October AI Meetup - Building with AI — Speed, Structure & Scale

AI 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&A

What 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 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, 12 October, 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/