Industrial Research Unit · Straits Institute for Applied AI
Applied AI in New Zealand
The record holds 35 entries from New Zealand, across 11 industries, led by Government & Public Sector, then Legal & Professional Services. Last updated 29 Oct 2026.
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Narrow the 35 entries from New Zealand by what it is, the industry and the job it changes.
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Government & Public Sector
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Evidence of adoptionGovernment & Public SectorNew Zealand22 Sep 2026
New Zealand agencies budget more than $41 million for AI this year
New Zealand government agencies — Government AI spending across public agencies tops $41 million for 2026/27, ministers' written replies to the Green Party reveal. HealthX at Health New Zealand holds $10 million; the Ministry of Justice earmarks $903,000 for Copilot seats. Police, which put $1.25 million into AI during 2025/26, expect similar AI budgets.
Evidence of adoptionGovernment & Public SectorNew Zealand22 Sep 2026
New Zealand extends its small-business AI advisory pilot to 2027
Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment / Regional Business Partner Network — An extra 120 firms get small business AI help after the Government stretched the AI Advisory Pilot to 30 June 2027. Roughly 150 enrolled since January via the Regional Business Partner Network. MBIE meets 50 percent of roadmap and rollout costs, up to $15,000, says Small Business and Manufacturing Minister Cameron Brewer, easing AI uptake among small firms.
Evidence of adoptionGovernment & Public SectorNew Zealand19 Aug 2026
NZ public sector AI use doubles to 545 cases and new training goes live
Government Digital Delivery Agency — New Zealand's Government Digital Delivery Agency (GDDA) 2026 cross-agency AI survey counted 545 public sector AI use cases across 59 organisations, almost twice 2025's 272. Operational state-sector AI projects tripled to 167. On 18 August, the Leadership Development Centre and GDDA opened a free, self-paced AI Development Series for every public servant, teaching AI fundamentals plus safe, responsible use.
DeploymentGovernment & Public SectorNew Zealand25 Jul 2026
New Zealand trials generative AI to write biosecurity import rules
Biosecurity New Zealand / Ministry for Primary Industries — Andrew Hoggard confirmed a four-month trial of generative AI biosecurity import rules drafting, run by Biosecurity New Zealand within the Government. The system drafts import health standards, freeing staff from paperwork while specialists keep final say. Ministers frame this AI-assisted biosecurity regulation as modernisation, not automated judgement.
RegulationGovernment & Public SectorNew Zealand29 May 2026
New Zealand passes law widening automated welfare benefit decisions
New Zealand Parliament — New Zealand's Social Security (Modernisation) Amendment Bill has passed its third reading in Parliament, widening automated decision-making in welfare. Social Development and Employment Minister Louise Upston says automated welfare decisions will cover straightforward cases needing no discretion; the Bill went through under urgency on Budget day.
RegulationGovernment & Public SectorNew Zealand2026-05
Responsible AI in action: guidance for regulators
Ministry for Regulation — New Zealand's Ministry for Regulation now steers regulatory leaders toward safer AI in regulatory functions, via Responsible AI in action: Guidance for Regulators. Version 1.1 adds Māori data sovereignty material, citing Te Kāhui Raraunga on Māori data governance expectations. Aim: confident AI adoption in regulation.
DeploymentGovernment & Public SectorNew Zealand3 Mar 2026
Hutt City Council rolls out 15 custom AI assistants to staff
Hutt City Council — Hutt City Council's AI-Volution programme has put 15 custom-built AI assistants and 300 licences into staff hands, an example of AI in local government. The rollout frees 44,000 working hours a year and saves NZD 900,000 annually, with 26 staff certified as AI navigators. Licence holders complete compulsory e-learning first, aimed at faster, more responsive resident services through generative AI adoption among council staff.
RegulationGovernment & Public SectorNew Zealand8 Jul 2025
New Zealand publishes its first national AI strategy
New Zealand Government — New Zealand's Government unveiled 'Investing with Confidence', its national AI strategy, branding the nation a 'sophisticated adopter' of machine intelligence rather than an architect of foundational models. Existing statutes and a light-touch, principles-based stance replace any push for fresh AI-specific rules. Science and Technology Minister Shane Reti flagged 8 July 2025 as the latest such rollout among OECD members, leaving New Zealand's AI policy framework trailing every peer nation.
RegulationGovernment & Public SectorNew Zealand8 Jul 2025
Responsible Artificial Intelligence Guidance for Businesses
Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) — MBIE's Responsible Artificial Intelligence Guidance for Businesses gives firms a starter kit for AI adoption in business: risk toolkits, checklists, lifecycle controls. Tied to New Zealand's AI strategy, the non-binding framework favours light-touch, principles-based oversight, steering artificial intelligence for companies toward safer, ethical use.
