But after the roadshow, I had the basics broken down, a better understanding of how AI might impact me as a worker and the regulatory gaps explained in a way that a normal person can understand.<\/p>\n
The crowd appeared to be a range of people – young, older, men and women, from both the private and public sectors. It certainly wasn\u2019t the intimidating, brainy tech fest I had suspected it would be.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/IMG_6989.jpg\")
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The AI Roadshow by AI New Zealand. <\/p>\n
What stood out to me the most was a segment from\u00a0Asa Cox of Arcanum, during his presentation on AI profitability.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He said in his 10 years trying to get organisations to embrace and adopt AI, eight times out of 10 it was not the technology; it was the humans who got in the way, through a lack of planning or some fear, or a lack of organisational design.<\/p>\n
“There needs to be somebody in your organisation that very clearly can articulate, why do you want to do AI? Why do you want to embrace it? Why do you want to use it?<\/p>\n
“Because if you don’t communicate that clearly, I can tell you from the hundreds of companies we’ve worked with, there will be people that go,\u00a0‘I’m just worried about losing my job, because that’s all I know from the press… that means the writing is on the wall – stuff that – I’m going to block it as much as I can’.<\/p>\n
“Or it’s going to be, it’s cheating, the bosses haven’t told me that I’m allowed to use AI, so therefore, if I do use it, and I get caught out, then it’s going to be cheating.”<\/p>\n
Cox said time was needed to get the value from AI.<\/p>\n
“This is a transformational technology. It will unlock value, it will unlock time. This is an investment, a personal development investment, an organisational development investment. For some companies, this is an existential threat or an existential opportunity. Do not take it lightly.”<\/p>\n
Implementing cybersecurity alongside AI<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you\u2019re thinking of AI, and you\u2019re not thinking about cyber security, then you\u2019re not thinking about AI,\u201d Richard Kenyon of Datacom told the audience.<\/p>\n
Kenyon spoke about implementing AI into organisations and encouraged people to think of what “you would like to do that you can’t do today because you don’t have enough capacity and you don’t have enough capital and you have enough time”.<\/p>\n
Ben Schollitt from cybersecurity company Check Point had a presentation titled Your Data Isn’t Leaking, It’s Being Handed Over.<\/p>\n
Schollitt\u00a0showed us three ways AI creates a new attack surface – through employees (\u201cone bad paste can leak your crown jewels\u201d), applications (a single prompt can hijack your Gen AI application) and through agents (can take unsafe actions autonomously).<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether it’s an AI chatbot… or if we start playing around with agents as well, and agentic workloads, we’re going to unlock a lot of value for New Zealand businesses, but what that’s also going to do is increase risk,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThings like data leakage, AI-specific threats like prompt injection and uncontrolled autonomy, so allowing agents to go do things that you said, just go do whatever order you need, and then it ends up doing more than it should have.\u201d<\/p>\n
Schollitt told us while 78% of organisations use AI, almost 70% of enterprises have AI-powered data leaks as a top security concern, but almost half are operating without AI-specific security controls.<\/p>\n