Before you put AI on top of your business, make your information findable, governed and well described. How a Kiwi financial services firm got the basics right and turned AI into real, everyday wins.

NZ organisations are using AI faster than they’re building the structure around it. First-party 2026 Cairn Compass data, the three adoption traps, and a practical six-step guide to adopting AI in a New Zealand organisation.

The AI Forum's latest Blueprint calls it high-use, low-trust: New Zealanders use AI constantly and believe in it less than almost anyone. I sat down with Sanel Tomlinson, who's spent thirty years getting people to trust things they can't check for themselves, to work out how trust in AI actually gets built.

The tools are not the hard part anymore. The work around them is. Start there, and the "which AI?" question quietly answers itself down the track.

Four numbers in the Blueprint every NZ business owner should read twice:

2.7% of our workforce are AI practitioners with embedded workflows.
97% are using AI superficially or not at all.
79% of employers don't know how to train their team.
90% expect to be using AI by 2028.

📡 The gap between "we use it" and "we use it well" is the whole story.

"People don't really put the truth on the internet. When you really discover the useful insights is when you actually have conversations with the manager who was implementing that strategy or doing that thing. You'll hear all about the challenges that were faced, what really happened behind the scenes, some really exciting wins that they weren't able to put in the report or some big challenges."

At the start of the morning one manager told me he doesn't do AI. Not interested. By midday he'd downloaded ChatGPT and was excited to give it a go. What 100 community services managers taught me about putting people before technology in an AI workshop.

A conversation with Scott Arrol about what it really takes to build trust and collaboration across a complex health ecosystem. Scott's career spans more than two decades across health, disability, community services, and technology. He moved from business ownership into health leadership at Radius Health Group and Kindercare, spent five years running community services at Healthcare of New Zealand, then led NZHIT for nearly seven years where he turned it into the peak body for NZ's digital health sector. From there he was chief executive at Dementia NZ and then MND NZ, before returning to HiNZ as conference programme director and then interim CEO for 12 months. He's now a Life Member of HiNZ and works independently as a freelance executive, director, and advisor, with governance roles across telehealth, disability, and digital health. The thread through all of it is the same: connecting people who don't normally talk to each other and building something that holds. This conversation explores how Scott thinks about ecosystem leadership, the human skills that hold a sector together, and what digital health can teach the rest of us about leading through complexity.

AI adoption in Aotearoa has moved fast. By 2025, over 80% of New Zealand organisations reported using AI in some form. That sounds impressive until you look closer. Among businesses with fewer than 200 employees, nearly half have no plans to adopt AI at all. And of those that have started, many are stuck in pilot mode: a ChatGPT subscription here, a Copilot licence there, but nothing connected to how the business actually runs.