersecurity and digital resilience across the organisation were each cited by 77 percent of respondents as a key area of focus, highlighting how the scope of responsibility continues to widen, extending into regulatory readiness, enterprise risk and organisational resilience.

The results signal technology leadership’s central role in enterprise performance, governance and risk, rather than operating as a support function sitting alongside the business.

Deloitte frames the change as a move ‘from uptime to outcomes’ and a fundamental reset of the technology leadership mandate.

According to the study, AI adoption is a major driver. As the technology becomes embedded across business processes and decision-making, expectations around the role of technology leaders have expanding. Boards and CEOs are increasingly focused on how digital and AI investments translate into tangible business value, rather than whether technology has simply been deployed successfully.

“The era of the operational technologist is over,” says Deloitte Consulting’s Anjali Shaikh, managing director and leader of the global CIO and US tech executive programs. “This shift has been building for over a decade, and AI is the catalyst bringing that into focus. Today’s CIO isn’t just leading technology; they are being asked to redesign the very fabric of how the business runs.”

The survey also suggests this change is reshaping how performance is assessed across the technology leadership spectrum, and how leader are prioritising their agendas, which are consistently anchored around AI. Forty-six percent of CIOs say AI adoption and value realisation is the measure which will most define their success over the next two years, a result which underlines how closely the CIO role is now tied to turning AI initiatives into demonstratable business impact, rather than simply enabling adoption.

For CDAOs the priority is gaining tangible business value from data and AI assets, reflecting the growing emphasis on monetisation, insight and decision support. CISOs identified integration of security into AI initiatives as the key measure of success, highlighting the increasing convergence of cybersecurity, risk management and AI deployment. And for CTOs, AI-enabled automation and innovation velocity topped the list of measures defining success, signalling pressure to accelerate delivery while modernising platforms and architectures.

Despite the increasing focus on AI, the study shows leaders are not shedding their existing responsibilities. Tech executives remain accountable for a broad set of outcomes, including resilience, compliance and sustained enterprise value – on top of the expanded AI-related mandates.

Structural constraints

While the expectations placed on tech leaders continues to grow, the study makes clear that many organisations have yet to adjust the structures around them to support this shift.

Governance models, funding mechanisms and operating structures often remain rooted in an era where IT was primarily responsible for delivery and support. As a result, leaders are expected to take on broader strategic and transformational responsibilities without corresponding changes to the structural fragmentation from an expanding tech C-suite, constrained and misaligned funding models and outdated operating models that constrain them.

The gap between ambition and execution is a recurring theme, with Deloitte noting that while 81 percent of surveyed leaders say their current operating model can deploy and govern AI enterprise-wide, 75 percent also say their organisation must change its operating model within the next 12-18 months to drive greater value.

“This disconnect suggests that while organisations have established models to deploy and govern AI, they are still working through foundational questions around ownership, prioritisation, and integration needed to truly capture value,” Deloitte says.

“The gap between a tech leader’s expanded mandate and their organisation’s ability to execute is where competitive advantage can be won or lost,” Deloitte says. “The organisations that empower their leaders to close this gap – by redesigning how work gets done, how decisions are made and how value is created – can define the next decade.”

The post Organisations reset scorecard for tech leaders appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

New research from Teletrac Navman (those of a certain vintage may recall that Navman was a Kiwi company founded by Sir Peter Maire back in the 1980s) shows the issue is not a lack of technology investment. In fact, 84 percent of fleets have invested in tracking, telematics and integrated equipment platforms to some degree. The problem, Teletrac Navman construction solution specialist James French told iStart, is what happens next – or more accurately, what doesn’t, with many deployments remaining incomplete, creating pockets of insight, rather than organisation-wide intelligence.

“Without all the data… you can be profitable overall, but you’re leaving money in the dirt.”

The report, which is based on a quantitative online survey of 600 companies operating commercial vehicle fleets, including 200 across Australia and New Zealand, 75 percent are still relying on manual logs either as a primary tracking method or alongside digital systems. Fewer than one-third have fully implemented utilisation technology.

French says while most operators recognise utilisation is important – and believe equipment may be underutilised – the actual picture many businesses are working from is incomplete.

“The utilisation information is often incomplete,” he says, describing fleets where some equipment is tracked, while others aren’t, or where telematics is applied only to specific projects, rather than the entire fleet. The result is what he calls a partial utilisation picture – and decisions made on partial data rarely end well.

French says utilisation initiatives commonly stall because projects are left half finished. GPS might be rolled out to part of the fleet, but not all. Maintenance systems live somewhere else. Third-party equipment has its own tracking platform. Acquisitions add yet another layer of complexity, with multiple systems running side by side because no one wants to disrupt what the newly acquired business is comfortable using.

“You’ve got disparate systems,” he says. “GPS sits here, maintenance sits somewhere else, fuel lives somewhere else again.”

Without pulling those datasets together, organisations miss the opportunity to build a full picture of how assets are actually performing – and what they really cost to run.

French says once utilisation data is integrated with maintenance, fuel and financial systems, businesses can calculate their true total cost of ownership per machine, per hour. That’s where the money starts to surface – and sometimes, where uncomfortable truths appear.

“If it costs $250 an hour to run a machine and you’re charging $220 an hour, you’re losing money,” he says. “Without all the data, you don’t know it. You can be profitable overall, but you’re leaving money in the dirt.”

Idling away

One of the headline findings from the research is that equipment is sitting idle up to 50 percent of the time.

French admits calculating idle is fraught with technical challenges.

Basic GPS can tell operators where machines are and when engines are on or off. More accurate utilisation comes when systems are connected into engine data via CAN (controller area network) bus – the vehicle standard designed to allow microcontrollers and electronic control units such as the engine, brakes and lights, to communicate with each other – pulling details such as RPM to distinguish between productive work and an engine running without doing anything useful.

Machine-level integration also matters. A crane truck may be stationary with the engine running, but if the crane is operating, that’s productive use, not idle time. Without that visibility, utilisation data risks being misleading.

Manual logs are also fraught with issues. French points to a real-world productivity study he worked on in a previous role, comparing manually recorded data with machine-generated data.

“We found about a 15 percent difference,” he says.

Human error, transposed numbers, lost paperwork and best-guess reporting cause further issues in manual reporting. With digital systems, French says, the data becomes a single source of truth that can be audited, retrieved and compared across years.

The double-pay issue

Nowhere is the financial impact more visible than in equipment hoarding.

The report found that two-thirds of organisations admit assets are sometimes held onsite but unused, largely due to uncertainty around maintenance and scheduling. French says the behaviour is understandable, but costly.

“If I ring another site asking if they’ve got a 24‑tonne excavator, they’ll often say they’re flat out,” he says. “Sometimes that’s fear they won’t get it back. Sometimes it’s that they don’t actually know whether it’s being used or not.”

Without utilisation data, businesses turn to renting an additional machine – and double-paying.

“If I think it’s being used and I go and rent another machine, now I’m paying for one excavator sitting idle and another one working,” French says. “One is internal money. The rental is external money. That costs more.”

The fix does not require sophisticated analytics from day one. French says even fleet‑wide GPS coverage can immediately change behaviour.

“If I can ring a site and say, ‘I can see that machine hasn’t worked in a week – we’re sending a truck to move it,’ that saves money immediately.”

He cites the example of one client who reported saving roughly $30,000 in just 40 days by identifying idle plant and redeploying assets based on evidence rather than assumption.

For Australian companies, there’s another big win waiting: Fuel tax credits. He says many companies are leaving cash unclaimed simply because they can’t prove how, where and when equipment is used.

GPS and utilisation data can provide an accurate picture of when vehicles and equipment are operating on ‘non-gazetted’ roads where full fuel tax rebates can be claimed.

“GPS gives a very accurate picture of what percentage you’re off road,” he says, pointing to the ability to use geofencing and location data to distinguish between on‑road travel and off‑road work.

The distinction matters across a wide range of real-world scenarios, from trucks and light vehicles operating on job sites as opposed to driving to those sites, to concrete agitators running engines while unloading, washing and equipment once they enter a site. Forestry operations are another area French highlights, with vehicles transitioning from public roads onto private land and becoming eligible for different treatment.

“In Australia there are billions of dollars sitting in unclaimed fuel tax credits and this is one of the areas you make a quick gain.”

Where utilisation delivers fastest value

French says the first integration point for utilisation data should be maintenance. With live hour data, service intervals become predictable, automated and defensible – an operational and compliance win.

From there, fuel data becomes critical, particularly as costs rise and supply remains uncertain. Understanding where and how fuel is being consumed allows operators to narrow down why similar machines are costing more on one site than another – whether that’s environment, operator behaviour or simply the wrong machine for the job.

Critically, this feeds decision-makers beyond the fleet team.

“When it all feeds into a BI platform,” French says, “the CFO can see what machines cost, what they generate, and what happens if you remove assets that aren’t being used.”

At that point, utilisation stops being a reporting metric and starts behaving like what it actually is: One of the most powerful – and under‑leveraged – drivers of financial performance in asset‑heavy businesses.

The post Idle data, idle machines: The utilisation tech blind spot appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

Tuanz’s (Tech Users NZ) 2026 Digital Priorities Report, which is drawn from conversations with nearly 30 CIOs and CTOs, captures some of the frustration IT leaders are feeling at New Zealand, rich in innovation pockets, being constrained by fragmented execution, uneven adoption, rising technology costs and an ongoing shortage of specialist talent. The stagnation comes as other nations accelerate their digital transformation efforts, creating a widening innovation gap, Tuanz says.

“They’re not just going to pile money into new IT systems because it feels like the right thing to do.”

Craig Young, Tuanz chief executive, says the most striking finding in this year’s report was how leaders described the moment New Zealand is in.

“There was a real feeling that New Zealand is at a crossroads – a decision point where we have to decide to do something, or not,” Young told iStart.

That sense of drift is a change from previous years, which were focused more heavily on recovery and reflection following Covid-era disruption.

The plateau reflects a broader tightening of expectations around technology investment, particularly when it comes to AI. Young says AI continues to drive behaviour across vendors and organisations, but boards are no longer prepared to invest without clear evidence of value.

“Things are moving so fast, and AI is having such an impact, that boards are now saying: We need a return on our investment,” he says, acknowledging that is a good discipline to have. “They’re not just going to pile money into new IT systems because it feels like the right thing to do.

“AI might still be the flavour of the month, but CIOs are looking at whether they’re actually seeing value,” he says. “If they don’t see it, they’re prepared to sit where they are.”

The report found many organisations are moving away from building their own tools or running standalone experiments, and instead are prioritising AI capabilities embedded within the platforms they already use, including enterprise SaaS systems.

“What they’re looking to do is make the most of what they’ve already go,” Young says. “If the capability is built into SAP, Saleforce, Zoho, Xero or other services, that’s where the focus is going.”

Young says leaders broadly believe AI can deliver value, but only if it’s implemented properly.

“What we’re hearing is that it’s a mixed bag,” he says. “There are situations where people are finding real value. But it isn’t the hype it might have been a year ago.”

That has pushed digital leaders to get more disciplined, particularly around usage and licensing.

“If someone isn’t using a Copilot licence, take it off them and give it to someone else who will,” Young says. “They’re getting down to that level.”

At the same time, CIOs face pressure from suppliers whose products increasingly bundle AI features as part of standard upgrades, regardless of whether organisations are ready to use them.

“Providers say: You need to upgrade because this has AI in it,” he says. “But CIOs are asking: What’s the value right now.”

They’re waiting for real use cases, he says, adding “We need CIOs and digital leaders to find the use cases and the business cases for the stuff they’ve already go, but then start investigating what else they can invest in. It is a rock and a hard place for some of them.”

The report flags a shift away from broad experimentation toward targeted implementation and clearer business cases – a change Young sees as both necessary and overdue.

“We need to move away from experimentation to real implementation. That means getting beyond personal productivity and into areas where AI can actually automate workflows and drive productivity across the organisation.”

Cost pressures reshape priorities

The tightening of focus is occurring within a broader cost squeeze affecting local businesses. Rising cloud, licensing and infrastructure costs are forcing technology leaders to reassess earlier assumptions – including the long-held ‘cloud-first’ stance.

“Costs keep rising and organisations aren’t always getting the value they expected,” Young says. “So there’s more thinking around where things need to be in the cloud and where it might make sense to keep control over costs.”

He notes that New Zealand’s small market size leaves organisations particularly exposed to pricing decisions made by multinational providers, while global investment in AI-driven infrastructure continues to flow through to customer pricing.

“You’ve got massive investment going into cloud data centres and undersea cables,” he says. “That investment has to be paid for, and ultimately users pay for it.”

A crossroads, rather than a crisis

Despite the slowdown, Young is careful not to frame the findings as a failure of ambition or capability. New Zealand still has strong infrastructure and governance settings, and pockets of innovation continue to emerge.

The concern, he says, is what happens next.

“The key message is that we’re at a cross roads,” he says. “If we’re not careful, we’ll get left behind.”

The report calls for more deliberate choices – by government and by organisations – about how existing technology is used, how value is measured and how digital capability is built.

Among the recommendations for organisations to implement to drive adoption, stabilise their environments and build a resilient culture is a call for organisations to formally pause the deployment of new speculative tools and instead redirect IT and change management resources toward embedding existing platforms into daily workflows.

“By focusing exclusively on training, data cleanup and user adoption of current systems, businesses can reduce change fatigue, realise promised productivity gains and build a stable foundation capable of supporting advanced AI integrations in the future,” the report says.

On the talent side, Young says organisations need to look at different ways to bring people into their organisations. While interns and digital apprenticeships have been talked about ‘businesses need to actually start doing stuff like that now’, he says.

“We need to be bringing young New Zealanders into business – not waiting for them to graduate from university but looking at other pathways. Because if we train them properly, they will bring different perspective and views and will query things and bring a use of technology that perhaps us older people haven’t thought of.”

Because AI is automating the administrative tasks traditionally used to train junior staff, new frameworks must be created, pairing juniors with senior specialists and training heavily on critical thinking, data validation and AI prompt-auditing.

Young notes a positive move in the introduction of the electrotechnology, IT and creative Industry Standards Board to set qualifications, standards and training requirements for the sectors.

“Now it’s on us to make sure the industry is strong on what those vocational pathways look like. Now we’ve got to work and make it happen.”

The report also recommends strengthening national settings that digital leaders say are limiting progress. Top of the list is the introduction of mandatory, non-negotiable cyber security standards, reflecting concern that inconsistent security practices across organisations are exposing the broader economy to increasing risk.

Young says digital leaders feel minimum standards would lift the baseline across large and small organisations alike and reduce the burden on individual firms to assess security maturity on their own.

Beyond security, the report calls for stronger national coordination through mechanisms such as a digital clearing house to vet global technology vendors, accelerated progress on a secure national digital identity framework and recognition of data platforms as critical national infrastructure.

Young says these recommendations reflect a desire for clearer direction rather than heavy-handed intervention, with government uniquely positioned to set long-term priorities and provide certainty that extends beyond election cycles.

For enterprise leaders, the implication is clear. The pause in adoption is not an endpoint. It’s a moment where decisions made about investment, implementation and focus will determine whether New Zealand consolidates its digital foundations – or allows strategic drift to set in.

The post NZ digital leaders warn of ‘strategic drift’ appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

At the time, Bunnings was still a bricks and mortar retail defined by the big green sheds, weekend sausages, paper catalogues and deeply ingrained operational rhythms. It had no website, recalls Mike Schneider, Bunnings Group managing director, in Boston Consulting Group’s Business & Beyond podcast. Internally, the organisation had wrestled with whether digital even belonged in the model. Its website, while popular with about 20 million hits, was effectively just a digital catalogue and the company wouldn’t enter eCommerce in Australia until 2018 with the launch of ‘Special Orders Online’. It would be 2020 before it launched eCommerce in New Zealand.

“We are incredibly underestimated in how good our technology is.”