DeploymentGovernment & Public SectorNew Zealand26 Mar 2025
Immigration NZ to automate visa approvals in $336m overhaul
Immigration New Zealand (INZ) — Automated visa approvals are coming to Immigration New Zealand under a $336 million, seven-year overhaul Cabinet approved in March 2025, the Our Future Services project. Algorithms clear straightforward grants; humans still handle refusals. Officials expect the shift to automated visa processing to save at least $80 million yearly once finished.
RegulationGovernment & Public SectorNew Zealand3 Feb 2025
Responsible AI Guidance for the Public Service: GenAI
Government Chief Digital Officer (GCDO) — Under the Responsible AI Guidance for the Public Service: GenAI, New Zealand's Government Chief Digital Officer requires agencies deploying generative AI in government to set up governance boards spanning privacy, security, legal and Māori representation. Human oversight for high-stakes decisions, proportional risk assessments and Māori data sovereignty are compulsory. This replaces interim July 2023 guidance on AI in the public sector.
RegulationGovernment & Public SectorNew Zealand30 Jan 2025
New Zealand launches Public Service AI Framework
Department of Internal Affairs (Government Chief Digital Officer) — New Zealand now has a formal method for rolling out AI safely across government, set by Paul James under the Public Service AI Framework. It covers every kind of AI in public services, part of a wider effort tied to the National AI Strategy. Public sector AI governance gains a fixed reference point.
RegulationGovernment & Public SectorNew Zealand2023-09
Artificial Intelligence and the Information Privacy Principles
Office of the Privacy Commissioner — New Zealand's Privacy Commissioner ties AI regulation in government agencies to the Privacy Act 2020's 13 Information Privacy Principles, covering a system's full life. Leaders sign off, assess privacy impact pre-launch, and keep someone accountable for outcomes. Vendor contracts must bar reuse of uploaded data for training, with Māori consulted on data sovereignty — AI governance for public sector agencies as an ongoing duty, not one step.
DeploymentLegal & Professional ServicesNew Zealand24 Sep 2026
Tika launches AI-assisted sexual-harm reporting in New Zealand
Tika Legal — Tika, from ex-reporter Alison Mau and lawyer Zoë Lawton, has opened publicly, pairing sexual-harm reporting with Tika Legal representation. Solicitors apply AI in legal services, as machine learning plus a large language model surface accounts possibly naming one alleged perpetrator. Staff vet matches before survivors decide, keeping AI-assisted legal support under human control.
DeploymentLegal & Professional ServicesNew Zealand16 Jun 2026
Simpson Grierson rolls out Legora to all its lawyers
Simpson Grierson — Simpson Grierson is extending Legora to every lawyer from June 2026, a legal AI platform chosen after comparing rival products. Sifting large document sets and spotting issues sooner are the aims. Andrew Harkness, managing partner, says the system keeps client material confidential and secure, with senior oversight and professional judgement still at the centre.
RegulationLegal & Professional ServicesNew Zealand25 May 2026
New Zealand Supreme Court warns AI fake citations may be contempt
Supreme Court of New Zealand — Litigants in person who cite fake authorities, unchecked chatbot output included, risk AI contempt proceedings or an obstruction charge, the Supreme Court has cautioned in two rulings. Jones v Family Court at Whangārei first sounded it; Justices Dame Ellen France, Sir Stephen Kós and Forrest Miller echoed it when Liyun Chen's case against Goodmore Investments and Tawa Trade Finance relied on bogus precedent. Contempt carries up to a $25,000 fine or six months' jail; obstruction, seven years.
DeploymentLegal & Professional ServicesNew Zealand5 Mar 2026
Wynn Williams adopts Harvey for its lawyers
Wynn Williams — Wynn Williams has brought in Harvey as generative AI for its lawyers, wrapped in governance and confidentiality controls with people supervising each step. Ash Hill, managing partner, calls the move a deliberate part of long-range innovation and counts the practice among the earliest in New Zealand to take the platform up. Qualified lawyers check every result.
DeploymentLegal & Professional ServicesNew Zealand19 Oct 2025
Dentons New Zealand adopts Legora AI legal platform
Dentons — Drafting, research and document review at Dentons' New Zealand offices now run through Legora, a specialist generative AI platform marking the firm's entry into AI in legal practice. Charles Spillane described it as a foundational move toward broader legal document review software adoption.
