AI in April

AI in New Zealand

Engineering New Zealand upcoming AI webinars and workshops

AI and Automation Workshop In this May webinar, Amir Mohammadi, co-founder and director of Nodey, will show how AI and automation can streamline structural engineering workflows and reduce repetitive administrative work. Using tools such as n8n and Cursor, he will demonstrate practical ways to automate processes, speed up internal tool development, and support more efficient day-to-day delivery.

AI in practice at Transpower New Zealand From Concept to Control Room: Real-World AI Applications Transforming Engineering at Transpower. Join Transpower New Zealand for a practical webinar on how AI is being used to support engineering and operational work.

Exploring the power of generative AI This full-day workshop gives participants hands-on experience with multimodal generative AI across text, image and video. Upcoming sessions are scheduled for Auckland on 26 May and Wellington on 25 June.

AI Forum NZ webinars

Governance, Risk & Compliance with Frith, Paula & Matt - AI Forum Governance, risk and compliance with Frith, Paula and Matt is part six of the Forum’s seven-part series. The session focuses on practical guardrails for organisations moving from pilot projects to day-to-day AI deployment, including legal, ethical and contractual risk.

Other news from New Zealand

Westpac New Zealand launches Microsoft AI in contact centres Westpac says it is the first major company in New Zealand to roll out Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Centre as a Service with built-in AI. The system is designed to surface relevant customer and product information in real time so staff can respond faster and more accurately.

Endeavour Fund projects to receive 2026 extensions MBIE announced 12-month extensions for 64 high-performing projects, including machine-learning tools for monitoring cell-based protein production and an AI-enabled photonic device for chemical-free varroa mite control. It is a useful signal that AI-related science and engineering capability remains a national investment priority.

Pairing geotechnical data with AI helps New Zealand to build better Beca’s BEYON platform now allows engineers to query the New Zealand Geotechnical Database in natural language. The article reports that the database holds about 168,000 shared geotechnical tests, supports more than 4,300 users, and that the AI assistant cuts data retrieval time by an average of 40 percent.

Waikato and Canterbury pitch Outdoor AI for New Zealand’s primary industries The universities are shortlisted for a national AI research platform focused on physical and digital AI systems for complex outdoor environments, with early applications in agriculture, horticulture and aquaculture. The proposal is pitched as a way to lift productivity, sustainability and exports in New Zealand’s primary industries

How AI is helping Fonterra work differently Microsoft highlights AI use cases at Fonterra ranging from automated butter packaging checks and production scheduling to predictive maintenance using real-time IoT data from more than 100 plants. It is a strong example of AI moving beyond pilots and into operational manufacturing environments.

AI and Engineering

HII teams with GrayMatter Robotics to bring physical AI into shipbuilding The partnership is focused on autonomous surface preparation, coating and inspection for crewed and uncrewed naval platforms. It is a useful example of physical AI being applied to difficult, labour-intensive engineering work rather than office workflows alone.

Germany tests AI-powered shape-shifting wings that adapt mid-flight Researchers at the German Aerospace Center have completed early flight tests of AI-controlled morphing wings on an uncrewed aircraft. The aim is to replace conventional flaps and ailerons with adaptive structures that can improve efficiency, controllability and safety.

Fujitsu and Carnegie Mellon University launch joint centre for Physical AI The new research centre will focus on core technologies that improve the capability and scalability of physical AI across sectors including manufacturing, logistics, construction, infrastructure and healthcare. It reflects how quickly robotics and embodied AI are moving into mainstream engineering research.

AI and Governance

Safe and smart AI use for New Zealand businesses. Business.govt.nz has updated its practical guidance on privacy, cyber security, transparency and data sovereignty. The guidance is especially useful on AI agents, warning that tools with access to email, files and business systems can create wider-risk exposure if permissions, logging and human review are not well managed.

AI global

RAM shortage expected to continue AI demand is putting growing pressure on memory supply, especially high-bandwidth memory and premium DRAM. That matters because it affects more than GPUs alone. For engineers and businesses, it could mean higher hardware costs, longer lead times and ongoing procurement pressure across the wider AI infrastructure stack.