Deadline over comfort

The turning point came not from the technology team, but through leadership pressure.

Schneider recalls telling the market Bunnings was going online before the organisation felt ready, effectively forcing teams to work backwards from a public commitment. “As a leader, you sort of try different things, and in the end, I just told the market we were going online and didn’t tell my team,” he told the podcast, acknowledging the company was late to the online party.

It was a move he’d seen his predecessor do in order to enter a category. It was also, he admits, a move that wasn’t particularly popular with his team.

In 2017, Bunnings – or more specifically, Schneider – announced that its extended ‘special orders’ range – around 20,000 SKUs – would be available online by February 2018. “It was a bit of an ‘oh hell’ moment for the team because they had to work out how they were going to do it,” Schneider admits. The experience was clunky, imperfect and uncomfortable, but it proved two things: Bunnings could move faster than it thought, and online wasn’t the enemy.

By November 2019, a full online platform was live in Australia – just in time for Covid. Had it not been, Schneider says the business would have been exposed. (And, in a mark of how far the company had come digitally, when lockdowns hit and customers were craving their Bunnings sausage sizzles, it set up mobile payments so customers could snag their snag, contactless.)

The underestimated tech engine

Schneider says Bunnings’ technology capability is far more advanced than it is commonly perceived to be. “We are incredibly underestimated in how good our technology is.”

“We’ve gone from that kid that can’t run fast to the kid that’s actually in the elite sports team, and I think that’s actually deeply underestimated by many, many people.”

While externally the retailer may still be seen through a physical-retail lens, internally in now runs a fast-growing digital marketplace, a ‘hugely successful’ retail media arm enabling suppliers to reach customer customers across its digital and physical channels, advanced property development and sourcing systems and increasingly sophisticated digital operations.

He credits the company’s first CIO, Leah Balter, who was recruited to the role in 2018, and current CIO Genevieve Elliott, for the tech success.

“[They are] both world-class executives who have, and continue to, transform the organisation to the point where partners like Google, with the agentic Gemini commerce platform, have looked to us to partner as one of the early adopters.”

The company showed off its Buddy AI-powered shopping assistant, built using Gemini Enterprise for CX, at Google Cloud Next 2026 last month. Customers can tell Buddy what they’re looking to do – build a deck for example – and Buddy recommends the necessary equipment from decking to tools, and links to Bunnings’ how-to videos. Photos, including of a broken part or a handwritten shopping list, can be uploaded with Buddy visually identifying and locating items required.

The assistant has been rolled out in Australia across both the website and app, and will be available in New Zealand ‘later this year’, Bunnings says.

It is, Bunnings says, part of the company’s ‘accelerated use of data and AI to improve customer experiences, streamline work for teams and support long-term growth’.

Schneider frames digital as a capability layer, rather than a shiny channel – something to augment stores, suppliers, sourcing and customer experience, rather than replace them.

The shift reflects how far the retailer believes it has moved from its early digital hesitation into enterprise-grade technology execution.

That technology depth isn’t limited to eCommerce or customer-facing platforms. Schneider points to systems, processes and measures across the business designed to ensure disciplined execution and governance as Bunnings has scaled its digital operations.

Alongside its broader digital build-out, Bunnings has also deployed facial recognition technology as part of its in-store security operations.

The new industrial revolution

Schneider compares the current moment to the industrial revolution, saying he believes ‘AI will do to our generation what the industrial revolution did’.

He says Bunnings and parent company Wesfarmers are thinking deeply about how to use AI ‘properly’ for better customer and team experience, with ‘wise’ allocation of capital – and with the systems, processes and measures to do so behind the scenes.

“But there are going to be people who are worse off in the short term if it is not used properly. Just simply, ‘thank you so much for your service, we’ve not got an agent doing the work’ – that is going to happen.

“We are going to need to reimagine jobs and careers.”

He urged leaders to be clear on purpose and direction to ensure they make good choices.

“I’m an eternal optimist that things just get better and this become an enormous enabler of growth, productivity and job and life satisfaction.”

Schneider says there’s plenty of ‘really deep strategic thinking, planning and high-quality execution’ going into the Bunnings business – often through a lens of being ‘pretty casual’.

“A lot of successful Bunnings’ leaders don’t take themselves too seriously – but they are deadly serious about the work they do,” he says.

That casual exterior can mask how deliberate the machine underneath really is. Marketplace expansion, category adjacencies, retail media growth and digital platforms are all driven by disciplined capital allocation, systems and measures designed to scale without breaking trust.

And as for Bunnings’ technology being underestimated? That suits Schneider just fine – he says being underestimated has always been his natural preference.

Just a quick note for all our readers: This vendor case study was not a paid placement. We want to keep things transparent and share only authentic, fact-based stories about what real businesses are doing with real tech. If you’re a brand owner or an agent and have a genuine story to tell, iStart’s readers are eager to hear about it. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’d like to share your experience.

Thanks for helping us showcase meaningful stories that inspire, educate and motivate businesses to invest in their productivity.

The post Inside Bunnings’ ‘underestimated’ tech engine appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

AppWrap May 2026

07.05 Australia’s largest tech startup community, Fishburners, is in voluntary liquidation, with KPMG appointed administrator. InformationAge reports KPMG is facilitating a strategic restructuring of the organisation, and will be seeking expressions of interest from parties in the innovation and tech sectors. Fishburners will continue to trade as usual while the assessment is underway.

06.05 Australian education institutions are among those caught in a worldwide cyber security attack after they Canvas learning management system, developed by US company Instructure, was subjected to a hack. ABC News reports state schools in Queensland and Tasmania, universities in NSW and South Australia and TAFE in Tasmania are affected. Instructure says it doesn’t believe birthdates, passwords, government identifiers or financial information have been impacted. Names, locations of study, email addresses and messages between users are however believed to have been compromised.

04.05 NAB has changed its capitalised software policy, reducing the value and useful life of capitalised software assets thanks in part to AI enabling software to be built or replicated quickly and cheaply. ITnews reports the bank took a $1.3b hit to its underlying profit and $949m to its cash earnings for H1 FY2026 owing to the change.

AppWrap April 2026

28.04 Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations Amanda Rishworth says her department is currently undertaking gap analysis to identify how current frameworks and institutions are interacting with the adoption of AI. Speaking at the AFR Workforce Summit, Rishworth noted the tripartite AI Employment and Workplaces Forum, which meets for the first time this week, bringing together government, employers and unions to ‘build a common understanding’ and translate themes of trust, capability, transparency, safety and productivity into actions and outcomes in workplaces.

27.04 NAB is building an AI science team to guide how AI tools are deployed across the business and the workforce’s transition. TheAussieCorporate says the team will shape which tasks are automated and which new roles are created to support them. The work includes designing systems to safely handle customer data, helping make staff decisions and streamlining back office processes.

23.04 The Australian government has signed a MoU with Microsoft which is promising to continue investment in local AI capability and cloud computing and align with the governments Expectations for Data Centres and AI Infrastructure Developers. The Department of Industry, Science and Resources says the MoU – the second under the National AI Plan – also outlines Microsoft’s intention to collaborate with government on AI safety and workforce capability, support delivery of the APS AI plan and help the government understand future infrastructure needs.

22.04 The OAIC has found that InspectRealEstate’s rent-tech platform, 2Apply, collected excessive information and did so by unfair means. The OAIC says the platform has agreed to adapt its personal information collection practices on a without-admissions basis. The decision requires IRE to cease collecting personal information just as prospective renters’ gender, student status, citizen status and visa expiry and details of previous living history.

21.04 Identity verification company Persona has announced an integration with ConnectID, the Australian digital identity exchange created by Australian Payments Plus. BiometricUpdate says the integration keeps data private, providing age verification that relies on data a financial institution has already collected from a user.

22.04 The eSafety commissioner has given legally enforceable transparency notices to Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite and Stream amid concerns online games are being used to spread violent propaganda and radicalise young people and by sexual predators to groom children. eSafety says the notices require the providers to explain how they are identifying, preventing and responding to these harms, along with bullying and online hate.

21.04 A NSW Treasury staff member has been charged after allegedly downloading more than 5,600 government documents containing ‘confidential commercial and financial information’. NSW Government says the information covers multiple departments and projects. Police believe all the data has been located and is now secure, with no external compromise to the Treasury’s system.

16.04 Apple has granted Australian law enforcement access to user notification data for the first time. InformationAge reports a transparency report shows four push token identifiers were sought across two of the requests, with one push token request granted.

16.04 South32 Aluminium is suing Siemens alleging missing code in a programmable logic controller led to a steam turbine generator overheating and being ‘effectively destroyed’, ITnews reports.

15.04 Travel giant Booking.com has notified an unknown number of customers about a data breach which has seen hackers steal customer data. BBC reports some customers have contacted it saying they have already started receiving suspicious messages. Booking.com has declined to say how many people are affected or in what regions.

09.04 Canva has acquired Australian AI tool Simtheory and Australian marketing automation company Ortto for undisclosed sums. Canva says the deals will take it from a design tool to an ‘end-to-end’ work system and strengthen its AI capabilities, 9news reports.

09.04 Bendigo and Adelaide Bank will cut its tech and business operations teams after signing two major tech deals with Infosys and Genpact outsourcing some tech and business management capability. The cuts will save the business at least $65 million yoy, by the 2028 financial year AFR reports. It adds hundreds of roles are likely to be affected.

03.04 Artemis II astronauts experienced Microsoft Outlook failures shortly after launch, with Mission Control called in to remotely troubleshoot the issue. Commander Reid Wiseman reported that two instances of Outlook were running simultaneously on his Surface Pro, leaving both unresponsive, Mashable reports.

02.04 The ATO has launched an in-app security feature enabling users to confirm, in real-time, that they are speaking with the real ATO not a fraudster. Almost 7,500 ATO impersonation scams were reported in July 2025 alone, with impersonation scams peaking during tax time, the ATO says.

01.04 SpaceX has filed confidentially for an IPO according to reports, which say the company is committed to debuting in June, with Elon Musk aiming to raise US$50b-$75b. The NYTimes reports SpaceX values itself at more than $1 trillion and would be one of the most valuable companies to reach the stock market.

01.04 Oracle is cutting thousands of jobs from its 162,000-strong workforce, with 10,000 believed to have lost their job so far. Senior engineers, architects, operations leaders, program managers and technical specialists are among those affected, the BBC reports. Around 10,000 people are believed to have lost their jobs so far. It is unknown if the cuts are related to Oracle’s heavy AI spend.

01.04 The Federal government has signed a new MoU with Anthropic to build on the national AI plan launched in late 2025.

AppWrap March 2026

31.03 eSafety has flagged Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube for compliance issues with the Australian Social Media Minimum Age obligation and is gathering evidence to inform potential enforcement action, it says.

26.03 Meta and Google have lost a landmark US case, with a Los Angeles jury finding the two companies negligent for designing social media platforms that are harmful to young people. Reuters reports the jury found Meta liable for damages of US$4.2 million, with Google liable for $1.8m in the case of a US woman who sued Meta and YouTube over her childhood addiction to social media.

25.03 Delaying public disclosure of serious cyberattacks on critical infrastructure operators ‘to prevent disclosure from compromising national security’ is one of five changes proposed in a Department of Home Affairs consultation paper for amended Security of Critical Infrastructure (Soci) rules. Other reforms in the paper include changes to make it easier for the government to restrict multiple entities from using high-risk vendors or technology and clarity around the threshold for issuing a direction.

25.03 Canva has acquired Melbourne-based digital out of home advertising company Doohly in a $30m deal which adds outdoor advertising to its offering. The deal is the design company’s third acquisition this year and comes just a month after it bought US startup Mango.AI and the UK’s Cavalry notes StartupDaily.

24.03 Silicon Quantum Computing has secured $20m from the National Reconstruction Fund to support scaling of its quantum processing units and Watermelon machine learning system, SmartCompany reports.

19.03 The X Money payments service, Elon Musk’s attempt to build a ‘everything app’ will enter early public access in April. Musk’s ambitions for the embedding payments into X are broader than most Western tech companies, notes PaymentsIndustryIntelligence, with Musk talking about a system that could eventually encompass savings, payments, securities and other financial activity, reducing reliance on traditional banking channels. At launch X Money is expected to offer core wallet and payment functions, including the ability to move funds within the platform.

18.03 An attempt by the CEO of US videogame publisher Unknown Worlds to wriggle out of paying a US$250m performance has suffered a setback after the court documents showed Changhan Kim asked ChatGPT how to avoid paying the bonus. InformationAge reports Kim engaged the chatbot to draft a corporate takeover strategy, which involved stymieing the release of the highly anticipated Subnautica 2. Following ‘guidance’ from ChatGPT he also posted public ‘critical messages’ on the company website.

17.03 Google has reportedly paused plans for a $20b AI and data centre hub, warning the federal government that high taxes could cause the country to miss out on investment. DatacentreDynamics reports the company has told government it is concerned that if it set up such a hub in Australia, the ATO would consider it a ‘permanent establishment’ exposing it to a 30 percent corporate tax rate. Google is currently exploring where to establish the major APAC hub.

16.03 AI disruption is causing Australian software companies to make big job cuts, with private tech companies expected to follow in the footsteps of Atlassian and WiseTech with redundancy rounds, valuation cuts and a bottleneck for public listings, AFR reports.

12.03 Atlassian is cutting around 1,600 jobs – or 10 percent of its workforce. The company says the move is to ‘self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales’, while strengthening its financial profile, Forbes reports. The retrenchment will cost between $225m-$236m.

11.03 Professional body CA ANZ says it will investigate the failure of an external exam delivery platform after more than 1,300 students were locked out of one exam and another 60 experienced delays of up to 40 minutes on a second exam. CA ANZ blamed a failure in an external exam platform operated by a third-party provider.

11.03 US medtech giant Stryker has been hit by a major cyberattack, with an Iran-linked hacking group claiming responsibility, saying it is in retaliation for the killing of more than 170 people – mainly schoolgirls – in a strike on a school, and warning it marks the beginning of a new chapter in cyber warfare, Al Jazeera reports. The group says it has seized 50TB of Stryker data in the attack which it says has erased data from 200,000 devices.

10.03 Anthropic is opening a Sydney office and hiring a local team. The company says Australia ranks fourth globally in Claude.ai usage, relative to population, with strong demand from local business. It says it plans to deepen engagement with Australian institutions and collaborate on projects that advance the country’s national interests and priority sectors. It is also exploring opportunities to expand compute capacity in Australia ‘given our longstanding belief that democracies should lead in AI development’. The company is currently suing the US government over its claims that Anthropic is a ‘supply chain risk’. The row erupted after Anthropic refused to all US military to have unfettered use to its AI tools.

05.03 Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind is warning Australian organisations that a recent ruling allowing Bunnings to use facial recognition is not a green light for the technology. Kind, who says she has not filed an appeal of the Administrative Review Tribunal finding, which overturned her ruling against the technology, says the decision shows the law allows for the balancing of competing interests – privacy vs public safety – but entities will need to conduct a detailed risk assessment specific to their circumstances before deploying the technology. “Retailers should view the decision as a useful case study, rather than a green light for deployment of biometric technologies,” she says.

AppWrap February 2026

27.02 Commonwealth Bank has called in the police and corporate regulator over concerns $1b in home loans were obtained fraudulently, including with AI-created documents. AFR reports the bank reported itself to police and the regulator after a review of the compliance practices and customer lending documents, which stepped up following revelations about the Penthouse Syndicate, which allegedly defrauded NAB of around $150m. Increasingly sophisticated AI has made it easier to create authentic looking false documents and to steal identities.

26.02 Nvidia has posted blockbuster quarterly results of US$68.1 billion – up 73 percent year on year and well above analysts’ forecasts. Revenue from the data centre division, which sells the chips used to train and run AI models was up 75 percent yoy to $62.3 billion, the company says.

