Right now, there is a growing gap between what AI can do and what New Zealand businesses are using it for. Compared to many advanced economies, we remain largely AI-illiterate.
The good news? New Zealand is small, agile, educated and economically advanced. We can close that gap, but only if we move now, before it becomes too wide to bridge.
The time is right to look to the future and the huge growth opportunities AI offers. New Zealand does not often get clear, near-term economic advantages handed to it. AI presents something rare: a lever we can easily reach.
But our play is not to build the biggest data centres or compete with Silicon Valley on the biggest models. Our opportunity lies in how effectively we use the tools that already exist.
AI capability is now broadly accessible. For the first time, a powerful technology is available to individuals, small businesses, public servants and educators, generally for less than $40 a month or free. Bill Gates, with all his money, quite literally cannot buy more powerful AI than you can through a US$20/month ($33.14) subscription. That democratisation of access changes the equation for countries like ours.
Our real opportunity lies in AI skill and literacy: knowing what these systems can do, where they break down and how to redesign work and companies around them.
That is something New Zealand can move on quickly. But we aren’t.
Several countries already treat AI literacy as national infrastructure. The United States, China, the UAE, Singapore, Finland and Australia have moved decisively to invest in growing their citizens’ AI skills. We need to do the same.
These tools now enable a rethink of how work gets done within any company. The organisations seeing the biggest benefits are not merely bolting AI on to the way they always did things. They are redesigning workflows, roles and processes. They are asking bigger questions about the structure and strategy of their companies and industries – and getting exponentially bigger results as a consequence.
The latest generation of AI models now produce work equivalent to professionals with 14 years of industry experience, across a wide range of tasks. The countries that benefit will be those that prepare their workforces to direct and augment this technology.
Yet the biggest barrier to AI adoption is not the tech itself. It is human resistance to change. Leaders hesitate, organisations wait for certainty and individuals underestimate how quickly the ground is moving beneath them.
AI adoption at an individual level is increasing but, in many cases, those forward-thinking workers are being hamstrung by antiquated workplace processes resistant to change. That is why AI is, at heart, a leadership challenge.
The organisations that win are not those with the best tools (although they have those too), but those whose senior leaders build shared understanding, set clear expectations and give their people permission to rethink how work is done.
For organisations, and the country as a whole, the opportunity is to invest now in broad AI literacy, establish responsible guardrails and redesign processes before competitors do.
New Zealand has a chance to be deliberate and calculated with what will be the biggest shift in work in our lifetime. AI literacy is the most accessible and powerful economic lever we have. Pulling it won’t solve every problem, but it will compound across our economy, lifting productivity, resilience and incomes in a way no other policy choice of our generation can.
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