Is NZ's Food Sector Missing the AI Boat?

Kia ora! Welcome to New Zealand’s weekly AI news.

The AI landscape is shifting faster than a southerly through Wellington—and I'm keen to hear how you are riding the wave!

Why might that be? To make The AI Corner more valuable.

And that means getting to know you (or reconnecting!) and learning how you’re using AI. I’m especially curious about:

1. What bits of The AI Corner you actually read (be brutally honest)

2. Where you're at in your AI journey (beginner to advanced, all welcome)

3. What you wish someone would just explain properly about AI

In return for 15 minutes of your time, you'll receive tailored AI troubleshooting tips and better content delivered to your inbox each week! I’d be most grateful. 🙏 

Highlights from this week’s edition:
🏉 AI Tackles Rugby
🏠 Kiwi-first AI property tool
💅 AI For Her: Global Women Leaders
🥝 Spotlight: Olivia Dyet & Empathix
💔 It’s Rocky With Microsoft & OpenAI
📊 AI Tip: Turn Reports Into Diagrams

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FOOD SYSTEMS

🌱 MPI Report Reveals NZ's AI Food System Blind Spot

📣 Word On The Street: New MPI study shows Kiwi food producers face critical AI adoption hurdles while international firms race ahead.

🔍 Zooming In:

• International firms interviewed by MPI "don't really think about AI in New Zealand”, viewing us as "conservative" tech adopters with outdated kit.

• Our SMEs face the steepest climb—ageing machinery, patchy rural broadband, and tight budgets create a perfect storm blocking AI adoption.

• The stakes are high: food tech AI is projected to grow 38% annually through 2029, transforming everything from farming to supply chains.

🏘️ Our Take: The stark reality from MPI's report is clear: our global reputation for food stops short at AI. We deliver top quality products but international firms barely consider us for food tech. The numbers tell a sobering story, with competitors banking 5-10% returns on AI investments and the sector growing 38% annually. Our hesitancy puts 80% of NZ's merchandise exports at serious risk. Australia's already implementing a national AI roadmap with university-industry collaboration at its core. Meanwhile, our domestic companies struggle with outdated equipment and limited connectivity, causing the clock to tick on our competitive advantage.

LEATHER & AI

🐄 NZ AI Takes Over Thousand-Year-Old Leather Checking Job

📣 Word On The Street: Auckland-based MindHive Global has partnered with JBS, the world's largest leather processor, to roll out their AI quality assessment technology across all Brazilian facilities after an 18-month pilot to prove their tech.

🔍 Zooming In:

• MindHive's cameras and AI spot leather defects consistently, solving a critical skills shortage as leather graders retire with limited replacements.

• The technology originated 15 years ago counting apples on Kiwi trees before pivoting to deer leather in Timaru and eventually chasing the cowhide market.

• MindHive operates in seven countries including South Africa, Mexico, Germany and Italy – the global capital of high-end leather production.

🏘️ Community Noticeboard: This partnership puts another Kiwi tech firm on the global stage, showing how our AI companies can modernise lucrative traditional industries. While everyone's talking chatbots, MindHive is quietly revolutionising processes in tanneries—showing AI can be impactful in unglamorous sectors. The breakthrough isn't about speed but consistency of output, another angle for AI innovators to consider beyond automation when tackling quality control challenges.

GOVERNMENT AI

💾 NZ Government Gets Smart About Data Plumbing

📣 Word On The Street: Our government is finally treating data assets like critical infrastructure rather than disposable goods, with CDO Paul James leading a shift to evergreen cloud platforms while 120 AI experiments unfold across 40 departments.

🔍 Zooming In:

• The cycle of rebuilding digital systems every 10 years is over, with a “continuous updates” approach replacing the costly "rip and replace" model.

• Recent legislation creates a framework for identity services, enabling accredited providers to connect passport, licence, and citizenship systems.

• Despite ranking highly in digitisation globally, our biggest hurdle remains connecting services for a unified experience.

🏘️ Community Noticeboard: This shift means we'll soon interact with government services that remember who we are and what we need, without starting from scratch each time. The new single customer view approach transforms how both public servants and everyday Kiwis navigate bureaucracy, potentially saving millions.

🥝 Other Kiwi Bites

🤖 Meet Liz, Skinny Mobile’s AI Ambassador. Skinny Mobile has turned customer loyalty into a cost-cutting strategy by AI-cloning their "happiest customer", creating a digital brand spokesperson. The world-first showcases NZ’s position at the leading edge of creative AI applications, while raising important questions about the future of digital identity. 3-min read.

🏠 Kiwi-first AI Property Tool. Opes Partners launched NZ's first AI-powered property investment tool that provides access to all of their expertise and insights at your fingertips. Keep an eye out on LinkedIn this week for my tool test drive! 4-min read. Tool Link.

🏉 AI Tackles Rugby. Sky NZ's new partnership with Stats Perform will revolutionise how we experience rugby, bringing AI-powered insights across All Blacks, Black Ferns, and domestic competitions. Previously seen during the 2023 Rugby World Cup, these advanced analytics predict kick success, track match momentum, and highlight previously invisible player milestones (among much more) – the same data magic Stats Perform already delivers to Cricket, NRL, and Rugby Australia. 2-min read.

🗿 Copy-Paste Culture Hurts Māori. Digital technology has made ripping off indigenous artwork "pretty straightforward" according to IP expert Dr. Taiuru, while proper protections remain stalled after 10+ years. Without the Waitangi Tribunal's Y262 intellectual property recommendations being implemented, Māori artists are forced into costly legal battles using systems never designed for their unique cultural context. 7-min listen.

🦘 From Across the Ditch

🔬 Melbourne Snags AI Lab. Indian conglomerate Firstsource will build a new AI Innovation Lab in Melbourne to focus on responsible AI adoption, creating 400 jobs. See Mike’s perspective.