25.02 Australian logistics software company WiseTech is cutting around 2,000 jobs – nearly a third of its global workforce in a restructure focused on using genAI to increase efficiency in software engineering and support, Reuters reports.

25.02 Australian Peter Williams has been jailed for seven years for selling critical software and information related to cybersecurity to a broker with ties to the Russian government. Williams was working in the US. 9News reports the tools were cyber-exploit components which can be used to identify weaknesses in tech systems or infect them with viruses.

24.02 The federal government has scrapped a permanent AI advisory board appointed to develop AI guardrails. ABCnews reports the body, funded in the 2024 Budget, was scrapped only months after spending $188,000 and more than a year whittling down a list of experts to a shortlist of 12 nominees. The government says it will instead establish an AI safety institute early this year.

25.02 Commonwealth Bank is spending $90 million to get staff ‘AI-ready’. The bank says the program will help employees ‘build skills, find new opportunities and get ahead of the changing nature of work’. AI learning has already been delivered to 30,000+ staff.

24.02 The ASD has publicly released its Azul open-source malware analysis tool to help safely handle and analyse malware. Azul is designed for large-scale malware analysis and is designed to be highly scalable and store tens of millions of samples, ASD says, adding it can turn common analysis steps into analysis plugins which can be used as part of an automated workflow and assist in identifying variants of a malware family more efficiently.

18.02 Xero is restructuring with 250 jobs on the line – including in Australia. The company is creating around 280 roles in Canada as part of the restructure, BusinessDesk reports [paywalled].

18.02 YouTube suffered an outage from around 11.50am AEDT, with a spokesperson for Google saying an issue with the recommendations system prevented videos appearing.

18.02 The federal opposition has unveiled a new-look shadow ministry under Angus Taylor, with Victorian senator Sarah Henderson appointed shadow communications and digital safety minister. ABCnews reports Casey MP Aaron Violi has been promoted to the outer shadow ministry with a broad portfolio including science, technology, cyber security and the digital economy. Deputy Liberal Leader Jane Hume will be shadow minister for employment and industrial relations as well as productivity and deregulation.

18.02 Australian company Terram Astra has set its sights on a US$10m seed capital raise for a new sovereign ground-based infrastructure platform designed to strengthen communications resilience, defence readiness and space safety across the region. Manufacturers’ Monthly reports Terram Astra’s first hub is located near Alice Springs.

17.02 Highly sensitive Australian court files have been accessed by a foreign entity based in India, an ABCnews investigation has revealed, with Greens senator David Shoebridge saying access to the cases by foreign entities is ‘a national security risk’. The investigation showed Canada’s VIQ Solutions, which employs transcribers in Australia, has also subcontracted work to an Indian company specialising in automated voice-to-text technology, in breach of the VIQ contract. Thousands of court files were accessed by e24 staff with Indian email addresses.

16.02 Federal government entities are failing to report cyber incidents to the Australian Signals Directorate. InformationAge reports just 35 percent of the 200 government entities said they reported at least half of all cybersecurity incidents observed on their networks.

11.02 Service NSW has started testing a new system enabling residents to verify who they are in a single step when interacting with state government services online. ITnews reports initially the digital ID system will be used with a limited number of services, starting with a state toll rebate scheme.

06.02 Australian-founded AI data centre startup Firmus Technologies has secured another $100m to expand its local data centres. The funding, from ASX-listed Maas Group means the company, which is Singapore-based, has raised more than $900m in less than five months, StartupDaily reports.

06.02 CommBank says it has become the first bank to disclose how it is ideating, developing, deploying and managing AI at an organisational level, including ‘practical examples’ of AI in action across the business. Those examples include AI to protect against fraud and scams, strengthen cyber security, enhance customer experience and detect abuse in transaction descriptions.

05.02 Atlassian’s revenue for the quarter to December 31 was up 23 percent to US$1.58 billion, with cloud revenue growing 26 percent providing the company with its first $1b cloud revenue quarter. However, net loss also grew from $38.2m to $42.6m. Operating loss was down from $57.5m to $47.7m the company says. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes dubbed the quarter ‘fantastic’, adding: “We’re building a bloody great business.”

03.02 The federal government has rejected a bipartisan proposal which would have allowed a parliamentary committee to cancel large consultancy contracts, saying its own reforms are doing the job. A centralised register for conflicts of interest breaches has also been ruled out.

03.02 Australia’s STEM capability is facing a ‘severe crisis’ as a result of flatlining Commonwealth funded research, Science and Technology Australia says. In a pre-budget submission it says Stem research must stop being viewed as a cost and instead be seen as an investment. It says 47 percent of Stem professionals are considering leaving their current roles, with 33 percent planning to leave the sector altogether.

03.02 Xero says more than two million subscribers are using its full AI features, with more than 300,000 using its newer GenAI features. In a market update today the company claimed customers are saving around 22 hours a month using bank feeds and automated actions, with more than 12 percent using AI Insights.

03.02 Kiwi AI startup Teacher’s Buddy has raised $2.3m in trans-Tasman seed funding. The offering aims to reduce teacher workloads, helping with marking and student report writing and producing customised, differentiated curriculum-aligned teaching and assessment materials  The company says the funding was led by Auckland’s Soul Capital and Australia’s Giant Leap.

02.02 Victoria has set its sights on being Australia’s AI capital with the launch of an AI Mission Statement setting out the Allan government’s plans across six key pillars of investment attraction and adoption, data centres and digital infrastructure, local innovation, products and services, talent and workforce, ethical AI use and public sector adoption. The plan includes a $8.1 million Digital Jobs – AI Career Conversion program to safeguard jobs in industries at risk from AI, upskilling workers to transition into AI roles and become specialists in the technology.

AppWrap January 2026

27.01 Airwallex boss Jack Zhang says the fintech is at least two years away from a public listing, despite regular references to an IPO in 2026. Zhang’s comments, reported in StartupDaily, follow news last week that Austrac has ordered an audit of the company over AML/CTF concerns.

26.01 The APS plans a whole-of-government learning technology ecosystem following a co-design involving teams from 37 Commonwealth agencies. ITnews reports a core goal of the new system is to enable interoperability and integration across learning and development environments.

23.01 TikTok has finalised agreements with backers including Oracle, Silver Lake and Emirati company MGX to establish a US joint venture. Each of the three backers will hold a 15 percent stake in the company. ByteDance keeps a 19.9 percent share. The BBC reports the content recommendation algorithm has been licensed to Oracle – headed by Trump ally Larry Ellison – which already oversees US user data under a previous arrangement set up over security concerns. The deal will enable TikTok to continue operating in the US, but is likely to continue to be scrutinised, with some Democrats voicing concerns about the ties between Trump and TikTok’s new investor group could limit what gets shared on the platform.

22.01 Australia’s financial intelligence unit, Austrac has ordered an external auditor be appointed to assess whether fintech – and unicorn – Airwallex is complying with anti-money laundering and counter terrorism financing. Austrac says it has ‘concerns’ about potential non-compliance including that Airwallex’s transaction monitoring program has not been ‘attuned to the full range of risks it faces’ and the company hasn’t demonstrated an acceptable understanding of who its customers are and what reporting may be required. The auditor must report findings within 180 days of appointment.

20.91 AI projects to improve construction safety, enhance space safety and detect speech delays, are among the 174 projects winning funding in the latest round of Australia’s Economic Accelerator (AEA) Ignite program. More than $72.5m in funding was allocated. The funding is for projects that build capability I nationally important sectors aligned with the National Reconstruction Fund’s priority areas, AEA says.

20.01 Gilmour Space has become Australia’s first space tech unicorn after raising $217m in a Series E funding round – its largest funding round to date. SpaceNews reports the round was led by the federal government’s National Reconstruction Fund and retirement savings fund Hostplus along with several other investors.

20.01 A bill cracking down on hate speech has passed the House of Representatives and Senate at a special sitting late on Tuesday, a month after 15 were killed at Bondi Beach. It includes provision to ban groups deemed to spread hate, the BBC reports. The hate speech reforms were originally part of an omnibus bill along with gun reforms, but the two were split last week. The gun reform bill, which includes a buyback scheme, was also passed.

16.01 Social media companies removed access to around 4.7 million accounts for those under 16 in the first half of December, eSafety says.

16.01 Alphabet’s Waymo robotaxi business has held discussions with Chinese car maker Geely, and other electric car makers, as it looks to enter the Sydney market. AFR reports. Waymo is stepping up its efforts in Australia, with the appointment of a lobbyist and a search for an office now underway. It has yet to lodge an application to begin testing in the city.

13.01 Advertising is hitting the AI chatbots with ads starting to show up in Google’s ‘AI Mode’ in what the Washington Post says is likely to be just the beginning of more trial-and-error attempts this year. Google has been pushing a new type of ad in AI Mode to advertisers, OpenAI has also been looking at introducing advertising in ChatGPT and Perplexity attempted ads but pulled back last year – but has left the doors open to try again.

08.01 The DTA has warned against outright bans of IT suppliers and services companies for unethical behaviour warning such bans could introduce significant operational risks and unintended consequences. ITnews reports parliament is considering an exclusion regime preventing those engaging in unethical conduct from bidding for government work, in the wake of the PwC scandal. The DTA, however, says blanket bans could block access to tech advances or skilled resources.

The post Appwrap 2026: Fishburners falters, Education hack and NAB software change appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

The gap isn’t ‘AI vs no AI’. Instead, it’s how AI is adopted and integrated, with 2degrees, which commissioned the Deloitte Access Economics report, warning that AI alone won’t lift productivity. Instead, the benefits depend on how effectively organisations adopt it, integrate it, and build the capability to use it well.

“AI itself will not lift productivity.”

OECD, NZ Productivity Commission and Stats NZ numbers consistently show New Zealand produces less output per hour worked than Australia and many comparable OECD economies, with recent growth driven more by people working longer hours than by efficiency gains. Things aren’t so hot for Australia, either. While it sits closer to the OECD middle on labour productivity, the golden era of labour productivity in the 1960s and 1970s are far from today’s reality.

A $400,000 signal, with conditions attached

The Deloitte Access Economics’ report, Productivity Propelled: The Impact of AI on Business Performance, claims to be the first New Zealand-specific attempt to quantify the link between AI adoption and firm-level productivity. Drawing on survey data collected in early 2026, it estimates the average SME using AI earned around $400,000 more in FY25 than similar companies that had not adopted the technology, with larger businesses seeing even greater uplifts.

However, the report is explicit that outcomes are neither automatic, nor evenly distributed. While 82 percent of organisations report using AI in some form, many remain early in their AI journey, relying on AI features embedded in existing software rather than standalone or deeply integrated systems.

Liza van der Merwe, Deloitte Access Economics lead partner at Deloitte New Zealand, says AI presents a significant opportunity, but only if businesses have the right foundations in place.

“Progress depends on building mindset, systems and skills in tandem,” van der Merwe says. “When these come together, businesses are far better placed to turn AI into real productivity gains.”

She says for many organisations the biggest gains are not from inventing new technologies, but from using what exists more effectively. “That means integrating AI into day-to-day operations, supported by the right infrastructure, processes and ways of working. Ambition alone isn’t enough – without the right systems and capability, businesses risk getting stuck in experimentation rather than delivering meaningful results.”

That risk is evident in New Zealand. MYOB’s survey of 500+ leaders and decision-makers at mid-sized businesses shows that while AI usage is increasing, a significant share are still not seeing commercial returns, critical gaps in operational readiness meaning most are leaving significant productivity and commercial gains uncaptured.

Two-thirds of the Kiwi mid-market companies said they have strong digital processes (66 percent) and good data foundations (68 percent), but workforce readiness (56 percent) and having proper governance in place (61 percent) and meaningful process autonomy (55 percent) were tracking behind.

Where AI is layered onto fragmented systems or manual processes, the gains tend to be incremental, with businesses tending to report time savings as the primary benefit.

In contrast, MYOB’s data shows that businesses embedding AI into core systems and processes, supported by stronger data, governance and workforce capability, are more likely to report impacts that move beyond time savings, including revenue growth, margin improvement and better decision-making at scale.

Australia shows what changes at scale

In Australia 81 percent of the more than 500 mid-market business leaders surveyed said AI has had a positive impact on productivity. That number rises to 93 percent among the most advanced organisations.

The strongest results were reported by businesses that had embedded AI into their core processes, rather than treating it as a bolt-on tool. Those organisations were also more likely to report improvements in output quality, revenue and profitability, not just efficiency.

MYOB frames this through five foundational pillars it sees as critical to unlocking AI’s value:

• Core processes – standardised and digitised workflows
• Data – quality and integration
• AI strategy – clear prioritisation and use cases
• AI governance – risk compliance and guardrails
• Workforce capability – skills and change capacity

Australian companies scoring well across these pillars are more likely to see compounding benefits from AI. Where pillars are weak or missing, returns are more limited, regardless of how much is spent on AI tools.

Alex Hooper, Oxford Economics Australia associate director, says with productivity such a central focus on both sides of the Tasman, the MYOB results showing 75 percent of Kiwi and 77 percent of Australian mid-sized businesses are reporting productivity benefits from AI is encouraging.

“However, the results also show a divergence in maturity across the two markets,” she says. “While New Zealand businesses show strong ambition, Australian firms are more likely to have translated that into deeper operational integration, suggesting a faster pathway to realising productivity and commercial benefits.

“Across both markets, businesses appear to be converging on a similar set of priorities for scaling AI and automation. Workforce skills, core system upgrades and data quality are coming through strongly, although New Zealand businesses are more likely to report a need for greater to improve workforce skills and training,” she explains.

The size of the prize

For Kiwi mid-sized businesses that have invested across more of the key pillars, MYOB says the commercial returns are already showing up in the numbers.

In addition to time saved (46 percent), almost a third (30 percent) of decision-makers polled believe AI has contributed to increased revenue or sales growth and 27 percent report improved profit margins, however the proportion enjoying such financial benefits grows with business size.

More than one-in-three (37 percent) of businesses with 100+ employees report improved profit margins, compared with just 11 percent among firms with 20-49 employees. The revenue gap is similarly sharp, with 36 percent of the largest mid-sized firms reporting revenue uplift versus just 16 percent of the smallest.

From experimentation to earnings

Taken together, the Deloitte Access Economics and MYOB findings point to the same conclusion from different angles. AI can deliver firm‑wide productivity and financial benefits, and Deloitte’s $400,000 figure underlines the scale of the opportunity.

But the returns come where it is tied to systems, processes and skills that scale. Without that groundwork, AI risks becoming another well‑intentioned investment delivering marginal gains, not the step‑change both economies are looking for.

The post Australian SMBs bank AI, NZ chasing appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

That’s according to Fonterra and Spark who are both selling the same idea in different uniforms: AI doesn’t need to transform everything overnight to make your P&L sing. At Spark, it’s as unglamourous – and as valuable – as taking two minutes out of a customer call and untangling the workflow knots that slow staff down. Over at Fonterra, AI is doing equally practical work: Monitoring butter packaging and pausing the line when faults show up, replacing spreadsheet-based production scheduling and pulling real-time IoT data from machinery across more than 100 plants into the cloud to support predictive maintenance.

“We’re using that database to pull research faster and to turn that into insights and innovation.”

Fonterra: From factory to office

Fonterra’s AI work spans both physical operations and corporate functions, with a focus on consistency, speed and decision support.

On the manufacturing side, the dairy co-operative, which processes around 22 billion letres of milk solids each season, is using AI at sites such as Clandeboye in South Canterbury to monitor butter packaging across multiple stages of production. When faults are detected, the system can pause the line, allowing staff to intervene early.

In production planning, AI has replaced spreadsheet-based scheduling, while real-time IoT data from machinery across more than 100 plants is streamed into Microsoft’s cloud to support predictive maintenance. The aim is to reduce downtime and disruption across a global manufacturing footprint.

