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Sketchnotes from the May 2026 NZ Tech Rally meetup

Last week NZ Tech Rally had a great pre-conference panel meetup.

My top takeaways:

  • The rise of AI has lead to a rise in old-fashioned automation
  • Ask “How did you arrive at that decision?”
  • The hype is ridiculous, but there are realistic, good, use cases

Below are my sketchnotes.

Sketchnotes from the May 2026 NZ Tech Rally meetup. Text description follows this image.

AI adoption in high trust environments
  • AI in a measured and safe way
  • Cautious with AI and decisions, outcomes
  • Code (GitHub Vopilot) summarisation, internal / back-office productivity
  • All AI ideas go through a Working Group
    • The group contains people from privacy, infosec, legal, and more
  • The (Public Service) Framework is more of an enabler than a constraint
  • The rise of AI has lead to a rise in old-fashioned automation
    • Don’t always need AI!
  • “Do you need this to be deterministic”
  • Train staff to be critical of AI outputs
  • “How did you arrive at that decision?”
  • “What is good enough?”
    • Hard to answer!
  • Testing is hard!
  • Needs SMEs, more business engagement, when using AI
  • Can’t predict the future, but can stick to our principles

Q&A

  • Can customers opt out?
    • Guidance from Privacy and Ethics
  • Managing the risk of the rising AI costs
    • Having a Business Continuity Plan
    • Looking at Small Langauge Models
  • The hype is ridiculous, but there are realistic, good, use cases