Welcome to AI Forum News!

March has been another busy month with great attendance across various events and initiatives throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. 

Working Groups

This month we established governance for the AI Strategy for Aotearoa Working Group and laid the groundwork for a new Working Group on Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC). We are also expanding our Kāhui Māori Advisory Panel to help broaden our inclusion and share the increased workload.

The AI Governance Working Group is making great progress on extending our aigovernance.nz website content on AI patterns, with the resulting work due to go live in May, (keep an eye out for the launch event coming soon!)

Large Language Models (Gen AI) Working Group’s living white paper is being delivered by a new partnership, with SupaHuman doing the development work and Google providing the tech. The launch date is set for 22 May during TechWeek – registration details coming soon.   

Research: AI’s impact on Productivity

Good data helps us to see where and how Aotearoa New Zealand is using AI, where the opportunities are and where help might be needed. Given the speed of development and the potential for competitive advantage AI adoption is widely expected to result in, measuring the actual impact of AI on productivity is essential.

There is no equivalent data currently being collected in Aotearoa New Zealand and there is strong interest from within Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally. Contact us to be part of the partners helping to fund this, and at a minimum ensure you complete the survey coming your way in early April.

AI in Creative Industries

This month we were very privileged to welcome speakers from BBC (UK), WeCreate, wētā FX, Runway AI, ETC, Soul Machines, 2UPGames, Datacom, and many more to participate in a global conversation centered in Aotearoa New Zealand at our AI in Creative Industries event. Run over two days at wētā’s Post Production, and Datacom’s new Wellington office – and beamed out to Design Schools across Australasia thanks to Datacom and Future Works, EducationNZ and Meta. A big thank you to CreativeHQ for providing logistics on the ground and wonderful facilitation of the discussions. As promised, there’s a blog post and full write up coming in the very near future!

Badger – helping us to connect
 

Having trialled this successfully at our AI in Creative Industries event, we’ll be launching Badger (softly) in April. Badger is intended to help us provide meaningful connection opportunities with our members in a more consistent way. We’ll start with targeted opportunities like speaker requests, and talent opportunities and role seekers. Going forwards we’ll also start to use it as a way for people to communicate about our upcoming events – like posting questions for panel members ahead of time and continuing the discussion or providing feedback after the event. So, if you see a note from us via Badger make sure you register (it’s easy) and add it to your safe sender list.
 

AI for the Environment Hackathon Festival 2024

And finally, our annual NZ-Wide AI for the Environment Hackathon Festival is the perfect safe place to experience working with AI and upskilling while you save the planet! This year, we have confirmed venues at AWS in Wellington, academyEx in Auckland and University of Waikato in Hamilton, with a second venue for Auckland in process along with Tauranga, Napier-Hastings and Christchurch. We are also looking forward to welcoming Fiji back in 2024. If you’d like to host, sponsor, attend or find out more please go to AI Hackathon, and make sure you check out our pre-event survey below so you can have your input to this year’s event! Everyone who completes the survey goes in to win a pre-Hackathon one hour mentoring session with me.