At the same time Fonterra has embedded AI into everyday office work. The organisation was an early adopter of Microsoft 365 Copilot through the vendor’s early adoption programme, and identified hundreds of use cases across the business.

By February 2026, Fonterra says 35 percent of its global workforce was actively using AI tools, generating almost one million interactions in a single month across Copilot Chat, Copilot Studio agents, GitHub Copilot and the organisation’s own internal system, Co-op GPT.

The tools are being used to summarise meetings, capture actions, accelerate policy drafting and support internal decision-making.

Fonterra has also built a set of production AI agents using Copilot Studio in partnership with EY. These include an idea submission coach to improve the quality and consistency of investment proposals, an architecture assessment agent to support internal governance checks, and a technical accounting assessment agent designed to ensure financial assessments are audit-ready.

Skills, mindset and adoption at scale

Speaking at Microsoft’s AI Tour in Auckland last week, Fonterra CEO Miles Hurrell said the organisation’s AI work has been underpinned by a strong focus on upskilling its people and ensuring it has the right mindset around AI adoption. “There’s been a lot of work on how we get the right mindset, because you’ve got a range of views across an organisation,” he says.

Rather than positioning AI adoption as an IT-led initiative, Hurrell says Fonterra has taken a management-led approach. “We’ve gone with the approach of having it management-led as opposed to led from IT departments, and letting people explore and experiment in their own minds and share that knowledge,” he says.

One area where that approach is paying off is research and development. Hurrell says the company is using AI to improve outcomes at its Palmerston North research centre, which houses, decades of scientific work. With around 300 scientists, 120 PhDs and a century long legacy, the centre has a wealth of research documents. “We’re using that database to pull research faster and to turn that into insights and innovation,” he says.

Hurrell says the team is ‘hungry’ for the technology, but the organisation is focused on balancing experimentation with discipline. “It’s a matter of bringing the mindset and the skill set to ensure we don’t get too far ahead of ourselves, but experimenting and showing the benefit that we can create,” he says.

Spark: Fixing workflows first

At Spark the focus has been on understanding how work flows through the organisation and where it slows down or becomes more complex than it needs to be. Notes Spark CEO Jolie Hodson: “If you can remove some of that friction, you start to see a change not just in individual tasks, but in how the whole process comes together.”

The telecommunications and digital services provider signed a major strategic partnership with Microsoft in 2025, which included the country’s largest Microsoft Azure cloud agreement and one of its largest deployments of Microsoft Copilot.

The early impact has been felt in customer care. Speaking at the Microsoft AI Tour in Auckland, Hodson said Spark has more than 350 advisors now working with an AI system alongside them to help answer questions. Thousands of interactions are handled each day via the contact centres, and advisors don’t always have immediate access to the technical information needed to resolve enquiries on their own, requiring escalation to the operations team. Jolie says the system, a Copilot tool trained with technical and procedural knowledge call centre operators need, is deflecting 20,000 questions a month, or around 60 percent of issues, that would otherwise have gone to its back office.

The gains, however, are not limited to contact centres. Hodson says the organisation has deliberately spent time putting the right foundations in place before scaling its use of AI. “We spent quite a bit of time [on] the things you need to support the models – trust, privacy, the skills we need to build in our people,” she says. “With that you can then move at pace once the technology comes online.”

Spark is also using AI to accelerate its software delivery processes. “We are using it to test and change and still have human review inside that,” Hodson says, pointing to the use of AI to support development work without removing oversight.

She also pointed to broader ambitions for AI to lift productivity – a long term problem for Spark – and for the wider New Zealand Inc and Australia Inc. Hodson says AI is one way to lift productivity. “but standing back and waiting, hoping for something to change isn’t going to set us up to succeed.”

Moving from pilots to production

Across both organisations, the common theme is restraint paired with scale. Neither Spark nor Fonterra frame AI as a single transformational switch. Instead both talk about removing friction from existing processes, whether that friction sits in a customer interaction, a factory line, a governance workflow or research archive.

The signal is clear in how both organisations describe success: Measurable improvements in speed, consistency and throughput, grounded in skills, trust and governance rather than speculative pilots or one-off demonstrations.

The post AI adoption after the hype. Fonterra & Spark target friction appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

But recovery? That might be another story with only a third or organisations in a recent survey having a tested incident response or business continuity plan. The figures, contained in Datacom’s 2026 Cybersecurity Index point to a false sense of security big enough to drive a ransomware truck through.

“The figures point to a false sense of security big enough to drive a ransomware truck through.”

The Index draws on a survey of more than 700 security leaders across Australia and New Zealand. It found 73 percent of New Zealand respondents and 77 percent of Australian believe they have sufficient visibility across risks, vulnerabilities and compliance. They’re confident too (Australia: 70 percent; NZ: 78 percent), that they have the resources to deal with a cyber attack.

But Datacom has raised a red flag when it comes to organisational preparedness. The data shows only 30 percent of New Zealand and 32 percent of Australian organisations have a business continuity or cyber incident response plan in place. That gap between confidence and readiness is what Datacom dubs the region’s growing ‘resiliency gap’: Organisations have built world-class radar systems, but many still don’t have a safe runway to land the plane when things go wrong.

“Organisations have invested heavily in monitoring and detection, but they are falling short when it comes to recovery,” says Mark Hile, Datacom managing director, infrastructure products. “The priority now is not another dashboard but engineered resilience – from containment to stabilisation to rapid recovery.”

The Index shows most leaders expect to recovery from a major cyber incident within days, an optimism which flies in the face of real-world examples which routinely show recovery taking weeks or months. “Business leaders in particular underestimate recovery times, despite the fact IT leaders report an average of four weeks to reach a minimum level of operational recovery after an attack, according to global tech research firm Omdia,” the report says.

The problem is not a lack of alerts, but instead untested plans, unclear decision rights and an absence of operational muscle memory when cyber incidents become business crises.

“In 2026, maturity will be defined by resilience, not just detection,” the report says. “Visibility alone is no longer the differentiator; the ability to operate under high volume and to recover when defences fail is.”

As Datacom CISO Collin Penman puts it: “Detection is table stakes. Reporting is a must. Resilience is the differentiator.”

That resilience, he says, comes down to preparedness – something he says is a problem for A/NZ organisations, based on the survey data and an issue requiring a fundamental shift in how boards and business leaders make decisions in cybersecurity investment.

He notes the example of the 2025 ransomware attack on Jaguar Land Rover UK, which halted production for five weeks and took nearly five months for full recovery.

“What prolongs recovery is not a lack of alerts, but a lack of preparedness for disruption. Many organisations are well equipped to identify an incident, yet struggle once it impacts customers, services or revenue. At that point, untested continuity plans, unclear decision rights and cross functional dependencies slow progress,” the report notes.

The report suggests the threat landscape itself is well understood. Across both markets AI-enabled cyberattacks and phishing/social engineering consistently rank as the top concerns for organisations. These are closely followed by employee or user error, application and API attacks – particularly involving legacy systems – and data breaches involving extortion. Datacom notes AI-enabled threats are not necessarily new, but are acting as force multipliers, enabling attackers to move faster, scale more easily and compress attack timelines.

Cyber’s human problem

The same visibility trap is playing out inside security teams.

According to the Index, 43 percent of Kiwi and 36 percent of Australian organisations report signs of cyber burnout among their security or IT teams. While this is down form 2025 levels, Datacom warns that’s not because the work has eased, but because pressure has been recalibrated as ‘normal’.

Security teams are managing relentless alert volumes, AI-enabled attack acceleration and rising expectations from boards who often underestimate recovery realities. Responsibility for cybersecurity remains concentrated in IT, with over half of organisations in both markets still viewing cyber as primarily an IT or security function, rather than a shared executive responsibility.

“The drop in reported burnout is encouraging, but I don’t think the pressure has eased,” says Penman. “I think out people have recalibrated what they consider to be normal… no amount of hiring will outpace the volume and velocity of what we’re facing.”

Seeing everything, owning nothing

One of the potentially more uncomfortable findings in the Index is how poorly visibility translates into organisational action. Framework adoption remains fragmented, with no single framework surpassing 50 percent, even among organisations expressing high confidence.

Even where frameworks exist, Datacom notes they function more as ‘organising mechanisms than operational anchors’ with limited impact on real-world recovery capability.

Security teams are expected to manage incidents that cross cloud, identity, applications, supply chains and customer experience, often without clear authority to stabilise systems quickly. When response plans exist only on paper and have never been tested, recovery becomes improvisation under pressure. Says Penman: “A plan that’s never been tested isn’t a plan – it’s a document. Regular exercises build muscle memory, so response becomes automatic, coordinated and fast in the event of a cyber incident.”

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MIT Technology Review Insights’ report, Redefining the Future of Software Engineering, shows a surge of confidence that agentic AI – the advanced, autonomous AI systems capable of independently executing multi-step workflows – will dramatically accelerate software development. But DBT Labs’ 2026 State of Analytics Engineering Report, which tracks how AI is reshaping analytics and data platforms, highlights a quieter, but consequential trend: Infrastructure and integration costs are rising faster than budgets, particularly as AI becomes embedded across analytics and engineering workflows.

“This raises a central question for 2026: Whether validation, testing and oversight mechanisms are scaling at the same pace as AI-driven output.”

Together, the reports highlight that AI agents might be here, with adoption is accelerating, but the bill is landing not with licenses but with compute, orchestration and governance.

MIT Technology Review Insights surveyed 300 senior IT, software engineering and data leaders at large enterprises and found that 98 percent expect agentic AI to accelerate software delivery, with average speed gains of 37 percent anticipated over the next two years. More than half already rank agentic AI among their top three software investments, with that figure expected to rise to 84 percent within three years.

“2025 has marked a steep acceleration in how AI is used in software engineering, evolving from vibe coding experiments to more disciplined agentic engineering,” the report notes. Productivity no longer scales linearly with headcount. “It scales with how clearly we define the product vision, engineer context and onboard agents.”

Ambitions, too, are scaling quickly, escalating from assistance to autonomy, with agents managing product development and software development lifecycles. That’s a goal 72 percent aim to achieve in two years and 41 percent expect within 18 months.

The DBT Labs report shows the same momentum in analytics engineering. AI-assisted coding is now prioritised by 72 percent of analytics teams, and among leaders more than 77 percent emphasised AI for productivity gains.

“AI is no longer experimental inside data teams,” the report says. “Instead, it’s funded, embedded and actively reshaping analytics engineering workflows, influencing how code is written, how insights are generated and how teams invest in analytics and data infrastructure. What was once exploratory is now operational.”

Despite the optimism, the MIT report injects a note of caution: Most organisations don’t expect dramatic gains in the short term. The majority of respondents expect slight (14 percent) or at best moderate (52 percent) improvements from agentic AI over the next two years. Only nine percent expect the impact to be game-changing in that timeframe.

That detail reframes the adoption curve: Organisations are absorbing the full cost and complexity of integration before seeing transformational returns.

The DBT report reinforces this. AI’s primary impact today is operational – shortening cycle times, increasing throughput and expanding output volumes – rather than fundamentally changing what teams deliver.

The hidden cost of integration

The two reports align when it comes to the hidden costs, and a key challenge, involved.

In the MIT study, agent integration with existing enterprise applications and the ongoing cost of computing resources are tied as the biggest challenges to scaling agentic AI, each cited by 44 percent of respondents. Multi-agent orchestration across complex enterprise environments, often involving hundreds of APIs and third-party and home-grown applications, is a major constraint. Orchestration agents exist, but are not yet able to manage lifecycles end to end, partly because of that complexity.

The DBT Labs report shows the same pressure playing out in the analytics sphere. Fifty-seven percent of the 363 data practitioners and leaders surveyed reported increased data warehouse and compute spend as AI-drive workloads expand. Infrastructure demand is absorbing much of the AI investment, the report notes. Meanwhile, only 36 percent report increased team budgets.

While AI tools may be inexpensive to access, the reports point to the expense of operating AI at scale. Compute, storage, orchestration and observability costs quickly accumulate, especially when AI expands workload intensity by default.

Both reports also flag a growing imbalance between output and control.

DBT Labs notes that while 72 percent of teams prioritise AI-assisted coding, only 24 percent prioritise AI-assisted pipeline management, including testing, validation, observability and quality controls. “The signal is clear: Teams are leveraging AI to accelerate creation, but not to reinforce governance at the same pace.”

MIT’s research echoes this concern from a software engineering perspective. Reliability, governance and auditability are cited as gating factors to wider deployment, particularly in regulated or safety-critical environments. Most agentic systems today still require human oversight, which limits how quickly autonomy can scale.

DBT’s report found that trust in data remains a foundational concern as AI use expands. Poorly governed data doesn’t just undermine outcomes, it increases operational risk, forcing organisations to slow deployment or add safeguards after the fact.

“As AI expands what analytics teams can produce, concern is rising alongside adoption. This raises a central governance question for 2026: Whether validation, testing and oversight mechanisms are scaling at the same pace as AI-driven output.”

Or as one data engineer quoted in the report notes: “AI won’t fix a messy foundation. It just makes the lack of discipline much more visible.”

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The Autumn 2026 Young Company Finance report from NZ Growth Capital Partners and Angel Association New Zealand shows total startup investment rose to $754 million across 166 deals in 2025, a 61 percent year-on-year increase in total investment and a 14 percent rise in deal count. Australia recorded a similar pattern, albeit at far greater scale.

“Larger rounds are becoming more common, and that matters.”

The State of Australian Startup Funding 2025 report from Folklore Ventures and Cut Through Ventures found total funding was up 31 percent to $5.4 billion in 2025. As in New Zealand, the headline growth was driven by larger rounds, not a surge in deal numbers, which were down 20 percent year on year to 390.

Across both markets, the data points to a shift to more money flowing into later-stage, deployable technologies and less tolerance for long-horizon bets.

Execution, not experimentation

The most striking signal in New Zealand’s data is the stage profile of funding with nearly 49 percent of all successful rounds going to early expansion or expansion-stage companies. Those deals accounted for 83 percent of capital investment. The year saw 33 proof of concept deals recorded, with investment in PoC companies remaining largely unchanged.

“Larger rounds are becoming more common, and that matters. It signals that New Zealand companies are progressing further, staying competitive on a global stage and attracting the depth of funding required to scale,” says Angel Association of New Zealand chief executive Bridget Unsworth.

The report notes that New Zealand’s venture market is showing clear evidence of maturation at the scale-up end, with significantly larger follow-on rounds being raised by a small number of existing high-growth companies, with the market backing known performers. But the data also suggests a narrower pipeline of new companies entering large funding rounds, with the market not brining many new names into the $10 million-plus category.

But Unsworth warns that while larger funding round bring benefits, there’s a danger too. With funding heading to the later-stage rounds, there’s a natural risk that early-stage investment – ‘the lifeblood of the ecosystem’ – receives less attention and the pipeline of companies capable of reaching larger rounds will dry up.

It’s not a uniquely New Zealand challenge, with Australia’s data mirroring a similar concentration. The top 20 deals in 2025 accounted for 58 percent of total funding, with deal counts falling even as total capital rose. Median round sizes increased, at least marginally, at most stages.

AI leads, but fintech and healthtech are hot to trot too

AI featured prominently in both markets, but the nature of investment has shifted. The New Zealand report recorded seven AI-related deals – five rounds over $1 million and one large funding round of over $20 million – accounting for nine percent of all funding during H2 2025.

In Australia, 61 percent of total funding went to companies using AI somewhere in their technology stack. More than AU$1 billion went to AI-native startups and AI deals cleared at higher valuations than the rest of the ecosystem, the Australian report notes, with AI-at-the-core companies demanding higher valuations and attracting sharper investor competition, while non-AI deals were pricing within tighter, more disciplined bands.

“This bifurcation reinforces selectivity rather than broad-based hype,” the report says. “Investors report a willingness to pay up where AI meaningfully improves scale , defensibility or exit potential, while applying conservative benchmarks elsewhere.”

