The Importance of AI for Canterbury Businesses

We recently partnered in a panel discussion on AI for business in Canterbury, with One NZ, BNZ and BDO. It was aimed at being a practical look at how Canterbury businesses could apply AI in their operations and raised some interesting discussion points. We thought it would be useful to summarise some of the key points for the wider Canterbury business community.
 

 1. AI isn’t coming – it’s here

AI has started to have a very real impact on businesses around New Zealand. Larger organisations have had the resources to enable them to get well underway on their AI journey. It was surprising to hear just how extensive the applications were inside organisations such as One NZ and the wider usage AI was being put to in gaining efficiencies.

Generative AI is literally enabling hundreds of man hours to be taken off low-value tasks and be applied to high value, human-centric work that adds exponentially more to the business. The key message: mid-size businesses need to get onboard with using AI across their business so they don’t lag behind larger competitors.

2. AI is different to previous technology change

Utilising AI in an organisation shouldn’t be left to chance. It needs to be proactively led by its business leaders who in turn need to understand the problems they are actually trying to solve in applying AI. It is important you have IT resource to support you to resolve any tech related questions and also ensure that security is in place so using AI doesn’t cause unseen issues in your systems.

There is an important distinction between generic or public AI instances (such as ChatGPT) versus AI instances that are specific to your business, your data, and interact with your primary business goals - AI can do so much more than draft an email.

While there are many legacy technologies that can potentially deliver similar outcomes they can be very costly and time consuming to develop and build. Used well, AI tools can be trained in a fraction of the time to help resolve some core business problems – but it is this ease of use and accessibility that is also raising concerns.  

As there are already a very wide range of applications AI can be put to across the business, it is very likely some of your employees are already using generative AI in your workplace. There is a big difference between them using open platforms to conduct individual experiments versus targeted usage of AI approved and supported by your business.

That is why it is important to ensure this engagement is driven by team leaders and the appropriate policies, training, security, support is in place to manage this. At the end of the day, you need to establish how a tool as powerful as Gen-AI fits into your business and your culture, so that it can serve your people and your goals.

3. Where to start your business’s AI journey

One of the hardest things to understand is just where to start. Thinking about what AI can do is so broad, the art is actually figuring out how AI can specifically work for your business to improve engagement across people, data and systems. In some ways, starting with AI and what it might do can actually hold you back from realizing its full potential.

Instead, consider what it might look like to ask questions about what your business needs, and then put those needs through an AI lens to see what solutions might be found: “If we were to solve this problem using AI – what would it look like?”

Some examples would be, “what would it look like if:

• …I had an unlimited resource available to respond to customer enquiries?”
• …I had a data analyst with unlimited capacity to make sense of all the buckets of data we have?”
• …If I had an EA available to me who could draft documents and prepare me for meetings 24/7?"

The applications and possibilities are going to differ vastly between business types, stages, and industries. Reaching out to your vendors and industry partners to understand how they might be using AI is a good place to start. Once the business problems you are trying to address (and believe you can solve) have been identified it is then a case of looking at which AI options are going to help you solve them.

It might also surprise you as to the AI capability built into solutions your business is already using. At Computer Culture, for example, we are working with Copilot for Microsoft 365 with the view of being able to help manage a wide range of everyday tasks. It has some pretty cool functionality that isn’t generally visible to a user on the standard Microsoft 365 licensing packages.

Finally: Canterbury can lead in AI

But the biggest out take from the discussion was that there is absolutely no reason why Canterbury businesses of all sizes and shapes can’t embrace AI to help improve their business productivity in a positive and proactive way. It isn’t a case of “AI is coming” it is a case of “AI is here” and we all need to understand how to use it to our collective advantage.

If you would like to access our AI Policy template and/or further explore how to start your AI journey, please get in touch.