NZ leaders reveal how to build AI that delivers real value.

Artificial Intelligence’s promise is to fundamentally transform the way we live and work, powering a new era of productivity and growth. The Economist newspaper estimated that 40%of US GDP growth this year can be attributed to AI-related spending, while Cognizant’s New minds, new minds research suggests that consumers who embrace AI could drive up to 55% of spending by 2030.

While the potential is great, the recently released MIT Media Lab State of AI in Business 2025 report found that while upwards of 80% of organisations are adopting generative AI, 95% are not yet seeing measurable business returns. This is partly because it is still early days and organisations are exploring how to integrate AI across their operations.

It was against this backdrop that Cognizant and the New Zealand Herald recently co-hosted the Building the Foundations for AI Success roundtable in Auckland where participants discussed New Zealand’s AI journey in a wide-ranging conversation.

UDC Finance’s Chief Information Officer, David Johnson, said big tech companies are currently investing heavily in AI, experimenting to see what works.

“If you’re an early adopter you’re going to be investing at the bleeding edge right now and you’re going to have to wait until there’s a bit of maturity in the space before you see a return,” Johnson said.

One of the biggest challenges for businesses is knowing whether they should adopt AI and when. AI promises acceleration, but without addressing the underlying processes, organisations risk moving faster towards problems. Cognizant is helping organisations navigate these challenges.

“We’re currently seeing three areas where organisations they’re applying AI,” said Kat Carter, Markets Lead for Cognizant New Zealand and co-host of the event. Customers are using it to optimise workflows, improve efficiency and boost productivity. They’re also using AI to generate new products based on customer experience, feedback and needs.”

“The third area is agentic AI where autonomous agents act like workers. This shift is more complex and requires businesses to rethink their organisation. It needs to be modelled from a people and culture perspective on how it is adapted and which roles might be impacted,” Carter continued. 

Fellow roundtable participant, Chris Bradley, who heads up Enterprise Architecture and Portfolio Management at telco 2Degrees, said the company had been working with AI for some time, firstly, with machine learning and now with generative AI.

To help employees gain a stronger understanding of AI’s role in the company, 2Degrees recently held an AI Month that went beyond the technical aspects, exploring a range of issues including the ethical questions around agentic AI.

“For us, AI is going to be an integral part of our journey as service providers. During the month we explored how we are going to adapt as an organisation and embed an AI-literate culture across the business,” Bradley said.

ANZ Bank’s AI Enablement Lead, Emerald Cagney, said the bank is taking a cautious, more considered approach to AI adoption, ensuring key foundations are in place for safe and secure use. 

“We’re really focused on AI literacy and asking people how they’re using it internally,” Cagney said. “We’re also asking about their concerns, which is valuable because then you can start to unpack what we need to be doing to address those concerns as an organisation.”

AI Futurist and Founder of AcademyEX, Frances Valintine recently convened a 10-week AI program for 200 New Zealand business leaders. As part of the programme participants were asked, on a scale of one to ten, how they felt their organisations were responding to the opportunities presented by AI.

The vast majority rated their organisations a three out of ten, indicating their businesses are aware of AI but no tangible changes or adoption had been deployed.

“I think awareness of AI is incredibly high but adoption is lean,” Valintine said. “Part of the problem is senior leaders still haven’t figured out how to communicate the benefits of AI in language people can easily understand. Put bluntly, it hasn’t really left the world of IT-speak.”

Ana Ivanovic-Tongue from the Executive Council of the AI Forum says better communication on AI’s benefits is the key to driving more buy-in across the nation.

“Educating people and upskilling them on how to use and communicate with AI is vitally important,” Ivanovic-Tongue said.

UDC Finance’s Johnson agreed: “By building AI literacy, your workforce and your management team will have a better understanding of what it actually is and what it isn't or what it can or can't do now, which should lead to better ideas and investment in what an organisation is going to do with AI.”

NZ Post’s Chief Information Officer, Peter Kennedy said whether people like it or not, AI is here.

“It’s going to become absolutely pervasive in products and services that people consume but it will be different for a large corporate as opposed to a small business,” Kennedy said.

The future is about “pervasive AI” – artificial intelligence seamlessly woven into the everyday tools and systems businesses rely on. But pervasive AI isn’t about putting AI everywhere for the sake of it; it’s about integrating AI where it delivers real value.

Across the country, AI is prompting organisations to rethink their approach to technology. It’s become a catalyst for modernisation, driving efforts to reduce technical debt and boost agility. Modern engineering starts with enterprise-wide visibility: value streams, constraints and feedback loops. Without that, ‘more velocity’ can actually lower quality.

“There’s no one-size-fits-all roadmap,” Carter said. “Start by making the invisible visible - measure the flow, find the constraints, automate the feedback. The stronger your engineering foundation, the more value AI will add.”

Security was another key theme. While AI introduces new risks, it also opens the door to a smarter, more adaptive approach to security. Traditional defences often struggle to match the speed and scale of today’s threats but AI changes that dynamic, helping mitigate

threats and maintaining compliance, without slowing innovation. It’s about building trust and accountability. Governance is not optional – organisations need transparency and bias checks to explain decisions, with humans firmly in the loop for critical calls.

AI success won’t come from scattering AI across outdated systems. It begins with strong foundations: engineering practices that balance speed with quality, legacy simplification to shed tech debt, robust data governance, and security frameworks that embed trust.

The message is clear: make AI your mandate to modernisation. Organisations that invest now will unlock AI’s real value: speed, resilience and innovation at scale.