Tech industry offers AI solution to NZ’s productivity problem

Artificial intelligence could totally transform the New Zealand economy, leading to a country where no major sector faces limitations on productivity and growth due to the lack of skilled workers by 2030, a new blueprint for the rollout of the technology suggests.
In its ‘AI Blueprint for Aotearoa’, the AI Forum outlines an ambitious strategy for New Zealand to catch up to the rest of the world on adoption of AI and then become a global leader. The forum, which counts multinational tech giants, local digital firms and government departments among its members, said New Zealand needed “to start NOW and at SPEED” – “in five years it will be too late to start this journey”.
Preexisting advantages for New Zealand include reliable and complete datasets in key sectors, a stable political environment and a high renewable electricity percentage. That can be leveraged to make New Zealand a leader in the AI space, rather than a consumer of AI products and services developed in other countries.
The report identifies six sectors that should be prioritised in adopting AI: agriculture, architecture engineering and construction, creative industries, education, environment and health.
A new authentication marker, called Tiaki AI, could be established over the coming years to protect New Zealand creatives. The mark would distinguish “ethical AI models, grounded in transparency and respect” as being created in New Zealand, “enhancing Aotearoa’s global reputation for creativity and innovation”.
In education, AI could lead to more personalised learning for students and automate burdensome administrative tasks that take up teachers’ time. Significant upskilling for teachers will be needed to get there, the report notes, and new programmes to do so will be developed over the next 12 months.
Patients and healthcare staff, meanwhile, will in five years “expect AI-driven solutions for both functional and clinical treatment, recovery and continued wellbeing”. New tools could help identify those at high risk of conditions like cancer or poor mental health. This would, however, also entail opening up health datasets to private companies and researchers.
Overall, the AI Forum sees the technology as the solution to New Zealand’s productivity problem. It wants New Zealand to advance up the ranks of indices like the Government AI Readiness Index and the Global AI Index. The qualitative goal for 2030 envisions a country that “has no major sector where productivity or growth is limited by the availability of skilled people”.
Victoria University of Wellington senior lecturer in computer science Simon McCallum says that, in many ways, the blueprint report is less ambitious than it could be. A self-described optimist about the value of AI and the pace of its coming adoption, he believes more transformational change could be over the horizon.
“I think they’re underestimating how much education changes. As an educator – I’m teaching first, second and third year at the moment – and I look at all of our first few assignments and the AI can just do all of them,” he says.
“There isn’t anything that I can describe well enough for a first-year student to do that then can’t be done by the AI. So we need to pivot to, rather than teaching people skills that are no longer needed, we need to teach them how to understand what they are asking and what they actually want.”
Alistair Knott, a professor in artificial intelligence at Victoria, takes a different perspective on AI.
“I think we have to be quite open-minded. It’s possible that it is going to come and transform everything and we really have opportunities that we need to make sure we don’t miss. And so it’s useful for there to be that focus,” he says.
“But I think there also has to be this understanding that we’re going into an area where we don’t know how things are going to play out. We’re in the middle of an industrial revolution, or a scientific revolution, and it’s very hard to do policymaking or to set agendas in the middle of a scientific revolution. The best we can do is to keep an open mind and have this conversation.”
That conversation is also important to build social licence for any large changes that are heading our way, Knott says. An Ipsos survey released in June found two in three New Zealanders say AI makes them nervous, well ahead of the global average of 50 percent and second only to Ireland.
“I think it’s useful to reflect on that. That’s not to do with AI infrastructure or readiness, it is simply to deal with public opinion. That’s something that’s worth mentioning that could have been in this report,” Knott says.
That nervousness has many causes, but one is the disruption to white-collar sectors, he says. Looking at education, creative industries and healthcare, “you can see the generative AI in particular coming into some of those white-collar industries and jobs and doing a lot of disruption, creating a lot of churn”.
Generative AI includes models like ChatGPT, which generate original content based on prior consumption of millions of pieces of human-created content. Other forms of AI have more applications to blue-collar industries.
“The more traditional sort of AI, which is just predicting stuff – training a model to predict A from B – whether that’s predicting cancer in images of skin lesions or predicting hospital bed occupancy or something like that. I think that has more relevance to the non-white-collar sectors, like environment and agriculture. We’re not going to see ChatGPT having big effects in those areas, it’s the white-collar industries that ChatGPT is coming for,” Knott says.
Victoria University’s Andrew Lensen, a senior lecturer in artificial intelligence, warned the changes outlined in the report could lead to job losses and data privacy issues.
“There’s going to be a massive change to what employment looks like if it does go down this pathway that they see. There’s also limitations in terms of the amount of energy we have available, the amount of resources we have, the amount of investment we can put into things,” he says.
“Even just the amount of data available and the data privacy concerns and the work that needs to be done to look at, in cases like healthcare, what happens in terms of inequities across different demographics. It would be very easy to bring an off-the-shelf AI system from overseas, plug it into our health system and technically get better results, but you could end up just having more inequity in the system because the models are being trained on Caucasian people.”
While the report is only a high-level outline, Lensen believes its optimistic positioning means it disregards some of the negative impacts of AI.
McCallum, for his part, says the change is coming regardless of whether we want it or not. The key is about positioning New Zealand so that we have some agency in the transition, rather than being reliant on overseas products and firms.
“The change that is coming is much, much greater. It’s not just a GDP bump, it’s a restructuring of the economy. This [report] feels more like a, ‘This is how we adopt a new technology’ and we’ve adopted new technologies before. For me, it undersells the seismic change that is coming over the next five years,” he says.
“There’s a YouTube of me from 2012 saying, in 2025, we’ll pass the Turing Test and we’ll be unable to tell the difference between human and computer-generated text. That was a decade ago and it’s happened about when I thought it would.
“So I’m not that far off in my predictions of this technology.”