Quentin Wallace, cofounder and venture partner of Archangel Ventures, says the market is looking for ‘a synergy between strong growth and innovative products’.

The report says AI has acted as an accelerant, not because ‘AI’ sells, but because it compresses time. Startups can reach minimum viable product faster and more resource-efficiently, and iterate with minimal engineering effort, pulling companies into a fundable position earlier.

Both reports identify fintech and healthtech as consistent investment leaders.

In New Zealand, the Young Company Finance report notes fintech and healthtech recorded strong investment growth in H2 2025, with fintech increasing five percent year-on-year as a share of total deals to hit 12 percent of deals and 13 percent of funding. Five multi-million-dollar deals were logged during the half year, with total investment in the sector up 133 percent year-on-year.

Healthtech too, attracted ‘significant’ investment, accounting for 15 percent of total funding, with seven rounds exceeding $4 million, and overall investment in the sector up 89 percent year-on-year.

In Australia, fintech attracted $868 million, with biotech and medtech drawing $829 million, pushing them into second and third place, behind AI.

Climate-tech and clean-tech investment declined in New Zealand during 2025, a trend the report says reflects global funding patterns. Australia’s experience adds important context: Climate and deep tech investment continues, but later-stage rounds increasingly rely on government support or blended capital, rather than private venture capital alone.

Stepping away from the two reports – and from broader climate trends – agritech is entering a new phase of growth in New Zealand, with significant capital raises and a maturing ecosystem focused on scaling globally.

Brendan O’Connell, AgriTech New Zealand chief executive, says the scale of recent capital raises from companies like Halter, Hectre, Agovor, Scanabull and Scentian Bio ‘shows we’ve moved from promising to proven’.

In March, Halter raised NZ$377 million in series E funding, at a $3.43 billion valuation. Meanwhile, Hectre, which uses AI and computer vision to capture real-time data on fruit size, colour and quality before it enters the packhouse, raised $12 million in a series A round in February.

“Capital growth is a signal, but system strength is the goal,” says Young Company Finance. In practice, the data suggests that strength is increasingly defined by relevance. As capital concentrates across both markets, fewer companies are making it through, but those that do are arriving with the scale and backing buyers expect.

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Put another way, organisations are buying the AI sports car, but most employees still don’t have a driver’s licence.

“Organisations that treat AI literacy as a strategic priority, not a box-ticking exercise, will unlock meaningful productivity gains and long-term competitive advantage.”

AIQ measures the readiness of individuals, teams and organisations to adapt to, collaborate with, trust and generate business results from genAI and other forms of the technology. The Forrester report AIQ 2.0: Employees (Still) Aren’t Ready to Succeed with Workforce AI, finds that only 16 percent of employees achieved a high AIQ in 2025, up marginally from the 12 percent seen in 2024. That’s despite widespread deployment of generative AI tools such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, Google Workspace and enterprise copilots now embedded into daily workflows.

The disconnect matters. JP Gownder, Forrester VP, principal analyst, says the lack of AIQ is becoming a clear bottleneck to productivity and ROI. Employees with low AIQ are slower to adopt AI tools or use them incorrectly, increasing errors, rework and frustration. In many cases, the time and effort required to use AI outweighs the value generated, preventing organisations from reaching the productivity ‘crossover point’ where AI meaningfully improves work outcomes.

Forrester’s AIQ framework looks at four dimensions of employee readiness: Understanding AI, skills and training, confidence and motivation, and ethics, risk and privacy awareness.

While 68 percent of organisations report using generative AI in production applications, only a small minority of employees show a strong ability to work effectively with the tools, with AI skills ‘stagnating’ despite the widespread deployment.

“This slow progress indicates that enterprise AI rollouts are outpacing investments in employee capability, creating a readiness gap that limits productivity gains and increases operational risk,” the research firm says.

Training gaps a key constraint

Training is a major weak spot. Just over half of organisations provide AI training to non-technical staff and fewer than a quarter offer prompt engineering training, which Forrester dubs a ‘foundational skill’ for effectively using tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot and Google Workspace.

The report dubs a ‘mere’ four-point gain in the percentage of individual contributes who said they received formal training as a ‘shocking lack of progress’. “It’s clear that employers haven’t stepped up to enable their employees through learning initiatives.”

It notes that GenAI tools are probabilistic, rather than the deterministic computing we’re used to. Where with deterministic tools the same input produces the same output each time, following fixed rules and logic, with GenAI’s probalistic outcomes ‘we don’t know exactly what they’re going to say and do’, Forrester says. That changes how employees must work with technology, requiring them to understand that AI outputs are suggestions, rather than definitive answers and making the need to know when to question the output of AI ‘crucial’.

There’s also the human factor. Many employees still worry AI will replace their jobs, even though Forrester’s forecasts show limited job displacement to date. Poor communication and vague messaging about AI’s role are fuelling anxiety, reducing trust and quietly sabotaging adoption efforts.

Gaps in employee confidence and motivation are also highlighted. Only 37 percent of employees report feeling confident in adapting to AI-driven work and fewer than half are motivated to build AI-related skills.

Ethical readiness is another area of concern with just 44 percent of employees feeling confident using AI responsibly and ethically. Forrester warns these gaps increase organisational risk, particularly as AI is increasingly used in customer-facing, decision-making and regulated environments.

“Employers aren’t giving their people the skills, understanding or ethical grounding they need to succeed with AI,” Gownder says. “Our research shows most organisations are rolling out AI tools without investing in employees’ ability to use them effectively.”

Here’s how to close the AIQ gap

The good news is the research is equally clear on what works. High-performing organisations treat AI literacy as a capability to be built over time, not a one-off training exercise.

“To close the gap, businesses must move beyond surface-level training and build continuous, hands on learning that demystifies AI, addresses employee concerns and develops real capability,” Gownder says. “This isn’t about replacing workers – it’s about enabling them to work smarter with AI.”

Formal learning plays a surprisingly small role in raising AIQ, with linear training quickly forgotten, Forrester says. Organisations making progress are investing in continuous learning models that combine formal instruction with practical, hands-on experience. This allows employees to apply AI skills directly within day-to-day work and build capability over time. “Better is a weekly email with tips, videos and best practices form inside your organisation and ideally inside your division.”

Social learning – with weekly office hours with a subject matter expert – are also key. Approaches such as AI champions programmes, shared experimentation and peer support networks have been shown to be more effective than traditional training alone. These models help reinforce learning and support sustained adoption across teams. Middle managers need to signal with their attendance the behaviour they want to see from direct reports. Online discussion forums offering real-time help and testimonial videos of successes and failures from within your organisation have more legitimacy, Forrester says, than bland, online training.

Third, organisations need to ensure training reaches non-technical employees, who make up the majority of the workforce using generative AI tools. Practical training in areas such as prompt development and use-case application is critical to improving baseline AI capability.

Forrester also highlights the need to address employee concerns and build confidence. Clear communication about how AI will be used, what it will and will not automate, and where human judgement remains essential can reduce anxiety and support adoption.

Finally, the report stresses that ethical, risk and privacy considerations must be integrated into workforce AI education. Employees need guidance on responsible use, particularly as AI systems are embedded into sensitive and regulated workflows.

Forrester’s conclusion is clear: Technology deployment, as is so often the case, is not enough on its own. Without corresponding investment in employee readiness, organisations will struggle to realise the full benefits of workforce AI.

“The organisations that treat AI literacy as a strategic priority, not a box-ticking exercise, will be the ones that unlock meaningful productivity gains and long-term competitive advantage,” Gownder says.

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“We started using machine learning and predictive analytics about seven years ago, so this isn’t new for us” Bain tells iStart. “What people think of as AI now is really just the latest evolution of things we’ve been doing for a long time.”

“These projects aren’t really AI projects – they’re data projects.”

From the outset, Spark discovered that deploying AI – particularly where customer data is involved – raised complex questions that couldn’t be solved by technology alone.

“When you’re building models, it can be hard to explain how they choose. So the starting point for all of this was really strong ethical guidelines around how we use the technology.”

Rather than reacting case by case, Spark invested early in defining what it considered acceptable – and unacceptable – uses of AI. “What that looks like: What do we want to use this for, what data is acceptable, how is the data stored securely, and making sure that if a model does something we can explain why it did it.”

The principles were designed to be enduring, rather than technology-specific.

“The technology changes really quickly,” Bain notes. “But if we start from a foundation of what we believe is right and wrong as a business, and what we would never do – even if it was commercially attractive – then those principles still apply as the technology evolves.”

Over time, those principles were embedded operationally, supported by internal tools Spark developed to help teams assess proposed AI use cases before they’re deployed. “We’ve now got tools that allow our people to see the use case, understand what it’s being used for and the system will flag whether this is permissible.” The tool translates Spark’s ethical principles into practical decision-making, helping teams evaluate how data will be used, whether a human needs to remain in the loop and whether the use case aligns with published governance standards. Embedding these checks early reduces ambiguity and gives teams the confidence to move quickly once a project is cleared, Bain says.

He says this foundational work gave Spark a level of maturity before generative AI entered the mainstream.

“We already had a baseline. Our teams understood the effects, the principles and how they turn into actions.”

A Skinny test

That groundwork was tested with an ambitious project to clone a customer for an advertising campaign for Skinny – Spark’s low cost mobile and broadband brand – in what Bain says was a world-first.

“We’d never cloned a human before,” he says. “That’s a whole new level. Someone’s identity. Their voice. Their mannerisms and physical likeness.”

The technology made it possible to produce creative content faster and at a lower cost – and it feed into the Skinny brand – ‘cheeky and innovative’, using AI based on a real person, rather than a completely synthetic human to keep marketing costs low.

“We could put her in space. We could put her on the moon. We could test creative ideas really quickly and get to a finished product much faster than traditional filming.”

The visible outcome however, understated the work required behind the scenes.

“Above the waterlines is what you see,” Bain says. “Below the waterline was a huge amount of new thinking – particularly around security – because this is actually more sensitive than the personal information we usually hold.”

Skinny treated the AI likeness as requiring a higher standard of protection than typical customer data.

“Before we even captured the data, we had to decide who could access it, how many people, whether it could be downloaded, and where it could live. It could only exist in a very secure environment and could never leave it.”

Legal and privacy teams were involved throughout, running alongside the technical work.

“Some of these things you don’t realise until you hit them, so the practical steps evolved as we went,” Bain says. “Our legal and privacy teams were actively involved, making sure they were always a few steps ahead.

Liz Wright, the customer who was cloned, has remained involved throughout the campaign.

“She was more involved each time. We didn’t just do things and put them out there without her knowing, even where we could have done that legally. We didn’t think that was the responsible way to handle it.”

There are clear limits too, on usage. “We have rights for a defined period, and then we destroy the data. We don’t want to hold it for longer than we need to.”

Guardrails unlock speed

While the governance work was intensive upfront, Spark says it was this effort that now allows teams to move quickly.

“What we found was that we spend more time upfront evaluating the risks and making sure we have those covered. But once the guardrails are in place, teams can move very fast inside them.”

Bain argues that the common perception – that AI governance slows innovation – misunderstands where the real friction lies.

“Building the models is really quick these days,” he says. “The hard part is the guidelines and the ethical approach.”

Once teams understand how AI works and what the boundaries are, Bain says fear drops away. “When people understand the technology and the risks, they’re emotionally comfortable with it, that’s when they can really move.

Bain notes that AI governance must accommodate technologies that change continuously. “These models are doubling in capability every six months. You can’t imagine now what will be possible in two years.”

Rather than constantly rewriting rules, Spark applies the same principles to each new use case as it emerges.

“You need to govern it like a piece of technology that will constantly change,” Bain says. “Have broad principles, then apply the same framework every time.”

That approach, he says, creates clarity internally and avoids paralysis. “It means people are never ambiguous about where the business stands. And it lets them move quickly within those guidelines.

Hard won lessons

When asked which AI capability Bain is most proud of at Spark, he points not to the latest offering, but to its customer intelligence platform that uses hundreds of machine-learning models to understand individual customer preferences and predict what will be most relevant to them. “We now have hundreds of models running against our customer base that say things like: Heather loves music, she’s not price-sensitive, she prefers iPhones, she’s an early adopter,” Bain says. That insight is used across channels – emails, texts, retail stores and call centres – to personalise interactions in real time. “What we found was that we massively improved engagement with those communications.”

Adding that same intelligence helps frontline staff make more relevant recommendations when customers get in touch. “That’s a pretty cool thing – and it’s still pretty unique in the market today.”

Another internal AI tool is a system allowing staff to query financial and performance data using plain language, rather than writing manual SQL queries. Traditionally, Bain says, answering questions about revenue, sales or margins meant a slow loop between analysts, spreadsheets and follow-up requests. “We built an AI that could understand text, turn it into an SQL query, query the database and then create a multimodal report with graphs, tables and written insights.”

What once took days now happens in seconds or minutes, dramatically speeding up decision-making and allowing finance teams to focus on higher-value analysis rather than producing reports.

So what are Bain’s three key tips for companies finding their way with AI and data?

Get your data in order first Bain says data quality is the single biggest constraint on successful AI use. “These projects aren’t really AI projects – they’re data projects,” he says, adding that ‘the underlying data is 90 percent of the work’. Where data definitions are inconsistent or ambiguous, models become confused and unreliable. By contrast, when data is clear, structured and robust, Bain says AI solutions can be deployed very quickly and deliver real value.

Start now — the learning curve is unavoidable

Bain warns that delaying adoption doesn’t reduce complexity, it just postpones learning. “If you don’t get started now, there’s a learning curve – and that learning curve will be the same no matter when you start,” Bain says. He recommends beginning with low‑risk use cases so organisations can build confidence, understanding and capability before scaling more complex applications.

The technology is no longer the barrier — mindset is What used to be expensive and exclusive is now widely accessible. “What used to only be possible for a Spark is now available to small businesses – we’re using the same technologies,” Bain says. The real work is educating teams, demystifying how AI works, and putting appropriate guardrails in place. “By understanding it, you can mitigate the risks,” Spark says, adding that responsibility and confidence – not fear – are what allow businesses to move forward productively.

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New research shows more than half of ASX-listed boards have no directors with STEM expertise – a gap that has barely shifted in 15 years. The research, published in the Journal of Accounting Literature, shows Australian boards are more comfortable reading balance sheets than code, despite years of digital transformation and the rapid arrive of generative AI.

“Firms with greater STEM board expertise are associated with higher levels of innovation investment and firm value.”

The study, STEM Expertise in Australian Boardrooms: Trends and Impact on Firm Outcomes,  examined the backgrounds of directors at the top ASX-listed companies in 2007 and 2022. Over that 15 year period, the share of board seats held by directors with STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) expertise rose from 8.4 percent to just 12.9 percent. More than half of those boards had no STEM-qualified directors at all by 2022.

Meanwhile directors with background in accounting, banking and law filled around 42 percent of board sets, with former CEOs and other c-suite executives accounting for a further 35 percent. Even in sectors with a high level of technical and innovative activities, such as IT, the materials sector and healthcare, STEM directors were outnumbered by directors with financial and executive expertise, with 27 percent of IT and materials boards comprised of STEM directors, and 24 percent of healthcare.

It’s a trend also seen in the Australian Institute of Company Director’s 2025 Board Diversity Index, which showed Australian boards were continuing to appoint a ‘significant proportion’ of people with accounting and financial background – with just 7.7 percent having a tech background.

In short, the boardroom remains dominated by financial and governance specialists – a structure that has proven stable, consistent and not especially technical, or innovative.

Innovation and value benefits

According to the research, co-authored by Natalie Elms and Aeshesha Weerasinghe from Queensland University of Technology and John Nowland from Illinois State University the lack of STEM expertise does have an impact on business both in terms of investment and value and in limiting cyber risk exposure.

“Firms with greater STEM board expertise are associated with higher levels of innovation investment and firm value,” the research article says. “These effects are strongest in firms without STEM CEOs and in industries with lower STEM representation.”

