The Edge team recently attended annual Tech Summit at Te Pae and had a day of immersion in tech talks, business talks, networking – and of course, good food!
We did not all agree on the best and worst speakers, but that makes for lively debate, and we thought we’d share a few of the highlights.
One Key Theme
Unsurprisingly, AI featured in most sessions and streams throughout the day. For many organisations AI use is moving towards ‘business as usual’.
The conversation has clearly moved on from whether to use it, to how we manage the cost, manage the risk, and make it solve real business problems safely.
The challenge is – if everyone is using AI, it's not getting us the same advantages anymore – it's lifting everyone’s capability, but only to the average.
Where AI can help organisations get ahead is when it’s blended with what you already have that is unique to you: your data, your rules and guidelines, and the judgement of your people.
The keynote speaker was Stefania Druga of Sakana AI who highlighted that frontier capability of AI comes from a handful of global providers. It only becomes locally owned and able to bring local value when local people control the layers around the model, including governance, interaction, routing, adaptation, evaluation and data.
Her challenge to the room was that many nations have already set local guidelines and controls around these layers, but New Zealand has nothing at all.
For New Zealand organisations, Māori data sovereignty is a governance question with real obligations attached.
What Surprised Us
Charles Herring, Co-Founder of global cyber security firm WitFoo said the cyber threat of AI is real. He reported 45,234 AI-driven attacks in a single month of his company's data. It was not just the number of attacks that were surprising, but also that he claimed every one of them was ‘ordinary’ and something that any capable human attacker could also have done twenty years ago, and that basic controls protect.
His core advice to organisations is to focus on getting the fundamentals right, rather than chase AI-specific defences.Brooke Martin, Founder of Mindflint took a different approach to the AI conversation, and focused on the human mind and how this creates defensible IP and a point of difference from the average AI.
Arina was blown away by the amount inherited traits influence who we are. It’s up to 70%, and the older we get the more our inherited traits express themselves.
Grant was struck by how many impressive businesses operate out of plain sight – from the scale of Hectre's operations, to the number of businesses operating globally, but still choosing to base themselves in Christchurch
There’s been $780 billion of AI capital expenditure in 2026, about $24,700 per second.
Aha Moments - What we Learned
There were plenty of learnings from the day, here are a few tasters:
Brooke Martin - "average belongs to the robots” - training everyone in AI tooling is necessary, but it will not differentiate you, as everyone has it. The layer you can controllably differentiate is built from assets nobody else holds, including proprietary data, and the accumulated judgement of experienced people.
She talked about the difference between grind and flow. People energise and perform when the fit between brain and workplace is right, and they burn out when it isn't. Part of a leader's job is giving people permission to be high performers.
She also challenged organisations to allow for AI exploration, as well as spending all the time optimising.
Matty Blomfield, CEO of Hectre described how the company went from one deployment every two months to eight a day. Their first fix was growing QA from one person to four, which made no difference. What worked was engineers owning what they ship
Toby Cox, founder of Geodde had some sharp lines on building a business on purpose: prioritise partnerships over competition, design to benefit from increasing intelligence, and if you are a solo operator, design for survivable loss.
Ben Cowen, Founder & CEO, Into the Cryptoverse gave the final keynote – reminding us that a diversification strategy of AI vendors may not actually be diversification at all: if they all follow the same capital cycles and business fundamentals, if one fails, they will all fail.
Arina’s lightbulb moment was well articulated by “we are all figuring it out as we go, some further ahead and some behind, and it is a marathon rather than a sprint.”
Quirks & Funnies
Hnry bought a second domain with the N and R swapped, to save customers the embarrassment of a typo.
Toby Cox also offered "all things being equal, people buy from friends, so make all things equal and make a lot of friends."
Thanks to MC Stacey Morrison, who enabled Arina to get a selfie with the whole audience.
Thanks also to the Te Pae team for the slow-cooked beef and cheese rolls with gravy, which Arina rates a chef's kiss.
If you attended the Summit and had other reflections, we’d love to hear them. If you would like to talk with us about how any of these insights might impact your business – please get in touch.