“I think there’s a lot of opportunity – I think we’re missing a big trick on AI in New Zealand,” Luxon responded.<\/p>\n
“I think we always used to pride ourselves on being very good adopters of technology, and we are on one level, but if I go around the Business Association, the Chambers of Commerce, and I get people to put their hands up who’s using some of the AI tools, I’m constantly underwhelmed by how little we are adopting them.”<\/p>\n
In recent years AI-first companies like OpenAI and its spinoff-turned-rival Anthropic, plus Silicon Valley veterans like Google and Microsoft, have introduced work-focused versions of their large language model (LLM) technologies.<\/p>\n
For example, OpenAI – which launched the modern rush to use AI tools with ChatGPT in 2022 – has its coding assistant Codex, Anthropic has Cowork, while Microsoft has been embedding its Copilot offering into classic workplace tools like Excel and Word.<\/p>\n
Luxon said the government should lead the way in adopting AI.<\/p>\n
“We’re really stuck in a 1995 way of doing things. Why can’t a 32-year-old mother who needs eyeglasses for the nine-year-old daughter and wants to understand your tax rebates for the, you know, with an 11-year-old and nine-year-old daughters actually be able to just do an inquiry rather [than] have to go to MSD and IRD and all that stuff?<\/p>\n
“When you want to get a mortgage and you’ve got to prove ID and income, why isn’t it just auto-generated like you’d expect in corporates? … It’s not coming, it’s here, it’s been here now for six to nine to 12 months.<\/p>\n
“And so we have to disrupt government and public service with a view of large service organisations that have a customer mentality of serving the New Zealand public and are technology-enabled.”<\/p>\n
He said China’s rapid adoption of AI was also happening in “places like Estonia, the UAE, New South Wales, and Singapore” and it was a huge opportunity to boost productivity New Zealand might be missing out on.<\/p>\n
“To give you a feel for R&D (research and development) in New Zealand, we’re probably 19th per capita in terms of our spend on R&D, but we’re 46th on commercialisation. And I just hate it when I run into people and they go, ‘Oh, New Zealand invented a piece of science.’ You go, ‘That’s lovely, sunshine, but actually who invented the $10 billion business?’ And it’ll be some American or some Australian that gets to do that.”<\/p>\n
Luxon said the goal was to “brutally commercialise our science system”.<\/p>\n
“I want professors to become millionaires because they’re partnering with entrepreneurs and building out businesses … where that interface between universities and entrepreneurship and government is all joined up, like we see in other parts of the world too.”<\/p>\n
![\"Digital](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/4JMY6CE_GettyImages_2225185071_jpg.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Christopher Luxon says he is “constantly underwhelmed” at the slow adoption of artificial intelligence technology by Kiwi businesses.<\/p>\n
Andriy Onufriyenko<\/p>\n
There has been mixed evidence<\/a> to date on whether adopting AI tools – which include other types of AI than just chatbot-style LLMs – boosts productivity, with varying results in different sectors.<\/p>\n While some have reported productivity drains<\/a> caused by ‘workslop’ – sub-standard AI-generated output that others have to spend time fixing, others – such as hospital departments<\/a> – have realised real gains from the technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Christopher Luxon says he is “constantly underwhelmed” at the slow adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technology by Kiwi…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":493870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-493869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=493869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/493870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}