DeploymentLegal & Professional ServicesNew Zealand23 Jul 2025
Bell Gully rolls out Harvey AI to all lawyers firm-wide
Bell Gully — Bell Gully now ranks as New Zealand's first major law firm to embed AI legal research firm-wide, having struck a licence for the Harvey platform. Over 200 lawyers gain access for case lookup, storing files and tougher matters, per Andrew Petersen, framing it as a step in generative AI adoption for legal work.
DeploymentHealthcare & Life SciencesNew Zealand15 Aug 2026
Health New Zealand rolls out AI scribe Heidi to 1,000 ED clinicians
Te Whatu Ora (Health NZ) — Health New Zealand (Te Whatu Ora) is rolling out Heidi, an AI medical scribe turning consultations into clinical notes, to about 1,000 emergency-department clinicians nationwide after trials including Hawke's Bay Hospital. Hawke's Bay trial clinicians reported saving about 11 minutes per consultation on average.
DeploymentHealthcare & Life SciencesNew Zealand9 Oct 2025
Health NZ launches AI therapy chatbot Ask Groov for young people
Health New Zealand — Ask Groov, an AI therapy chatbot funded by Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora (Health NZ), gives young people round-the-clock mental health advice. Sir John Kirwan's firm Groov trained its generative AI on guidance from certified psychologists and psychiatrists, skipping raw web data. The aim: pull young people from unregulated AI mental health support toward something screened.
DeploymentHealthcare & Life SciencesNew Zealand22 Aug 2025
Health NZ rolls out AI stroke imaging to up to 30 hospitals
Health New Zealand (Te Whatu Ora) — Nicolab, a Dutch AI firm, is bringing its AI stroke imaging platform StrokeViewer into up to 30 New Zealand hospitals under a Health New Zealand rollout backed by the University of Otago. A Health Research Council-funded trial will check if faster scan reading cuts stroke treatment delays, targeting 850 additional patients reaching reperfusion therapy yearly. It marks a large-scale test of AI-assisted stroke diagnosis, pending confirmed outcomes.
DeploymentHealthcare & Life SciencesNew Zealand27 Feb 2025
Health NZ launches AI diabetes retinal screening pilot in South Auckland
Health New Zealand — Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora is trialling AI diabetes retinal screening in South Auckland, aimed at the Pacific community. Seven general practices deploy trained personnel to capture eye photographs; software flags concerns, while an ophthalmologist verifies outcomes. Roughly 840 people should be seen across three months, with AI-based eye screening for diabetes validated on 3,000-plus patients should the concept prove successful.
Bunnings launches Buddy AI shopping assistant in New Zealand
Bunnings — Bunnings has put Buddy, an AI shopping assistant, on the New Zealand website and app, after the recent Australian launch. The retailer says Buddy makes Bunnings the first in the country to introduce a shopping agent.
Bunnings puts its Buddy AI shopping agent on New Zealand website and app
Bunnings New Zealand — Bunnings has switched on Buddy, an AI shopping agent for its New Zealand website and app, the first local retailer using Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience. Shoppers type queries, send photos or snap scribbled lists; Buddy maps jobs step by step, picks products and draws on Bunnings how-to guides. Manager Melissa Haines expects the DIY helper to complement team members' guidance, following Australia's earlier launch.
Retail store adviser (DIY and home improvement)reseller.co.nz
DeploymentRetail & ConsumerNew Zealand2025-09
Designer Wardrobe launches AI tool to speed up pre-loved fashion listings
Designer Wardrobe — Designer Wardrobe's DW AI List Assist trims listing time by up to 90 per cent for 350,000-plus members of New Zealand's biggest pre-loved fashion marketplace. From snapped pictures, the AI listing tool completes each field within seconds. AI-drafted listings suggest live prices from recent site sales.
House of Travel launches HoT Brain AI platform for travel consultants
House of Travel — House of Travel Group launched HoT Brain, its own AI for travel consultants, bundling map creation, passport scanning, personalised itinerary generation and ChatGPT functionality. The consultant-facing AI runs in a secure Microsoft tenancy linked to Timatic and internal knowledge databases. Live in New Zealand, HoT Brain reaches Australia next month.
DeploymentManufacturing, Energy & ResourcesNew Zealand18 Nov 2025
Four NZ power companies deploy GridAware AI for grid inspections
Tapestry consortium (Northpower, Orion Group, Unison Networks, WEL Networks) — Northpower, Orion Group, Unison Networks and WEL Networks now run GridAware, Tapestry's AI grid inspection platform, spanning New Zealand networks with over 510,000 customers — the nation's first such grouping. Drones and computer vision replace manual surveys, spotting faulty or ageing gear. Within two years the four aim to supply 10,000-plus labelled images, powering automated infrastructure monitoring.
