With artificial intelligence set for widespread take-up in 2024, business leaders are eyeing how their organisations can gain data-driven insights, as well as develop their generative AI and digital skills training. Of 200 C-suite, senior managers, IT managers wirking in New Zealand companies employing 100+ staff and surveyed by Curia Market Research in December on behalf of Datacom, the country’s biggest tech company, 33% saw “data-driven insights to support decision-making” as the biggest tech opportunity this year. That was followed by workforce enablement tools (23%) and generative AI and ..read more

German enterprise resource planning software company SAP said this week it was undertaking a major restructure of its business that would affect 8,000 employee positions. It would increasingly build artificial intelligence into its products and platforms this year, but also pursue “AI-driven efficiencies” in-house. As Australian Financial Review technology editor Paul Smith put it: “Simply, SAP figures it can now automate some of the roles performed by thousands of well-paid, white-collar workers.” Think accounting, admin and legal staff, copywriters, marketing and admin roles. Software develo ..read more

Concern about generative artificial intelligence technologies seems to be growing almost as fast as the spread of the technologies themselves. These worries are driven by unease about the possible spread of disinformation at a scale never seen before, and fears of loss of employment, loss of control over creative works and, more futuristically, AI becoming so powerful that it causes extinction of the human species. The concerns have given rise to calls for regulating AI technologies. Some governments, for example the European Union, have responded to their citizens’ push for regulation, while ..read more

For all the focus on generative AI this year, has it really changed your life that much? I’ve been asking a lot of people that question a lot over the past few weeks, and the only responses in the affirmative have come from people working in IT. They include a Kiwi startup founder with big telco clients all over the world, who told me that the use of GenAI tools has dramatically accelerated the company’s product roadmap. A business transformation leader in a cybersecurity company told me that the use of GenAI had allowed her company’s software development team to achieve a 50% saving in the ti ..read more

AI dominated the tech scene in 2023 and is set to cast a long shadow over the industry again in 2024 as businesses move from the experimentation phase to operationalising AI systems. That’s the key theme from the big consultancies and analyst groups, who have in the past few days released their tech predictions for 2024. Here are some of the key trends they suggest we watch out for. Gartner - Gartner is predicting worldwide IT spending to reach US$5.14 trillion in 2024, up from $4.72 trillion this year. This would represent an annual growth rate of nearly 4 percent year over year. - By 2026 ..read more

Google has launched Gemini, a new artificial intelligence (AI) system that can seemingly understand and talk intelligently about almost any kind of prompt – pictures, text, speech, music, computer code and much more. This type of AI system is known as a multimodal model. It’s a step beyond just being able to handle text or images as previous ones have. And it provides a strong hint of where AI may be going next: being able to analyse and respond to real-time information coming from the outside world. Although Gemini’s capabilities might not be quite as advanced as they seemed in a viral video ..read more

It was just a couple of weeks ago that I got around to reading Permanent Record the autobiography of National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. In 2013, Snowden shocked the world when he left his job in Hawaii as a security contractor to the NSA, flew to Hong Kong and started releasing stolen classified documents to media outlets. The tech news over the next couple of years was dominated by revelations of Prism, the secret programme that allowed intelligence agencies to engage in mass surveillance by directly accessing the servers of US internet companies. The whole incident spurre ..read more

Working from home has become a regular part of work-life for Kiwis following the pandemic, with more than half logging on from home to earn a living. That’s according to the 2023 World Internet Protocol (WIP) report released yesterday by AUT’s NZ Work Research Institute (NZWRI), which undertook the New Zealand research. The proportion of respondents able to work remotely before lockdowns was 40%, according to WIP, and this increased by 22 percentage points (over 50%), to 62% during lockdowns. The figure has remained unchanged in the post-lockdown era. “This finding indicates that, at least in ..read more

OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT was unleashed onto an unsuspecting public one year ago on November 30. It quickly became the fastest-growing app ever, in the hands of 100 million users by the end of the second month. Today, it’s available to more than a billion people via Microsoft’s Bing search, Skype and Snapchat – and OpenAI is predicted to collect more than US$1 billion in annual revenue. We’ve never seen a technology roll out so quickly before. It took about a decade or so before most people started using the web. But this time the plumbing was already in place. As a ..read more

You have to hand it to Judith Collins - the veteran politician hasn’t shied away from a large workload in the new coalition government. Collins, as our cartoonist Brendan Boughen so artfully portrays it today, has no less than seven portfolios as a cabinet minister - including Attorney General, Minister of Defence, Minister for the SIS, Minister for the GCSB, Minister for Digitising Government, Minister for Space, and Minister for Science, Innovation & Technology. Phew, that’s a lot of responsibility - the Attorney General and Minister of Defence portfolios alone are enough to keep a cabin ..read more