Sabi wants thought-powered computing to go mainstream Startup Sabi has emerged with a wearable brain-computer interface designed to turn thought into text and commands. It is still early, but the concept points to a future where AI may not just respond to typing or speech, but interpret intention directly from neural signals.

Allbirds pivots from shoes to AI, and investors pile in In one of the stranger business pivots of the month, footwear brand Allbirds has announced plans to rebrand as NewBird AI and move into GPU-as-a-service and AI cloud infrastructure. The company has secured fresh financing to support the shift, and its share price jumped sharply after the announcement. The move shows how strong AI market momentum remains, even when the operational leap is substantial.

'Killing Satoshi': $70M bitcoin film will make heavy use of AI Director Doug Liman’s upcoming Bitcoin thriller is shaping up as one of the clearest tests yet of AI-led film production. Reports suggest AI-generated locations and virtual production tools are helping cut the budget well below that of a conventional international shoot. With Casey Affleck, Pete Davidson, Gal Gadot and Isla Fisher attached, the project shows how AI is moving beyond visual effects and into the core economics of filmmaking.

AI tools and models

Introducing Claude Opus 4.7 Anthropic says its latest model improves on advanced software engineering, vision and complex multi-step work, with stronger consistency on long-running tasks. It also appears positioned as a serious model for code, research and high-value professional work.

Claude Design Anthropic has launched Claude Design in research preview, allowing users to generate polished visual outputs such as prototypes, slides and one-pagers with Claude. It’ is an interesting sign of how quickly general AI tools are moving into adjacent design and communications work.

GPT-5.5 OpenAI describes GPT-5.5 as its smartest and most intuitive model yet, aimed at coding, research, analysis, document creation and computer use across tools. The emphasis is on carrying more of a messy, multi-part task with less step-by-step prompting from the user.

Codex for (almost) everything OpenAI’s latest Codex update pushes the product further into practical software engineering workflows, including remote development environments, pull request review, browser-based iteration and longer-running technical tasks.

ChatGPT Images 2.0 OpenAI says the new image model improves instruction following, text rendering, multilingual support and detailed visual composition. The thinking mode also adds reasoning and tool use, including web search, before image generation.

Gemma 4 Google has released Gemma 4 under an Apache 2.0 licence, positioning it as its most capable open model family to date for advanced reasoning and agentic workflows. It is notable for giving developers a stronger open-model option that can run on their own hardware.

Robotic roundup

Beijing half-marathon robot A humanoid robot in Beijing completed a 21.1 kilometre half-marathon in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, faster than the current human world record. While the event was still experimental, it was a striking signal of rapid progress in robot locomotion and system reliability.

Humanoid robots step into service roles in Tokyo Tokyo’s first humanoid expo featured robots that cracked jokes, delivered drinks and demonstrated customer-facing interactions. The event highlighted how service robotics is evolving from novelty toward practical hospitality and retail use cases.

Delivery robots help spot hazards for blind pedestrians Coco Robotics is sending real-time sidewalk hazard data from its delivery robots to BlindSquare, a navigation app for blind users. The idea is to turn robot sensing data into spoken alerts about obstacles such as scooters, construction zones and poor curb access, creating a practical accessibility benefit from delivery robot infrastructure.

Interesting reading

Sign of the future GPT-5.5 by Ethan Mollick offers a useful perspective on what the latest model shift may mean for day-to-day knowledge work, especially as systems become more agentic, more capable across tools, and less dependent on tightly structured prompts.

Give it a go

Try a side-by-side engineering test. Ask GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.7 and Gemma 4 the same practical question from your own discipline, such as reviewing a specification, explaining a failure mode, or drafting a short options analysis. Compare not just accuracy, but clarity, assumptions, structure and how much checking the output still needs before it would be safe to use.

If you have tools, case studies or events you would like included in future editions or just want to let us know what you want more of, please get in touch