When STEM representation exceeded 26 percent, companies were found to have invested significantly more in innovation than those where STEM expertise was below 25 percent.

The trio argue that appointing directors with STEM background may offer a competitive advantage, and recommends policies and initiatives to expand the supply of STEM directors.

The findings arrive as boards face rising accountability for technology-driven decisions, from AI investments to cyber resilience and data governance. Directors are expected to test management assumptions, evaluate technology risk and sign-off on digital strategy, even if many have never worked directly with the systems being discussed or with modern software systems.

“In Australia, the need for boards to leverage digital technologies and oversee technological risks has become a pressing issue. A national survey of corporate directors shows that 21 percent of organisations have no digital transformation strategy, while 41 percent report that fewer than one-quarter of their board members possess technology skills, and 13 percent have no technology skills.”

At the same time, cybersecurity, cyberattacks, data governance and staff technology capabilities have been identified as among the most critical risks organisations are facing, with directors in the firing line of regulators for failing to prepare and respond to cyberattacks appropriately.

“Directors with expertise in STEM are particularly well positioned to influence technology-driven innovation and, consequently, firm value.”

The study links this skills gap directly to measurable outcomes – ‘a positive and significant relationship’ between the number of STEM directors and corporate innovation investment. “This suggests that, although STEM directors comprise only a small percentage of the total director pool, their influence on innovation is significant.”

While not arguing for replacing accountants with engineers – financial, legal and governance skills remain fundamental for all businesses – the researchers note that without sufficient technical expertise, boards may struggle to interrogate major technology investments, assess risk trade-offs or challenge management assumptions, particularly in fast-moving areas like AI. (The report looked at 2022 director details, pre-dating the AI surge of the last few years.)

“Their cognitive capacities and technical expertise enable STEM directors to identify, assess, and respond to technological opportunities and risks, thereby enhancing their advisory and monitoring roles in relation to innovation and technology strategies.

“This is supported by our results, which show a positive and significant association between STEM director representation and both corporate innovation investment and firm value. Notably, these effects are strongest in firms without STEM CEOs and in industries with lower overall STEM representation, suggesting that STEM directors help fill a critical gap in firms’ innovation strategy and capabilities.

Kiwi mirror

New Zealand boardrooms appear to be grappling with a similar tension. The New Zealand Institute of Directors’ Director Sentiment Survey 2025 shows technology and AI have moved firmly into the governance mainstream, with 38.5 percent of directors identifying AI and digital acceleration as a top strategic issue and more than 60 percent of boards working with management on how technology can lift productivity.

At the same time, confidence in capability is lagging ambition. Fewer than half of New Zealand directors believe their board has the right skills to manage increasing business complexity and risk. The survey also shows easing attention to formal board evaluation and skills review, even as expectations around digital oversight accelerate.

The New Zealand IoD does not prescribe professional backgrounds for directors and the survey does not single out STEM expertise. However, a 2019 survey, cited by the New Zealand Institute of Directors, found just three percent of directors surveyed had science or technology expertise and the data highlights a widening gap between what boards recognise they need to govern and how confident they are that current capability matches that task.

The STEM Expertise authors stop short of calling for quotas or wholesale board upheaval. Instead, they argue for expanding the pipeline of board-ready directors with STEM backgrounds and recognising technical expertise as a governance asset, rather than a specialist add on.

For now, the numbers tell a simple story. Technology is shaping company performance faster than board composition is adapting.

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CPA Australia’s latest Small Business Survey of more than 4,100 businesses across APAC, shows both Australia and New Zealand are sitting near the bottom of the region for growth, innovation and technology adoption. It’s the second year New Zealand has ranked last for growth, something Rick Jones, CPA Australia regional head, dubs ‘a worrying trend’.

“Existing technology spend is not translating into profitability.”

In New Zealand just 38 percent of small businesses reported growth in 2025 – up on last year’s 36 percent but still well below the APAC average of 62 percent, and ranking New Zealand last out of the 11 markets surveyed. Just 26 percent said technology investment improved profitability, less than half the regional average and digital adoption remains weak. Australian results paint a similarly weak picture of low digital uptake and poor returns from tech investment.

Jones told iStart the problem is two-fold: Overall digital uptake in both markets remains well below Asia Pacific peers, and where businesses do spend, investment is heavily weighted toward basic IT such as computer equipment, rather than tools that change how the business operates. Online sales, digital payments and use of social media for customer insights, rather than visibility alone, remain underused, even as productivity pressures intensify.

With productivity firmly on the political agenda in both countries this election year, Jones says lifting small business technology should be a central priority.

“Our data consistently shows that businesses which invest effectively in technology grow faster, hire more people and are more likely to innovate. Countries like Singapore have demonstrated what targeted digital support programmes can achieve – there are proven approaches in our region that could work here,” he says.

Low adoption, low returns

The survey data shows that limited digital adoption remains a key issue across both markets, but the effect is most pronounced in New Zealand.

Only 32.4 percent of New Zealand’s small businesses generated more than 10 percent of their revenue from online sales in 2025, less than half the Asia Pacific average and the lowest results across all surveyed markets. Use of digital payment platforms is similarly low with just 35.4 percent receiving more than 10 percent of sales via services such as PayPal, Apple Pay or Google Pay, again ranking last in the region.

Technology use remains basic elsewhere too. Almost 31 percent of Kiwi small businesses don’t use social media for business purposes at all, compared with a regional average of 12 percent.

The pattern is mirrored in Australia, where 44 percent of businesses reported earning more than 10 percent of revenue online, still well below the Asia Pacific. The report notes however, that while New Zealand and Australian small businesses continue to be the least likely to generate online sales, Australia, at least, experienced an improvement year on year in 2025, while New Zealand’s decline continued. In Australia, 68 percent used social media for business, trailing the regional norm of 88 percent.

The gaps matter because the survey shows a strong relationship between digital adoption and performance. Businesses with higher use of online sales channels, digital payments and basic automation are most likely to report growth, hiring and innovation. “Technology continues to play a more critical role for high-growth small businesses than for other businesses,” the report notes.

Maintenance, not momentum

Where small businesses do invest in technology, the type of investment helps explain why returns remain weak locally.

In New Zealand, computer equipment was again the most heavily invested tech category last year – continuing a trend echoed repeatedly in the survey since 2020 – followed by website and accounting software. Australia was similar, favouring accounting software, followed by computer equipment and website.

In comparison, high-growth businesses across the region were most likely to invest in AI followed by cloud computing and CRM software.

CPA says this indicates A/NZ spending is often directed toward replacement or maintenance, rather than productivity-enhancing systems.

The profitability data reinforces that conclusion. Just 25.6 percent of Kiwi small businesses surveyed said tech investment improved their profitability in 2025, compared with a survey average of 56.3 percent. Australia recorded a similar outcome, with only 30 percent of businesses reporting profitability improvements from tech investments.

CPA links this to quality, rather than quantity of investment. Simply purchasing hardware – replacing devices, upgrading networks, maintaining on-premise systems – may keep the lights on, but it rarely changes cost structures, revenue flows or decision-making.

“What the survey shows is that existing technology spend is not translating into profitability,” Jones says. He says where business are investing it’s often without the sequencing or support needed to make the tools deliver operational change.

“The question is, how do we support these business owners in that capability piece, so they are not just investing in technology, but are investing in the right technology? That’s not just about using it right, it’s around making it work for the business so they are seeing returns,” he says.

Cashflow and time pressure points

Across both countries, the operational pressures facing small businesses underline why businesses are cautious – and why digital matters.

In New Zealand, 54 percent of businesses said increasing costs had a major negative impact in 2025, ranking highest among surveyed market. Hiring remains weak with only 7.4 percent increasing employee numbers, and just 14 percent expecting to hire in 2026. Innovation plans are similarly subdued with only 4.9 percent planning to introduce a new product, service or process in the coming year.

Australia’s results show similar stagnation, with CPA Australia business and investment lead Gavan Ord warning that prolonged underperformance among small businesses is feeding into a wider productivity slowdown. “When small businesses underperform year after year, it become a national economic problem, not just a sector issue,” he says.

Against that backdrop, the technologies most closely linked to measurable gains are not experimental. Jones points to practical improvements such as faster invoicing and payments, online ordering and booking systems and digital finance and reporting tools that reduce manual work across payroll, inventory and customer management.

He notes when businesses experience clear time savings and faster payments, confidence in technology investment tends to rise, easing hesitation around further adoption.

The older demographics of Australian and New Zealand businesses also has a role to play in tech adoption. New Zealand has the oldest small business ownership profile in the region, with 68 percent of owners aged 50 or over. Australia shows a similar generational divide, though less pronounced.

“It’s not an age thing in isolation, but what the survey showed is that business owners under 40 certainly reported growth,” Jones says. “They showed a lot more revenue through online sales and their digital and tech uptake is a lot higher. Younger business owners have a higher risk appetite and are more likely to invest in digital capability.”

In the wake of the survey results, Jones says business technology adoption needs to be made an essential priority for New Zealand (and Australia’s) growth and productivity agendas.

“We need to introduce some better sequence digital adoption support programmes,” he says, suggesting we look to Singapore for examples of programmes which have a proven track record in providing comprehensive support for small business.

“The government should consider designing business digital support programmes with more deliberate bundling and sequencing of measures, drawing on approaches used in Singapore,” CPA Australia says. “This would increase programme effectiveness, accelerate the diffusion of productivity enhancing technology and promote more effective use of existing digital capabilities. Over time this would support stronger productivity, greater business dynamism and a more competitive small business sector.”

In Australia the organisation is also calling for government to incentivise tech adoption and the development of stronger digital capability.

CPA is also calling for a coordinated package of measures to lift participation of younger people in small business. In New Zealand, that includes a ‘start-up apprenticeship’ or mentoring programme and improved access to finance and professional advice for younger owners, potentially through a ‘First Business Owners programme’ connecting participants with accredited advisers and possibly including a SME loan guarantee component.

Jones, who dubs the survey a ‘challenging read’ for New Zealand, says it’s not just about government investment, however. He’s calling for other organisations and consultants to step up and provide the mentoring relationships to help small businesses, and for the businesses themselves to more actively share with other small businesses their successes and learnings. CPA Australia itself is working on providing extensive professional development for its own members to help them on the journey – and ensure their small business customers can also move forward.

The post Why A/NZ SMBs are falling behind on tech appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

Kōrero Mai: Voice of the Digital Health Community in Aotearoa New Zealand, a report from HiNZ (Health Informatics New Zealand) based on conversations with more than 200 clinicians, administrators, technologists, industry experts, students, advocates and policy stakeholders, shows respondents acknowledge genuine gains in areas such as electronic referrals, e-prescribing, telehealth and AI, with progress happening ‘but in pockets’. But those gains, respondents warn, are being undermined by fragmentation and cyclical resets that erode confidence among the workforce.

“This is not because the workforce is resistant to change, but because they are tired of change that promises transformation and fails to deliver it.”

The report follows a 2024 Voice of the Workforce special report from HiNZ, which flagged widespread sector concern about the erosion of digital capability across the sector and comes as documents released under the Official Information Act show Health NZ knew last year that cutting data and digital roles would increase risks to patient care and hospital resilience, even as the restructure – which proposed cutting $100 million from the digital services budget and slashing data and digital team from 2000 to 1460 (many of the roles were already vacant) – proceeded.

The poor state of New Zealand’s health IT has been a focus for years, with Health New Zealand grappling with an outdated infrastructure, including an estimated 6,000 applications and 100 digital networks, inherited when district health boards were disbanded, replaced with a centralised system.

Change that fails to deliver

A central finding in the report is that trust in digital transformation itself is weakening. “This is not because the workforce is resistant to change, but because they are tired of change that promises transformation and fails to deliver it.”

Participants pointed to a familiar pattern: Pilots that never move into production or scale, contracts that end before benefits are realised and initiatives framed as discrete projects rather than long-term system capability. Digital change is being repeatedly ‘reset’ with momentum lost each time organisational structures or priorities shift, the report says.

For tech leaders, it highlights a credibility issue. When systems do not endure, confidence drops, making subsequent change more difficult to implement and increasing resistance at the frontline. Each reset, respondents said, reduces confidence that future initiatives will deliver lasting value, and they warned that when systems don’t endure, clinicians and digital teams become less willing to invest time and effort in new tools.

Skills not the constraint

Contrary to long-standing assumptions, Kōrero Mai finds the health workforce does not lack technical ability. Instead, professionals report having the skills needed to engage with modern systems, but lack confidence that those systems will functional reliably and be supported over time.

“The professionals already have the skills required to engage with technology. What is lacking is the confidence that systems will work, that investment will continue and that support will be available.”

Participants in the korero mai (open conversation) reported that training is frequently undermined by system churn, with platforms retired, restructured or under-resourced before benefits can be realised. As a result, digital confidence is being eroded not by lack of competence, but by lack of continuity.

“Participants stressed that digital transformation is not a cost-saving exercise in the short term, but requires sustained investment in people: This involves training, change management and roles dedicated to making systems work in practice,” the report says. It notes reductions in digital service roles have left fewer people available to train, support and optimise systems.

Resilience warnings

Concerns about confidence and continuity are reflected in internal Health NZ documents which the PSA gained under OIA. End user Impact of Digital Change – Consequences was written around March 2025 as Health NZ refined its proposals to slash the IT workforce and flags increased risks to patient care and hospital resilience.

It found risks ‘will almost certainly elevate as technical debt becomes unsustainable and the modernisation/transformation required to meet the future needs of the sector is delayed’.

The report also noted existing weaknesses in system resilience, including limited business continuity planning and ‘minimal’ hot-failover mechanisms, leaving core systems vulnerable.

Those vulnerabilities were highlighted in a series of high-profile IT outages earlier this year. In January a major outage impacted hospitals in the lower North Island with clinicians unable to access patient information, just days after a widespread outage affected the Southern district. Auckland and Northland hospitals were also knocked offline in January, with staff resorting to paper-based systems and whiteboards during the 12-hour outage. They were also affected by an outage in February.

Kōrero Mai also notes the ongoing issue of lack of interoperability across systems, with clinicians navigating ‘dozens’ of systems, multiple log-ins and manual workarounds to deliver routine work. Patients are required to repeat stories and critical information is ‘frequently’ lost between settings.

It calls for acceleration of interoperability and shared records as a national priority, saying incremental progress is no longer sufficient. “Clear milestones, accountability mechanisms and clinical leadership are required to ensure interoperability delivers real value to  frontline care.”

A ‘fundamental shift’ away from experimentation towards sustained, system-level capability is also required. “Digital health can no longer be framed as a series of projects, pilots or technology deployments…

“Interoperability, for example, is not simply a technical problem but a systems trust issue. A ‘single source of truth’ is about more than shared records, it represents shared understanding across organisations, professions and communities.’

Showing what alignment can deliver

Among the success stories, and an example of what is possible when technology aligns with real clinical needs, is the ‘rapid normalisation’ of AI in clinical and administrative settings, the report says. AI scribes, transcription tools and assistants have moved from pilots to business as usual in many environments. Participants reported tangible productivity gains and reduced administrative burden from the tools. For some it is enabling better eye contact with patients, more thoughtful consultations and reduced cognitive load at the end of long shifts.

Interestingly, workforce attitudes towards AI have also shifted, with fear of replacement increasingly replaced by recognition that AI is a tool which if governed well, can strengthen, rather than dimmish, roles.

That issue of governance, however, comes with a warning, with the report cautioning AI’s  future success ‘depends on governance that centres people, culturally responsive design, transparency, accountability and strong human oversight’.

Incremental system unification has also seen genuine progress and received a thumbs up from participants, particularly in regions where consistent platforms are used across departments. The national rollout of electronic referrals and wider adoption of electronic prescribing were also cited as practical wins. “These initiatives demonstrated that when proven solutions are scaled thoughtfully, they can deliver immediate benefits to both clinicians and patients.”

