As industries and governments grapple with how to safely use artificial intelligence, the tech is already being used effectively here.
It’s contributing in areas like the environment and health, but could also help boost our lagging productivity, according to experts.
Madeline Newman, head of the AI Forum, said while kiwis worked hard, our productivity levels were not flash compared to other countries.
“We're quite bad,” she told 1News.
“They are about twenty percent lower than the UK, about 50 percent lower than Denmark, which is a country of a similar size and with an agricultural economy.”
Artificial Intelligence could be effectively used to increase those productivity levels, allowing businesses to become more efficient, workers more skilled – and therefore can command higher salaries, and ultimately “make New Zealand rock”.
“It will have a societal level impact, it will change everybody's jobs,” she said.
“One of our concerns is that we take this as an opportunity and we have a strategy... and makes us better, faster, and stronger.”
“This is going to happen anyway, so if we don't have a strategy with how we want to use it, it's going to happen to us from the outside rather than us driving it.”
Organisations in New Zealand were already effectively using AI systems or had run trials.
MoleMap, a company that detects skin cancers. has a system where an AI scans hundreds of thousands of photos in a database to detect if a mole is melanoma.
Lara Wild, of MoleMap, said the accuracy was comparable to skin cancer specialists.
“It’s the same as an expert dermatologist in skin cancer - it’s much higher than a general dermatologist or even a GP who might have some knowledge on this,” she told 1News.
Environment Canterbury, the Canterbury Regional Council, had also run successful trials using AI to scan ariel photos for plant pests.
A trial to identify nassella tussock, an invasive grass in Canterbury, was wildly successful.
“At the clock of a few buttons, we can cover a huge amount of land and discover what pests are out there,” Matt Smith, Biosecurity team leader at Environment Canterbury told 1News.
“It’s just going to create huge efficiencies for us. Our surveillance and monitoring programmes, we can ratchet them right up.”
He said the main thing stopping using the tech now more widely wasn’t the AI system, it was getting enough high-quality aerial photographs.
TradeMe, one of New Zealand’s biggest ecommerce businesses, also used AI for things like estimating property prices and to individualising searches.
“I would say the opportunities that arise in five or ten years' time will not be what we expect today,” said Tom Lintern, Trade Me’s Head of Data Sciences.
“Things are just moving so quickly.”
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