Christchurch Artificial Intelligence

Explore how AI is transforming Marketing & Comms in August's Second Monday Meetup. Simon Rush and Nic Hendrie from Trimble will be sharing how enterprise marketing teams are accelerating campaign strategy with AI, while Caelan Huntress will be showing how to build a Brand Voice Kit that teaches AI to write in your unique voice. Drinks, demos, and practical takeaways included.

Meet up with your local AI community on the Second Monday of April at EPIC Innovation:

5:30–6:00 pm — Drinks & Networking
6:00–6:45 pm — Simon Rush & Nic Hendrie — Accelerating Marketing Strategy with AI
6:45–7:30 pm — Caelan Huntress — Build an AI Brand Voice Kit: Clone Your Voice with AI
7:30–8:00 pm — Drinks & Open Q&A

Accelerating Marketing Strategy with AI — Simon Rush & Nic Hendrie
This presentation will help you rethink your approach to marketing campaigns. Simon Rush and Nic Hendrie from Trimble will share a case study of how Trimble builds and executes always-on promotional campaigns through a Vertex-AI connected workflow.

This method can translate your campaign briefs into market research, strategy, tactical plans, and other deliverables in minutes, not months. They will also share why Trimble connected this workflow, how it supports non-prompters, and how built-in strategy critique can improve campaign quality without requiring every user to become a prompt engineer.

Key Points:
• How Trimble uses Vertex AI to accelerate marketing strategy
• Turning campaign briefs into research, strategy, and tactical plans
• Designing AI workflows for users without prompt engineering experience
• Adding automated critique, QA, review, and approval into campaign workflows

Who This Is For:

• AI-developers and AI-engineers considering Google AntiGravity, UX for non-prompters
• Marketing and business leaders who want to transform their buying process
• People considering the QA, review and approval process in vibe-coding workflows
• Anyone curious about real-world AI case studies

Build an AI Brand Voice Kit: Clone Your Voice with AI — Caelan Huntress
AI can write quickly. The harder question is whether it can write like you.
In this practical session, Caelan Huntress will show you how to build a Brand Voice Kit: a reusable set of examples, rules, tone markers, vocabulary patterns, and writing preferences that helps AI produce content in your unique voice.
You’ll learn how to capture the way you sound, train AI on your style, and use that system across emails, newsletters, social posts, articles, proposals, and internal communications.
Key Points:
• What a Brand Voice Kit is, and why it matters for marketing and communications
• How to capture tone, rhythm, vocabulary, structure, and personality
• How to train AI to write in a consistent brand voice
• How to use voice cloning prompts across different marketing channels
• How to invoke different voices through skills, CustomGPTs, and subagents
Who This Is For:
Marketers, communications professionals, founders, consultants, creators, business owners, and anyone who wants AI-generated content to sound less generic and more unmistakably human.

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When: Monday, 10 August, 5:30–8:00 pm
Where: EPIC Innovation, Christchurch
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Sponsored by the AI Coaching Academy. Come have some 🍻 beer and wine🍷 and raise a glass with your local AI Community!
https://ai-coaching.academy/

5:30–6:00 pm — Drinks & Networking
6:00–6:45 pm — Pamela Simpson — Human Judgement in an AI World
6:45–7:30 pm — Caelan Huntress — AI Implementation in Business
7:30–8:00 pm — Drinks & Open Q&A

Human Judgement in an AI World — Pamela Simpson
As artificial intelligence transforms how knowledge is created, shared, and applied, organisations need a deeper understanding, an "epistemological literacy" of how we decide what to trust, what counts as expertise, and how we actually "know" things in a hybrid world.

Pamela Simpson, DBA Candidate at the University of Otago, will share initial insights from her research involving 43 subject-matter experts across professional, corporate, and government sectors throughout New Zealand.

Rather than focusing on technical specifications, Pamela will explore the human side of AI adoption: the shifting tensions between human judgement, professional expertise, and machine-generated outputs.

Key Points:
• The Exploration Mindset: Is the most effective AI collaborator: a "generalists" with the imagination to synthesise competing ideas or 'expert' to validate outputs?
• Enhancement vs. Transformation: Is AI just making existing work faster, or is it enabling genuinely new forms of organisational knowing?
• The Expertise Paradox: How to use AI to boost productivity without falling into the trap of "cognitive atrophy" or eroding the professional formation of the next generation.
• Governance as a Knowledge Problem: Why effective AI governance must preserve epistemic integrity, professional standards, accountability, and trust.

Who This Is For:
This presentation is designed for a broad range of professionals who recognise that successfully integrating AI is ultimately a "people change, not a technology change". Join us to discuss how we can navigate this new landscape not just as tool-users, but as a new society of explorers.

AI Implementation in Business — Caelan Huntress
As AI moves from optional to operational, the challenge is teaching AI agents how the business actually works. The workflows, standards, decisions, rules, exceptions, and institutional knowledge need a digital Company Brain.

Caelan Huntress will explore what practical AI implementation looks like inside a business, with a focus on onboarding agents, transferring workflows, and creating internal structures of responsible adoption.

This session will demonstrate how organisations can train agents to participate in repeatable business processes, and gradually take responsibility for clearly defined work.

Key Points:
• Teaching Agents Your Workflows: How to document a process, provide the right context, define success, and train an AI agent to perform useful work without constant supervision
• The Onboarding Interview: Deploying an AI agent is closer to onboarding a new team member than installing a piece of software
• Ship an AI Working Group: How to assemble an internal group that can identify high-value use cases, test workflows, establish standards, and share lessons across the organisation
• Assessing AI Readiness: How to evaluate your organisation’s workflows, knowledge, capabilities, and culture before investing heavily in implementation

Who This Is For:
Business owners, leaders, consultants, operations teams, and professionals who are ready to move beyond isolated AI experiments and begin building repeatable systems.

Attendees will leave with practical frameworks for onboarding AI agents, handing off workflows, and launching an internal AI Working Group.

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When: Monday, 14 September 2026, 5:30–8:00 pm
Where: EPIC Innovation, 100 Manchester Street, Christchurch

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Sponsored by the AI Coaching Academy. Come have some beer and wine, and raise a glass with your local AI community.
https://ai-coaching.academy/