💰 Smarter Home Loans. East Brisbane-based Refai has launched an AI platform that analyses mortgage reduction strategies, helping Aussie homeowners save six figures in interest payments. The tech automates complex calculations, providing personalised insights for both consumers and financial professionals. 2-min read.

🏥 Medical AI Secures Millions. Heidi (Melbourne startup) secured $26M to expand their medical scribe tech to move beyond basic scribing for 1-million patients into pre-chart summaries, clinical guideline access and patient engagement. NZ's Tamaki Health is already onboard, helping Kiwis slash admin time. 1-min read.

🔦 Kiwi AI in the Spotlight

Lightbulb Moment sparks AI Recruitment Revolution

• A desperate job application to Adidas at age 21 sparked Olivia Dyet starting up what's becoming NZ's most disruptive HR tech startup—Auckland-based company Empathix is rewriting recruitment rules.

• Launched in 2023 after being incubated in Startmate's Launch Club, Empathix processes hundreds of CVs in five minutes flat—work that traditionally takes HR teams 25 hours. The platform uses a combination of keyword analysis, semantic analysis, and gen-AI to create job ads and evaluate candidates while maintaining complete privacy.

• Rather than replacing HR teams, it's freeing them from CV-scanning purgatory to focus on human specialties: connecting with humans. For overwhelmed hiring managers drowning in applications and candidates desperately awaiting responses, Empathix delivers the perfect promise: faster hires, reduced costs, and a genuinely level playing field.

I came across Olivia as she was recently featured in this 4-min read.

🌍 The News from Global

💔 Microsoft And OpenAI Alliance Crumbling, as Microsoft develops in-house models to compete with its $10B OpenAI investment. The tech giant has begun testing alternatives from Meta, xAI, and DeepSeek for its Copilot product, with insider reports suggesting OpenAI's high costs and unwillingness to share technical documentation about its o1 model have strained relations. 2-min read.

🔬 US Cuts Threaten AI Dominance, as Trump slashes billions from research funding despite claiming to "enhance America's global AI dominance”. An NYU professor who developed the tech behind ChatGPT warns these cuts will impact everything from infrastructure to PhD salaries, potentially driving more talent to chase those sweet six-figure tech company paycheques. 3-min read.

🤝 Oxford Uni Partners With OpenAI, signing a five-year partnership that will grant students and researchers access to AI tools. The collaboration will digitise parts of Library collections and accelerate research in health and climate. 2-min read.

⚠️ Tech Elite Warn Against AGI Race, with former Google boss Eric Schmidt dramatically reversing his position on superintelligent AI development in a new policy paper co-authored with two other AI industry leaders. Their rejection of the US government's "Manhattan Project" approach introduces a defensive strategy concept that could fundamentally reshape global AI governance. 3-min read.

🌏 Tech Updates You Should Know

• Anthropic: The parent company of Claude secured $3.5B in funding, valuing the company at $61.5B, to expand compute capacity and international reach.

• OpenAI: To release AI agents at an eye-watering $20K/month. Despite the sticker shock, they're potentially a bargain for replacing PhD-level talent.

• Amazon: Developing "Nova" AI model with hybrid reasoning capabilities, targeting June 2025 launch. Aims to undercut competitors on price.

📅 AI Events in New Zealand

Upcoming Events this week: 18. Four online, 14 in-person (not only in Auckland!).

This week’s featured event:

• Christchurch - Brainy Breakfast - AI Agents, Conversational Search, and Channel Fragmentation, 12 Mar: Insider insights on AI tools, search trends, and channel chaos from New Zealand's marketing maestros. Members $69, Non-members $94.

Access the full events calendar here.

💼  AI Roles Around Aotearoa

Picklist of 🌶️ HOT 🌶️ roles in AI.

• Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Canva, Remote

• Head of Data & AI - Contact Energy, Auckland

• AI & Platform Principal - Qrious Limited

Access the full job board here.

📚️ Levelling Up With AI

👩 AI for Her - by Erin Howard:

It was International Women's Day on the weekend, and we're celebrating the incredible international women leaders on the global AI stage. From healthcare to music, governance to diversity, they're not just participating in the AI revolution—they're driving it.

👉 Have a read here about the women leading from the front.

😇 Beginner Level - "I've heard of ChatGPT":

• Not having AI help you digest your reports wastes precious hours reading long documents and forgetting what you read on page 3.

• Think of AI as your report transformer: it turns piles of pages into visual dashboards in minutes.

• While others are still highlighting page 17, you've already extracted the insights for your work and moved on.

👉 Watch this 30-second demo video showing how a simple prompt transforms your report into an easy to read dashboard.

🤓 Intermediate - "ClaudeAI & ChatGPT are my best friends!”:

Model Context Protocol, despite being launched in November by Anthropic, it’s the tech world's latest buzzword. But what does it actually mean?

• In simple terms: MCP gives AI a universal remote for all digital services like Google Maps, Spotify, and Xero.

• The analogy: Think of MCP as a universal translator at the UN. Before MCP, connecting services required separate interpreters for each language pair—English to Māori, Mandarin to French. Clunky. MCP creates one interpreter who speaks all digital languages fluently.

• What this means for your everyday tech:

  • "Movie night mode" → AI knows to dim Philips Hue lights, queue up Netflix and silence notifications

  • Soon you'll ask your AI to compare power bills, reschedule appointments, and order flowers—all in one conversation.

• Where things stand: Not available yet. Major AI providers are working on standardisation, but we're still in "coming soon" territory.

🤦‍♂️ AI Fail Of The Week

We all love AI, but we all know it’s far from perfect…

Thank you for all of your support! Until next week,

👋 Mike