New Zealand

“Hiii, I am Sophia.” “I won’t take much time. Calling you to talk about our product.” That was how my afternoon was interrupted this week. A warm voice, a friendly name, the standard telemarketer’s opening apology for existing. And one detail that took about fifteen seconds to land: Sophia was not a person. She was an AI voice agent, dialled into my day uninvited, doing her level best to sound like she had woken up that morning, had her flat white, and decided that of all the people in New Zealand, I was the one she most wanted to talk to. ...

Every Saturday, while our sons are busy with their own activities, a friend and I go for a walk. The topic changes each week: sometimes food, sometimes cricket, sometimes geopolitics, sometimes nothing at all. This week it was AI. We quickly agreed on the obvious part: AI concentrates power. Faster than any technology before it. The people who control the models, the compute, and the data will wield influence on a scale that democratic institutions were never designed to balance. ...

In my previous post, What I Learnt Speaking at Global Azure ANZ 2026, I mentioned a short conversation that stayed with me long after the event ended. A university student told me that in 2023 they had been actively discouraged from using AI during study. Minutes later, another student casually described using AI throughout nearly everything they worked on. Those two conversations happened back-to-back. And honestly, they captured something important about the current moment better than most keynote presentations do. ...

उलझे नहीं तो कैसे सुलझोगे, बिगड़े नहीं तो कैसे संभलोगे If you never get tangled, how will you learn to untangle? If things never go wrong, how will you learn to set them right? I was part of three AI trials inside a New Zealand government agency. All three gave us invaluable lessons. Out of those three, one progressed quite a lot, through four stages of development, and has shown genuine promise. ...

Vibe coding is fun. It’s fast. It feels like magic. But unmanaged magic in a production environment? That’s how you get security gaps, compliance headaches, and a quiet email from the risk team asking for a “quick chat”. There’s a better way. For complimentary app development — dashboards, internal tools, workflow helpers, automation layers — managed vibe coding can dramatically increase output without increasing exposure. The trick is simple: structure the chaos. ...

A hammer helps you build. A violin asks you to learn a phrase. AI is closer to the violin. We often hear AI described as a tool, a neutral extension of human intent. Something you pick up, point, and apply. But that language downplays its nature. Tools don’t talk back. Instruments, on the other hand, respond. They shape the way you play, reveal new sounds you didn’t expect, and demand practice to master. If we keep calling AI a tool, we miss the more interesting truth: it’s an instrument. ...

Today I want to talk about Shadow IT. Not Shadow AI — I’ll cover that another day. Shadow IT is those tools and systems folks spin up outside IT’s blessing: sprawling Excel workbooks, legacy Access databases, SaaS apps bought quietly. They’re not always reckless — most of the time they’re born from urgency and ingenuity. I recently heard an anecdote that gives the flavour. A payroll specialist, wrestling with a tedious task, asked if their company could buy Python. They had asked Gemini how to solve the problem, and the model suggested Python. Taken at face value, it is a ’lack of context’ problem but it also reveals a powerful instinct: people will chase any tool that promises a quick fix, even if they don’t quite know what they’re asking for. That impulse — the creative scramble — is the heartbeat of Shadow IT. ...