About us
This is a group for people who want to explore, share, and learn about artificial intelligence, Generative AI, AI Agents, and AI Agent management.
We meet every month at EPIC Innovation. We typically feature a couple of speakers, mingle with drinks, and share new tools and insights about AI.
Give feedback on the group, or apply to speak, by filling out this form.
Upcoming events
2
September AI Meetup - Making AI Work: Judgment, Experiments, & ROI
EPIC Innovation Center, 78-100 Manchester St, Christchurch, NZExplore how organisations can combine human judgement with disciplined AI experimentation at September’s Second Monday Meetup.
Pamela Simpson will examine how professionals can preserve expertise, accountability, and sound judgement in an AI-enabled workplace. Dan Randow will then put those questions into practice through an interactive simulation where an organisation’s leadership team must choose between competing AI experiments, consider their alignment with business strategy, and decide what to measure to reduce risk and shorten the time to ROI.Together, the two sessions explore how organisations can make better decisions about what to trust, where to experiment, what to measure, and when to continue, adapt, or stop. Drinks, conversation, and practical ways to think about AI adoption included.
Meet up with your local AI community on the Second Monday of September at EPIC Innovation:
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 — Dan Randow — AI Experiments at Work
7:30–8:00 pm — Drinks & Open Q&AHuman 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 Experiments at Work: Reducing Risk and Time to ROI — Dan Randow
Organisations across New Zealand are investing in AI experiments, sometimes without being entirely clear about why, how those experiments support business strategy, or what evidence would justify further investment.Dan Randow will facilitate an interactive simulation of a leadership team inside a typical New Zealand organisation. A group of participants will consider competing AI investments, debate their alignment with the organisation’s strategy, and choose a small portfolio of experiments to pursue.
The leadership team will also have to decide what each experiment should measure. The rest of the room will watch the decisions take shape in real time as participants weigh value, uncertainty, risk, evidence, and competing priorities.
Key Points:
• Strategic Alignment: Learn how to distinguish interesting AI opportunities from experiments that could create meaningful business value.
• Experiment Portfolio: How leaders can compare competing investments in AI training, automation, agents, knowledge systems, engineering, security, and other emerging capabilities.
• Measure What Matters: How to decide what evidence an experiment needs to produce before committing further time, money, or attention.
• Continue, Adapt, or Stop: How clear measures can reduce risk, shorten the path to ROI, and help organisations avoid disconnected pilots that continue without producing useful evidence.
Who This Is For:
Business owners, leaders, managers, consultants, technologists, and professionals who are deciding where their organisation should invest in AI.
This session will be especially useful for anyone trying to move beyond disconnected pilots, vendor promises, or pressure to “do something with AI,” and towards a coherent programme of strategic experimentation. No technical, financial, or AI expertise is required.When: Monday, 14 September 2026, 5:30–8:00 pm
Where: EPIC Innovation, 100 Manchester Street, Christchurch***
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/91 attendees
October AI Meetup - Building with AI — Speed, Structure & Scale
EPIC Innovation Center, 78-100 Manchester St, Christchurch, NZAI is making it possible for small teams to build software, automate workflows, and create new capabilities at a pace difficult to imagine just a few years ago. However, greater speed creates a new set of questions: What should remain human? What structures sit underneath AI-enabled work? And how do organisations turn successful experiments into reliable business systems?
At October’s Second Monday Meetup, Joshua Campbell will share lessons from building with AI inside a growing Christchurch business, including what AI-assisted development genuinely accelerates, where it falls short, and why privacy, architecture, and responsible design become more important as teams move faster.
Caelan Huntress will then explore how businesses can move from individual AI use and isolated experiments towards operational implementation by documenting workflows, onboarding AI agents, building a Company Brain, and establishing an internal AI Working Group.
Together, the sessions explore how organisations can use AI to move faster without sacrificing judgement, structure, security, or responsibility.Drinks, demos, conversation, and practical lessons from building and implementing AI included.
Meet up with your local AI community on the Second Monday of October at EPIC Innovation:
5:30–6:00 pm — Drinks & Networking
6:00–6:45 pm — Joshua Campbell - What AI Speeds Up and What It Can’t Replace
6:45–7:30 pm — Caelan Huntress - AI Implementation in Business
7:30–8:00 pm — Drinks & Open Q&AWhat AI Speeds Up and What It Can’t Replace — Joshua Campbell
AI is changing what small teams can build, how quickly they can work, and how they make decisions. But faster development does not remove the need for experience, judgement, architecture, privacy, or careful technical design.Joshua Campbell will share practical lessons from Atlas, which began as a small Christchurch video production business. As the company grew, the challenge shifted from producing content to managing and distributing it across websites and multiple social platforms. Drawing on around a decade of software experience, Joshua began building internal tools to solve those problems, with AI accelerating the development process.
Those tools eventually grew into a broader software platform supporting the team. Joshua will use that experience as a case study in what AI-assisted development makes easier, where the limits remain, and what organisations need to consider when software can suddenly be built much faster.
He will also live-demo Orbit, a networking application designed to help people remember who they met and what they discussed at events, using it to explore the practical privacy, consent, and ethical questions created by AI-enabled software.
Key Points:
• AI-Assisted Development: What AI genuinely speeds up across software development, content workflows, and automation, and which parts still require human expertise.
• Small Teams, Bigger Systems: How AI can enable a very small team to build and maintain software capabilities that previously required much larger development resources.
• Speed vs. Responsibility: Why privacy, consent, security, ownership, and technical architecture become more important as the cost and time required to build software falls.
• Learning Through Building: Mistakes, concerns, and lessons from developing AI-enabled products and internal systems in a real business.
• Where Humans Still Matter: Why experience, architecture, judgement, and careful technical design remain critical even when AI can generate large amounts of the code.Who This Is For:
Developers, business owners, founders, product teams, consultants, and professionals interested in what AI-assisted development looks like in practice.
The session will be useful for technical attendees interested in the build process, as well as non-technical leaders considering what becomes possible when small teams can create software, automation, and internal tools much faster.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 implementationWho 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.
***
When: Monday, 12 October, 5:30–8:00 pm
Where: EPIC Innovation, Christchurch
***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/2 attendees
Past events
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