There’s also been a ‘meaningful’ shift in how rural needs are recognised, the report says, with technologies such as satellite connectivity enabling mobile and remote care models that were previously impossible and telehealth now widely accepted as a legitimate and valuable mode of care delivery.

The report concludes that the key challenge for 2026 is not the volume of technology being deployed, but the credibility of digital transformation itself. “The opportunity for 2026 is not simply to implement more technology, but to rebuild trust in digital transformation itself.”

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The report is based on ‘insights’ from more than 4,000 eCommerce founders which Australian company Ecommerce Equation has worked with, and draws a clear line between founders who are seeing commercial impact from AI and those who feel increasingly overwhelmed by it.

“Where that understanding is missing, AI simply creates more activity, complexity and noise.”

The report highlights that AI performs best when companies already understand their business constraints. Those seeing real gains are the ones who know exactly which problem they’re trying to solve.

Or as says Jay Wright, Ecommerce Equation founder, says:  “The founders getting real results aren’t the ones doing the most with AI. They’re the ones who knew their business well enough to know exactly where to point it.”

Founders who skip this step tend to deploy AI broadly, without a clear objective or identifying a bottleneck, resulting in more output but little impact on revenue, margin or time saved, a pattern described as  ‘activity without moving the dial’.

In contrast, those who are seeing results are described as starting with a precise diagnosis: A conversion issue on one product, uncertainty in reordering decisions, a slowdown in creative testing or excessive manual operational work. In these case, AI is applied narrowly to the bottleneck and measured against a defined outcome, such as conversion rate, marketing efficiency, time saved or cash conversion speed. In essence, AI doesn’t fix unclear fundamentals; it amplifies existing systems. Where founders already know what ‘good’ looks like in their business, AI accelerates progress. Where that understanding is missing, it simply creates more activity, complexity and noise.

“The short version is this. AI is delivering real value for a small number of founders who have done the diagnostic work first. For everyone else, it’s generating activity without moving the needle.”

Where AI delivers real value: Revenue and conversion

The strongest, most immediate wins documented in the report occur on the revenue side of eCommerce operations. These include conversion rate optimisation, creative production, advertising performance and customer experience.

Lead-side work of getting products in front of the right people and converting are where most brands find their first meaningful wins, the report says, with successful brands using AI to tighten the connection between product and customer with clearer landing pages, tailored ads and a stronger read on what is resonating and the speed to act on it. “The feedback is fast, the impact is visible and the tools are mature enough to act on.”

For those who are getting it right, the report claims the wins are visible and fast, with conversion rates jumping 24 percent in a week from a single tool built around one specific customer problem.

That 24 percent figure relates to Australian apparel brand The Lullaby Club. It identified that a best-selling product fit differently from the rest of the range, rendering the standard size guide ineffective. A custom AI fit-finder was built in Claude for that single product. When it was tested with the 40,000-strong customer community, it achieved a 97 percent sizing accuracy. Within a week, conversion increased by 24 percent and returns fell. With confidence in that project, Lullaby turned its focus to other initiatives including a velocity trends tracker to show how products were selling and trends, using the same data foundation.

“We’re seeing brands go from sub-three percent to 7-11 percent conversion every day by feeding AI the right context about the customer,” the report says of some of the quick wins achieved.

The report also points to growing, if less headline-grabbing, wins on the operational side. Inventory forecasting, purchase ordering and customer service workflows are emerging as areas where AI is beginning to reduce manual effort and uncertainty.

Companies using AI to draft purchase orders, track sell-through rates and flag shifts in momentum are tightening cash conversion cycles and reducing guesswork.

Australian independent apparel brand Dr Moose is one example. The company identified that growth was being constrained its website. Rather than outsourcing work to an agency, she used Claude tools to redesign site UX, introduce bundles and adjust commercial settings herself. Changes previously scoped as a $15,000 web development project were implemented internally, lifting daily revenue from around $600 to $3,000. To get the most from the tools she used ChatGPT to work out what to ask Claude, avoiding burning tokens on trial and error.

Where AI falls flat

The report is equally direct about common failure modes. The most frequent is confusing activity with impact. Those who deploy AI before identifying a real bottleneck often rebuild systems that already work, or chase issues they don’t have.

But the report also notes there are real risks companies need to understand before they go too far down the rabbit hole. “AI will produce data it doesn’t have, confidently and without

flagging it. It too easily gives everyone asking the same question the same answer. And it will sand off the rough edges that make your brand distinct if you let it.”

Those getting the most out of it are the ones who stay in the loop, sense check the output and never let it make the call they should be making themselves, the report notes.

The report leaves little ambiguity about what separates results from noise: AI delivers value where it is applied with intent, against clearly defined constraints with humans remaining closely involved in the outcomes.

Where it is treated as a general productivity layer or a substitute for decision‑making, it tends to add complexity rather than remove it. The implication for eCommerce founders is practical rather than philosophical: AI works best not as a strategy, but as an execution tool, applied deliberately, measured against specific outcomes, and expanded only once it proves its worth.

The post When eCommerce AI works – and when it doesn’t appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

Australian ASX-listed real estate assets manager Dexus, which was the project developer says it adopted an ‘end-to-end’ digital strategy for the project, including creating a full digital twin pre-construction to enable real-time decision-making, stakeholder engagement and seamless transition into facilities management, with the model now being used to manage the buildings operations.

“The scale of the model and the accuracy behind it are unlike anything we have worked with in New Zealand.”

The twin eliminated design clashes before construction began and held contingency to just five percent – half the industry norm of up to 10 percent.

The digital twin is now operating as a live facilities management system for the building, which opened last week, and Dexus says the technology has helped cut the building’s operational carbon by 80 percent.

Te Rua’s results demonstrate the impact of embedding a fully coordinated digital environment before ground is broken. Dexus says if digital twin technology is introduced from the design stage of large scale projects to identify and address flaws across the infrastructure pipeline to the levels achieved on Te Rua, New Zealand could potentially avoid millions of dollars in construction cost overruns.

The archive, which is one of the most technically demanding buildings constructed in New Zealand, required millimetre-level accuracy to meet strict environmental and seismic performance standards. Designed to remain operational after a one in 1,800-year earthquake, it must maintain temperature and humidity within one degree tolerance for at least 48 hours in a power failure to protect government records and taonga held under UNESCO Memory of the World obligations.

The digital twin created a 3D virtual environment that allowed architects, engineers and contractors to detect and resolve design conflicts before they appeared on site – a common source of costly delays and rework in complex builds. The archive’s model was ‘clash-free’ at tender stage, an accuracy level Dexus says was not previously seen in complex civic construction in New Zealand.

Contractors used on-site stations connected to the live design so they could install services with millimetre accuracy, and augmented reality was deployed for quality assurance during installation, allowing the design team to validate work in real time.

Once the building was operational, Te Rua’s digital twin transitioned into a live facilities management platform. It now monitors more than 20,000 assets, tracking temperature, humidity, energy use and structural movement in real time. The system has already contributed to an 80 percent reduction in operational carbon emissions – equivalent to around 1,330 tones – by optimising environmental systems and enabling proactive fault detection.

Risk-mitigation engines

Phill Stanley, Dexus portfolio manager, says the results have direct implications for hospitals, data centres, water infrastructure and high-density civic buildings that require strict environmental stability and uninterrupted operations.

He believes with the integration of AI, the methodology could be adapted for use in New Zealand’s planned multibillion dollar healthcare infrastructure programme to produce clinically safer environments for patients.

With major projects gearing up in New Zealand’s hospital sector, including a new Dunedin Hospital, the redevelopment of Nelson Hospital, the expansion of Wellington’s Emergency Department and major upgrades to Auckland’s hospital network, Stanley believes digital twins could be a winning formula – effectively a hospital risk-mitigation engine.

“These facilities rely on uninterrupted power, complex mechanical systems and precise climate control and even minor faults can create clinical risk,” he says. “Digital twins could help control costs, reduce construction delays and ensure clinical spaces meet strict operational and environmental requirements from the day they open.”

He says while New Zealand has previously been slower to adopt digital design, the gap now represents a chance to reset industry practice and prevent the design clashes that traditionally surface only once construction is underway.

“You cannot retrofit this level of coordination. You have to make the decision right at the start or you lose the opportunity. Once you commit early, everything else becomes more predictable.”

While no two infrastructure projects are identical, Stanley says achieving the financial results seen on a project of Te Rua’s complexity demonstrates substantial, repeatable savings potential across the broader infrastructure pipeline.

“This… shows what is possible when everything is coordinated from day one. The scale of the model and the accuracy behind it are unlike anything we have worked with in New Zealand. For us, it gave a level of design certainty you just do not get on projects of this complexity.”

Australian adoption

The benefits aren’t confined to Wellington. Australian projects—facing their own pressures from rising costs, labour shortages and a packed infrastructure pipeline—are turning to digital twins for similar reasons. According to Deloitte and Autodesk’s State of Digital Adoption in the Construction Industry 2025 report, digital tools are becoming a central too in how Australian firms manage complexity, reduce delays and improve visibility across major builds. The report highlights that digital twins are now among the key technologies transforming delivery workflows across six Asia Pacific markets, including Australia.

On construction sites, digital twin integration has moved from pilot to practice. Builders are pairing models with photogrammetry, laser scanning and IoT data to maintain continuous, real-time alignment between the physical site and its digital counterpart. Teams then use the live models to rehearse material deliveries, test staging sequences and identify planning errors early, reducing rework risk and improving the likelihood of on-programme completion.

During construction, the models act as coordination hubs. Australian projects using live digital twins report earlier detection of discrepancies, cleaner as-built validation and faster decision cycles thanks to remote walkthroughs that allow certifiers, trades and clients to review issues together. The approach helps cut reactive repair costs by flagging anomalies – such as rising transformer temperatures or spikes in water demand – before they turn into expensive failures.

Beyond immediate project control, digital twins are underpinning longer-term asset management.

In Australia’s bridge network, the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Spatial Data Infrastructures and Land Administration (CSDILA) is developing a digital twin platform for structural health monitoring. The system integrates real-time IoT data, geometric models and physics-based simulations to track structural behaviour across critical sites, including heritage rail bridges owned by the Australian Rail Track Corporation. These models support predictive maintenance and provide detailed insights into safety and performance, offering a scalable approach for infrastructure networks nationwide.

Meanwhile, digital twin project management is gaining popularity across Australia’s expanding infrastructure portfolio. Major initiatives, from Snowy Hydro 2.0 to Western Sydney International (Nancy-Bird Walton) Airport, are turning to digital twins for real-time monitoring, lifecycle analysis and predictive forecasting. As project owners balance the pressures of complexity, cost and stakeholder expectations, digital twins offer the transparency and control needed to mitigate delays and keep delivery aligned with programme targets.

For both countries, the implications are substantial. In New Zealand, where a $275 billion infrastructure pipeline is underway, the potential savings from avoiding design clashes and optimising performance could be measured in the hundreds of millions. Te Rua may be the most prominent example to date, but its methods – early coordination, real-time validation and data-driven asset management – are directly applicable to hospitals, civic facilities, water assets and data centres.

While the technology won’t prevent every challenge, it does offer something the construction industry rarely enjoys: Predictability. By exposing issues long before they hit the site – and flagging operational risks before they trigger failures – digital twins give builders and asset owners the chance to act early instead of react late.

The post Te Rua digital twin resets construction expectations appeared first on iStart keeping business informed on technology.

The long-awaited strategy and accompanying Cyber Security Action Plan 2026-2030, released earlier this month, signal that cyber resilience must now be treated as a core governance, risk-management and strategic decision-making responsibility. It also flags that regulatory change is likely on its way.

“The Strategy clearly signals that regulatory reform is being considered.”

Alongside the Strategy and the Action Plan, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet also released a discussion document seeking industry feedback on a new approach to the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure.

In it together

The Strategy adopts a whole of society model, outlining shared responsibility on government, industry and individuals. Businesses sit at the centre, with the Strategy’s four national objectives – Understand, Prevent and Prepare, Respond, and Partner, defining practical expectations.

Understand is around improving cyber awareness and literacy across organisations and New Zealanders, providing improved reporting of cybersecurity and sharing of information between government and industry to better understand the threat environment. NCSC will establish a single cyber security reporting service, with processes established for other types of online harm and cyber-enabled crime and redirected to other agencies. Critical infrastructure providers garner special mention, with the strategy noting there will be tailored guidance, including assessments, strategies for risk management and guidance to implement technical controls to protect IT and OT networks, for them (more on that later).

Prevent and Prepare is about strengthening cyber risk management, resilience and preparedness across government and industry. That includes strengthening the existing mandate for the Government Chief Digital Officer to entrench a culture of security from procurement to systems operations, with the Government Chief Information Security Officer establishing and enforcing minimum cybersecurity standards and working with digital supply chain vendors to apply more consistent security controls across agencies. Industry and public consultation on core elements of the regulatory framework is also proposed, including additional non-regulatory actions the government can take to better partner and support critical infrastructure owners and operators to manage cyber risk.

The Respond section says resilience and preparedness must be strengthened across government and industry, ensuring effective, coordinated responses to cyber incidents. Victims of cybersecurity incidents will be ‘supported to remediate and recover’. Legislative frameworks will be modernised to account for the complexity and global nature of cyber threats, with work to address jurisdictional barriers to Kiwi enforcement agencies can access cyber evidence to investigate cybercrime.

Partner highlights the need for ‘strategic and targeted cooperation’, both locally and internationally, with industry and international partners.

The Action Plan, meanwhile, provides the actions required over the next two years to put the Strategy into action, detailing lead agencies for each action.

Notably, the Critical Infrastructure discussion document highlights that if accepted, critical infrastructure entities would be required to develop, implement and maintain a risk management programme aligned with an internationally recognised cybersecurity framework – either endorsed by the NCSC or recognised internationally, such as the US National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework.

The discussion document also outlines requirements to allow government to collect specific information, such as (initially) a description of their operations including critical components, information on the owners and controllers of the entity, and mapping of key dependencies and interdependencies.

The establishment of a voluntary information exchanges connecting organisations across the critical infrastructure system with each other and the government to coordinate cyber security efforts, a requirement for sharing of certain information with other critical infrastructure organisations – for example information on projected restoration times – and a requirement for cyber incidents to be reported are also proposed.

Regulatory change

The Strategy clearly signals that regulatory reform is being considered across several areas including strengthened requirements for the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure, which encompasses everything from the electricity grid to telco networks, health and transport services and financial systems.

The Strategy document notes that around 120 countries have some form of critical infrastructure regulation. “As a first step, the government will consult industry and the public on the core elements of a regulatory framework, including additional non-regulatory actions the government can take to better partner and support critical infrastructure owners and operators to manage cyber risk.”

The critical infrastructure discussion document highlights that cyber risks are ‘not well understood or collectively managed to a consistent level’ across the system, and that effective protection requires understanding ‘critical components, ownership and control structures, and mapping of dependencies’.

The document suggests the reach of proposed obligations could extend beyond the core operator to include third-party service providers with operational control of critical components.

Another potential area for regulatory change is the potential introduction of a civil pecuniary penalty regime to the Privacy Act aimed at incentivising protection of personal information. The Ministry of Justice will provide advice on options to incentivise protection as part of the two-year action plan.

Thomas Anderson, MinterEllison solicitor says if implemented it would mark ‘a notable shift in New Zealand’s privacy landscape’ which currently has no civil penalties for breaches of the Privacy Act.

“At present, the Act relies on a complaints-based enforcement model administered by the Privacy Commissioner, which can result in recommendations or, in serious cases, referral to the Human Rights Review Tribunal. However, there is no power to impose civil fines for contraventions of the Act (such as a failure to comply with the data security requirements in information privacy principle 5), unlike comparable regimes in Australia, the European Union and the United Kingdom,” he says.