DeploymentManufacturing, Energy & ResourcesNew Zealand14 Aug 2025
Fonterra deploys AI image recognition on all 66 million milk powder bags
Fonterra Co-operative Group — Every one of Fonterra's 66 million annual milk powder bags now passes under AI image recognition milk powder inspection, part of a system covering all 56 packing lines. Designed in-house, this AI visual inspection setup catches damage on the 25kg sacks, pulls faulty ones off the line instantly, and stores a timestamped photo of each for tracking back through production. Separately, New Zealand's dairy giant has been trialling the Plant Equipment Scheduling Programme (ESP), which applies AI-driven optimisation and is now spreading from Edgecumbe toward Clandeboye.
Beef + Lamb NZ launches Bella AI assistant for farmers
Beef + Lamb New Zealand — Beef + Lamb New Zealand's new AI farming assistant, Bella, gives tailored guidance drawn solely from the B+LNZ Knowledge Hub: about 4,600 pages plus 220-plus hours of podcasts and video. Over two months, more than 100 testers, farmers, students and advisors among them, checked its answers before launch. Bella takes spoken questions in several languages, including Te Reo Māori and Filipino, functioning as a multilingual voice-based advisory tool for the sector.
Evidence of adoptionBusiness OperationsNew Zealand19 Aug 2025
87% of New Zealand organisations now using AI, Datacom survey finds
Datacom — AI adoption in business has surged across New Zealand, with Datacom's 2025 State of AI Index putting the share of organisations using some form of AI at 87%, up from 66% in 2024 and 48% in 2023. Among the 200 senior business leaders polled, 88% of those already onboard flagged a measurable positive impact, and a fifth, 20%, logged productivity leaps of at least 25%. Full-scale rollout still lags behind, though: a mere 12% have gone enterprise-wide, and nearly half, 46%, remain stuck testing the waters on this pattern of AI usage among organisations.
DeploymentEducation & TrainingNew Zealand31 Mar 2025
New Windsor School pilots AI programme for literacy and creativity
New Windsor School — New Windsor School in Auckland runs an AI literacy pilot built into daily lessons through the Ako Hiko Cluster. Students compose music with Suno, generate video through Sora, and get instant writing feedback from Brisk, sharpening reading, writing and creative skills. Principal Lisa Harland argues outright bans achieve nothing, so pupils learn instead to judge when AI in schools helps and when it hinders.
DeploymentMedia, Telecom & EntertainmentNew Zealand2 Dec 2025
One NZ deploys Network Concierge AI agent on Amazon Bedrock
One New Zealand — Coverage complaints get resolved 80% faster at One New Zealand via Network Concierge, an AI agent network diagnostics telecom system on Amazon Bedrock. It merges alarm feeds, incident history and performance stats automatically, enabling this AI-powered network troubleshooting. Storms trigger another use: ranking cell towers for backup generators.
Fisher & Paykel deploys AI agents for customer service and field repairs
Fisher & Paykel — Fisher & Paykel's Salesforce AI agent resolves 70 per cent of product troubleshooting queries, versus 30 per cent for previous chatbots, since the New Zealand home appliance maker launched AI customer service in February. An agentic AI support bot briefs technicians with customer profile summaries and suggested parts before home repair visits.
Air New Zealand rolls out Companion AI to 3,500 corporate staff
Air New Zealand — Companion AI, Air New Zealand's enterprise build of ChatGPT delivered through direct work with OpenAI, now reaches every one of its 3,500 corporate staff for daily tasks. That milestone in AI in corporate airline operations follows a year in which employees assembled over 1,500 Custom GPTs for in-house needs, with executives weighing generative AI for airline workflows across self-service for customers, upkeep scheduling and broader operational calls.
Your essential monthly update on Applied AI, with New Zealand specially tracked
We research and keep track of applied AI globally. New Zealand's record gained 2 entries in October. Your next dispatch will open with New Zealand, then the most important news about how AI is being used, applied and regulated globally.
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Method and sources
Every entry on this page is a named organisation putting AI to work in a real job, taken from the State of Applied AI record. Each one is traced to the report it came from and dated, and where a figure is the organisation’s own the entry says so rather than presenting it as an independent result. Readiness, ecosystem and policy figures, where shown, are attributed on the card to the body that published them.
The record is maintained continuously by the Industrial Research Unit of the Straits Institute for Applied AI: entries are added as they are found and verified, not on a schedule, and nothing is published without an open source behind it. It currently holds 4731 entries across 249 countries.
New Zealand22 Sep 2026
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