Also on the table is the creation of a potential new offence for handling – including disseminating – illegally obtained personal information. That’s an area the Ministry of Justice has been charged with providing potential advice on the new offence.

The proposal would extend liability beyond the breached organisation to anyone knowingly handling unlawfully obtained personal information. While the intention is to deter malicious actors from circulating stolen data, Anderson notes the wording also captures organisations or third-party recipients who are aware that the information they are accessing or using was acquired through unauthorised means.

“Together, these two actions seem to signal a clear intent: The Government plans to use both stronger Privacy Act enforcement tools and new criminal offences to create meaningful financial and legal consequences for the mishandling or exploitation of personal information after a cyber incident.”

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This year’s awards received a record 300 entries, with a line-up that ranges from deep-tech ventures rewiring entire industries to nimble start-ups punching above their weight, from sustainability trailblazers to software innovators, creative technologists, manufacturers and standout individuals.

Nearly 70 companies are vying for glory across 14 categories. So who are they and what exactly do they do? Read on for the full lineup…

PwC Hi-Tech Company of the Year finalists:

Aroa Biosurgery develops advanced regenerative healing technologies designed to support complex wound and soft-tissue repair. The Auckland-headquartered and ASX-listed company, formerly called Mesynthes, was started in 2008 by a former vet, around a low-value byproduct from the meat industry, and is experiencing strong growth.

Auror provides an intelligence platform to help retailers and police reduce crime through real-time insights and connected data. The company has scaled rapidly, becoming a leading player in crime prevention technology for retail. The company has expanded into Australia, North America, the UK and Europe.

Dawn Aerospace is building a space transportation network using non-toxic refuellable satellite propulsion and rapidly reusable spaceplanes. Dawn’s propulsion systems are already operating on 42 satellites and the company’s next step is Loop, an on-orbit refuelling network. The company has 130 staff across New Zealand, the US, the Netherlands and France.

Gallagher Group is a long-established global security and animal management tech company known for innovative, high-reliability systems. Operating in 140 countries, the 85-year-old business reinvests 15 percent of all revenue in research, design and product innovation.

Halter delivers remote-control, GPS-enabled smart collars for cattle, enabling farmers to virtually fence, guide and monitor livestock – and paddock health. It has just completed a US$200m raise, which sees the company valued at US$2 billion – and you can read about that here.

Tait Communications specialises in critical open standard communications systems for industries such as emergency services, utilities and transportation. In business for more than 50 years, Tait provides rugged, high-reliability mobile radio solutions and is increasingly linking that with a range of broadband and video technologies and services. It’s also the sponsor for the Hi-Tech Award’s Flying Kiwi award, recognising an individual who has played a leading role in the success of the sector, with founder Sir Angus Tait the first recipient back in 2003.

ASX Hi-Tech Emerging Company of the Year finalists:

BioOra develops cell-based and regenerative medicine technologies, automating the manufacture of CAR T cells for personalised immunotherapy, and ‘building the future of cancer treatment’. The company has an internationally recognised GMP license to manufacture CAR T cell therapies and is preparing to bring its products to market.

Calocurb produces a natural appetite-management supplement derived from New Zealand hops, targeting healthy lifestyle and wellness markets. The company has New Zealand and US operations and has reported 300 percent growth last year.

Hectre builds orchard-intelligence software and computer vision tools that help fruit growers improve yield, quality and labour efficiency. The company and recently completed a $12m Series A raise and their Spectre AI platform is gaining strong global traction.

Starboard Maritime Intelligence provides an AI-powered maritime intelligence platform that detects, analyses and monitors vessel activity for environmental protection and security. Their technology, which uses satellite, sensor and contextual data to provide real-time visibility of activity at sea, is used by governments and critical infrastructure operators to combat illegal fishing and safeguard oceans.

Starshipit offers an automated shipping and fulfilment platform for ecommerce businesses, integrating with major couriers and storefronts. Its tools help retailers streamline operations, reduce delivery friction and scale their online logistics.

2040 Ventures Hi-Tech Startup Company of the Year finalists:

Goodair Nosebuds is an Auckland startup which has developed a breath-powered nasal device designed to clear congestion naturally. It has raised more than $1.6 million and its first launch in 2025 sold out in less than a day.

Kara Technologies builds digital signing avatars to improve accessibility for deaf communities, using motion capture and AI to deliver sign language content at scale. Their Kat AI engine, currently in public preview, rapidly converts English text into high-quality sign language animations, aiming to make critical information more inclusive across media, education and public sectors.

Sea-flux provides mobile-friendly cloud-based integrated fleet management software for commercial vessels. The maritime compliance software provides real-time vessel monitoring, crew management, preventative maintenance and data driven decision making. The company secured nearly $3 million in seed funding and has more than 1,300 vessels and nearly 9,000 users.

Datacom Hi-Tech Inspiring Individual finalists:

Ankita Dhakar is the founder and CEO of Hamilton’s Capture the Bug a cybersecurity focused company helping organisations strengthen their digital resilience with penetration testing-as a-service.

Dan Walker is senior partner development manager, global partner solutions at Microsoft.

Irina Miller is co-founder and CEO of Daisy Lab a biotech startup developing dairy-identical proteins through precision fermentation.

Tim Young is founder and CEO of Smart Access, a company which has collected data based on 40 accessibility features in the built environment. The information is then provided to councils to see what changes they need to make, providing a form of asset management for decision making and spend.

Trent Fulcher is CEO of Starboard Maritime Intelligence – finalist in the Company of the Year category.

Poutama Trust/GreenMount Capital Hi-Tech Kamupene Māori o te Tau – Māori Company of the Year finalists:

Alps2Ocean Food is creating sustainable, high-protein beef snacks, notably the Mīti beef bar, made from young dairy beef. The company won a 2025 Early-Stage Innovation Award at Fieldays for Mīti.

Bio Innovations

Hectre – a second outing in these awards, with the company also a finalist in the Emerging Company of the Year finalists above.

PAM is an AI-driven personal assistant app to help families stay on top of tasks, calendars and everyday life.

Duncan Cotterill Most Innovative Hi-Tech Software Solution

CloudHound is an advanced infrastructure discovery platform providing deep insights and best-in-class recommendations to accurately plan and maximise AWS cloud success.

PAM – another showing for the AI-driven family personal assistant, which is also a finalist in the Māori Company of the Year category.

Partly is building ‘the first foundational AI model for the auto parts industry’ with AI native applications ranging from Parts Procurement which analyses business rules, availability, pricing and more to automatically build the most efficient parts basket, to order management and estimation.

RossOps helps manufacturers unlock the knowledge living in the heads of their most experienced people and make it available to others on the team so each shift can perform their best. It’s solutions include AI-powered shift handovers and engineering trouble shooting and knowledge management and CI project tracking.

UneeQ Digital Humans develops AI-driven ‘digital humans’ for sectors including tourism, financial services, healthcare, education, and aviation. It’s newly launched Immersive Training Platform provides ‘next generation learning’ enabling organisations to create lifelike, emotionally intelligent training simulations at scale across learning domains including sales, customer service and leadership. The company has strong momentum in the Middle East with customers include Qatar Airways, the Saudi Tourism Authority and Ajman Bank and is now looking at North American expansion.

VXT connects law firms calls to their legal software, logging time, transcribing conversations and filing notes, removing admin work.

Kiwibank Most Innovative Hi-Tech Solution for a More Sustainable Future

AoFrio provides intelligent hardware and a SaaS platform for beverage and food customers. It’s cloud-based platform connects millions of refrigeration assets, providing realtime data and actionable insights on cooler location, operation, sales and sustainability. The company, which counts Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Heineken among its customers, logged revenue of $83.2 million for the financial year ending 31 December 2025.

Captivate Technology is a Massey Ventures spin-out, and has developed a recyclable sponge-like adsorbent material to selectively capture carbon dioxide from industrial emissions. The patented material can be deployed across sectors including cement, steel, natural gas, biomass combustion and biogas. It recently completed a $3 million seed round.

Helical is a SaaS based genetics operating system for genomic data management, registry operations and genetic evaluation. The company, founded in 2021, now operates in more than 40 countries powering breeding systems across beef, dairy, sheep and others.

NZAutoTraps provides automatic, self-resetting possum and rat traps, manufactured in Whakatane. More than 20,000 traps are in use and the company is looking into further automation and data collection – as well as a project to exclude the tenacious kea.

Partly – another showing for the auto parts industry player, which is a finalist in the Most Innovative Hi-Tech Software Solution category, above.

TCS is a Waikato-based micro-processor engineering company whose Milkcollect system was created in 2014 and is now installed in more than 550 milk tankers collecting 84 million litres of milk a day. Its tanker fluid management includes pumping algorithms to maximise collection speed, RFID vial tags to electronically track the load, composite and quality samples to ensure full traceability and cellular data collection to factory scheduling systems.

Braemac Most Innovative Hi-Tech Manufacture finalists:

Alimetry has developed a non-invasive gastric diagnostic tool for diagnosing and managing gastrointestinal disorders. Their products combine wearable sensors with cloud-based analytics to deliver non-invasive insights into gut function. The company recently secured FDA clearance for an AI-powered update to the wearable device.

Architectural Glass Products is a Cambridge double-glazing manufacturing business. The insulated glass units are p;roduced with minimal human contact using precise automated equipment.

Aroa Biosecurity – the company is also a finalist in the Hi-Tech Company of the Year category, above.

Astute Access provides smartphone-centric keyless locking technology for utilities and critical infrastructure complete with a cloud-based audit trail and over the air access enabling remote administrators to instantly grant and revoke user access.

Cleanery develops eco-friendly, low-waste cleaning, dish wash and hand soap products using patented formulations that enable naturally occurring plant and mineral materials to easily mix with water. The concentrated mixes are sold in sachets with customers adding the water, reducing plastic waste and transport emissions.

Fisher & Paykel Technologies designs and manufactures advanced direct drive motors, motor control systems and electronics. Their technology powers home appliances from global brands and are used in a variety of industries to help businesses customise solutions for their customers. They’ve also stepped into health and fitness with drive systems, sensors, digital twin technology, flow builder software and a user interface to help companies design customised solutions for end users.

Consult Recruitment Best Contribution to the NZ Tech Sector finalists:

GridAKL is an Auckland innovation precinct, designed to support tech startups and scale-ups through shared workspaces, community programmes and ecosystem-building initiatives. It’s role focuses on accelerating collaboration, capability and growth within the wider NZ tech sector.

Ministry of Awesome is a Christchurch-headquartered, nationwide entrepreneurship hub providing founders with programmes, mentoring and pathways to investment. They play a central role in nurturing early-stage ventures and strengthening Aotearoa’s startup pipeline.

Mission Ready delivers training and upskilling programmes that help people transition into tech careers more quickly. Their industry aligned courses support workforce development and contribute to filling critical skills gaps in the NZ tech ecosystem.

Oxygen Advisors provides specialist guidance to startups, acting as an ‘outsourced CFO and hands-on finance team’. It has raised $650m in capital and secured $240m in grant funding, backing more than 330 founders over 10 years.

NZTE Most Innovative Hi-Tech Agritech Solution finalists:

BDX is a Whangarei-based company, originally providing engineering services specialising in industrial, mechanical and structural projects. It has since expanded into fabrication and maintenance services and civil contracting and mechanical services.

Bovonic develops agritech designed to support animal health monitoring and disease detection. Its QuadSense automatic mastitis detector has been installed on more than 160 farms across New Zealand and Ireland, saving farmers on average 3.7 hours a week, increasing milk quality and leading to reduced antibiotic use.

Hectre makes its third showing in these awards with the orchard intelligence provider also a finalist for Emerging Company of the Year and Māori Company of the Year.

TCS adds to another category to its lineup, alongside Most Innovative Hi-Tech Solution for a More Sustainable Future, above.

Trackit provides fleet tracking and management, including agricultural fleet management that handles seasonal scaling, off-road operations, mixed vehicle types and the unique complexity of farm logistics. It’s used in more than 150 kiwi farming operations, including with LIC’s 390 vehicle agricultural fleet and claims an average 40 percent increase in off-road RUC refund recovery.

Xero Hi-Tech Young Achiever finalists:

Jean-Luc Ellis is co-founder and CEO at WasteX which is developing AI-powered software to revolutionise waste, material, logistics and embodied carbon tracking to reduce waste, optimise costs and drive decarbonisation.

Lucy Turner is the CTO and co-founder of communication automation company VXT, a finalist in the Most Innovative Hi-Tech Software Solution category.

Nathan Konigkramer is an AIX engineer at Spectrum Consulting.

Sam Broadhead is co-founder of Sence which tries to make sense of unseen conversations to improve engagement strategy.

Fujitsu Most Innovative Deep Tech Solution finalists:

Masco Technologies provides sensory AI integration for hardware companies, offering solutions from data collection and engineering to model development and deployment. Alongside using AI to enable solutions to detect air quality issues and identify contaminants, the company has a focus on animal health and smarter, data-driven livestock care.

Starboard Maritime Intelligence – another appearance for the AI-powered maritime intelligence platform which is also an Emerging Company of the Year finalist, above.

ZealaFoam is creating plant-based technologies to enable businesses and consumers to make smarter, greener choices. Its ZealaFoam is 100 percent bio-based and designed to meet the need for sustainable alternatives to traditional materials.

NZX Most Innovative Hi-Tech Creative Technology Solution finalists:

Access Quest by Smart Access is mapping the world in an effort to make it more accessible. Users book a free access ‘cart’ then walk their usual routes and the cart tracks accessibility features and obstacles using the mobile phone. Data is then uploaded and information is provided to councils to encourage more inclusive access for all. Smart Access founder and CEO Tim Young is also a finalist in the Hi-Tech Inspiring Individual category.

Kara Technologies – the digital signing avatar company is a finalist in the Startup Company of the Year, as above.

Kitten Space Agency by Rocket Werkz is a mission to create a spaceflight game that inspires the next generation of space explorers – and yes, there are kittens. Currently in ‘pre-alpha’, players can sign up and test and share ideas on it. And did we mention that there are kittens?

Staples VR creates AR/VR training through SaaS solutions and bespoke software development across aviation, defence, health and safety, medical, first responders and entertainment. The immersive tech company closed a $5.25m funding round last year.

UneeQ Digital Humans – the AI-driven ‘digital humans’ company is also a Most Innovative Hi-Tech Software Solution finalist.

Christchurch Airport Hi-Tech Solution for the Public Good finalists:

Access Quest by Smart Access – a second outing for the project aiming to make the world more accessible using people power. It’s also a finalist in the Most Innovative Hi-Tech Creative Technology Solution category, above.

Canterbury Seismic provides advanced earthquake monitoring solutions including Sentinel Seismic Monitoring, using on-site sensors and cloud-based analytics to provide reliable insight into how a building is performing during and after an earthquake.

Evolocity is an EV programme aiming to inspire school age students into sustainable engineering. The year 7 to 13 students design, build and compete with their electric vehicles, with workshops provided to guide them in welding, CAD design and Arduino programming.

0800 Trust (Hark) is dubbed the world’s first acoustic wildlife monitor with true edge AI. Hark runs google’s Perch v2 bioacoustic model, directly on device, on solar power, to detect and classify more than 100 species in real time painting a picture of New Zealand’s forest – and the impact of predators.

oVRcome is a platform combining VR exposure therapy, using home technology, and generative AI to improve mental wellbeing. Its goal is to make treatment for anxiety disorders easy and accessible to everyone.

Wildlife.ai is a charitable organisation dedicated to accelerating wildlife conservation through AI, developing user-friendly, non-invasive and open-source technologies. Its projects so far include an AI-powered open-source smart camera trap with embedded machine learning for real time species identification and modular sensors capable of monitoring diverse taxa, and Spyfish Aotearoa, a citizen science and machine learning approach to identify fish in baited underwater videos.

Winners of the awards will be announced at a gala dinner in Auckland in May.

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