The Business of Tech

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The Business of Tech, hosted by leading tech journalist Peter Griffin. Every week they take a deep dive into emerging technology and news from the sector to help guide the important decisions all Business leaders make. Issues such as cybersecurity, retaining trust after a cyberattack, business IT needs, purchasing SaaS tools and more. New Episodes out every Thursday. Follow or subscribe to get it delivered straight to your favourite podcatcher. @petergnz @businessdesk_nz Proudly sponsored by 2degrees Business!  

  1. 4d ago

    FTN Motion's electric ride

    New Zealand isn't exactly famous for producing automotive brands, but FTN Motion is trying to change that. In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, the company’s co-founders Luke Sinclair and Kendall Bristow recount how a backyard BMX hack led to them creating one of the country's most distinctive electric vehicle startups. That was almost a decade ago, when two mechanical engineering graduates from Waikato University strapped a motor and battery onto a BMX bike in Pukekohe, before electric motorcycles were even a mainstream concept.  That scrappy experiment sparked an idea: a new vehicle category sitting between an e-bike and a motorcycle, built for the 20 to 30-kilometre urban commute. The result is the Street Dog, a retro-styled café racer that channels the romance of classic motorcycles while running on electric power. I spent a day test-driving the new Streetdog 50 on the streets of Wellington, enjoying a smooth ride on a bike that’s easy to get to grips with. This version doesn’t require the rider to have a motorcycle licence, so will appeal to people who want a bit more flexibility getting around town than an e-bike provides. Rather than chasing a futuristic look like many EV makers, FTN Motion doubled down on nostalgia and craftsmanship, betting that riders want something that feels like a classic, not a gadget. That bet is paying off, particularly in Wellington, a city custom-built for the bike's use case, with concentrated inner-city roads and no need to touch the motorway. At the heart of the co-founders’ success are relationships and networks. Luke and Kendall reveal how a chance conversation at a barbecue led them to Wellington incubator Creative HQ, how a single media column penned by professional director Mike “MOD” O’Donnell generated their first hundred pre-orders almost overnight, and how those early wins snowballed into relationships with Wellington’s Angel HQ and engineering veterans from Rocket Lab and Dyson. FTN Motion has resisted the industry's urge to over-engineer the user experience, deliberately skipping apps and unnecessary tech to keep the focus on the ride. And as the company eyes expansion into Australia, the US and beyond, Luke and Kendall get candid about what it actually takes to manufacture vehicles in New Zealand, why scaling slowly has been their secret weapon, and how they plan to stand out in a global market increasingly crowded with cheap electric alternatives from China. Listen to the full episode, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

  2. Jul 15

    Roger Sharp’s bid to build a travel tech powerhouse

    Queenstown has long been associated with jet boats, ski fields and postcard-perfect mountains.  But if veteran entrepreneur and online travel heavyweight Roger Sharp has his way, the resort town’s next big export won’t be adrenaline, it will be software. Sharp, who has spent decades at the cutting edge of online travel with companies like Webjet, Lastminute.com.au and WebBeds, is on a mission to diversify Queenstown’s tourism‑heavy economy by turning it into the southern hemisphere’s go‑to hub for travel technology.  His vehicle for doing that is Technology Queenstown, which has a 20‑year plan to grow a billion‑dollar tech economy in the region, lifting tech from 1.5% of local GDP to as high as 15–20%. Travel tech conference as a catalyst In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, Sharp makes the case for why a town built on tourism must now become equally famous for tech. Next week’s Web in Travel (WiT) conference, which Sharp secured the rights to host, will see a who’s who of travel innovation descend on the lakeside town, including senior leaders from airlines, hotel tech, payment platforms, online travel agencies and B2B marketplaces.  For Sharp, hosting them is about giving Queenstown critical mass and visibility as a testbed for new travel technologies. He tells me how he’s been building the scaffolding needed for a true cluster, convincing Queenstown Resort College to teach data and machine learning, coaxing the University of Otago to establish a digital tech campus, as well as recruiting a roster of long‑term corporate backers from Accenture to Genesis Energy and One NZ.  Learning from tourism towns He’s borrowed lessons from North American mountain towns like Bend and Boulder, which successfully layered high‑value tech jobs on top of lifestyle economies. But this isn’t a Silicon Valley clone play. Sharp is well aware of the risks of creating “a two‑class society” where tech workers thrive while hospitality workers are squeezed out of housing. His vision is growth with guardrails: higher‑paid, lower‑footprint jobs that ease pressure on roads, emissions and infrastructure, and give local kids a reason to stay rather than leave for Sydney or London. Listen to the full episode, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

  3. Jul 8

    Unworkable: the teen social media ban

    The National Party is aiming to introduce legislation for its proposed social media ban for under‑16s before November’s election. The move, replicating a ban already in place across the Tasman, might look like a neat political fix – but it is far more likely to fail, backfire and leave our kids and critical infrastructure less safe. That’s the stark warning from veteran tech consultant and internet governance expert Daniel Spector, my guest on this week’s episode of The Business of Tech. Spector, a long‑time KiwiFoo stalwart and current Internet New Zealand board member standing for re‑election, argues that prohibition‑style policies are the wrong tool for the job.  We don’t stop teenagers drinking by banning alcohol. We won’t stop them using TikTok and Instagram by declaring them off‑limits either. Wait for the VPN boom Instead, Spector says Australia’s under‑16s ban is already doing something unintended but entirely predictable – upskilling teenagers in VPNs, masking tools and hacking techniques, as they learn how to route around clumsy age‑verification systems and facial recognition.  In his view, New Zealand is on track to copy a model that not only won’t protect children, but will produce a more technically adept generation of young hackers while entrenching a surveillance architecture dressed up as “child safety”. We examine the deeper question politicians are mostly dodging: why are we attacking the demand side – who can log on – rather than the supply side of harm, like infinite scrolling, rage‑bait design and hyper‑targeted advertising?  Spector highlights recent US court moves that treat addictive features such as endless scroll as “defective by design”, putting liability squarely on Meta and Google, and argues this is the direction New Zealand should be watching - and even replicating. A golden age of hacking Spector also lays out why Anthropic’s Mythos and similar cutting‑edge models are likely to usher in a “golden age of attack hacking”, systematically hunting for vulnerabilities in decades‑old code. Criminal groups will get them eventually, and board directors – with the potential to soon face personal and even criminal liability for cyber breaches – are nowhere near ready. We talk zero‑knowledge proofs, digital identity, data sovereignty, and why outsourcing our safety to offshore tech giants and hurried bans is a dangerous illusion. You can hear the full discussion with Daniel Spector on The Business of Tech wherever you get your podcasts. Show notes A Modest Proposal for the Orderly Dissolution of New Zealand. - Daniel Spector, LinkedIn The verification layer did say 'yes'. Well... once. - Daniel Spector, LinkedIn #DigitalSovereignty: A personal professional crisis. And a national one, too. - Daniel Spector, LinkedIn NCSC got nation-state grade AI. Now what? - Daniel Spector, LinkedIn See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

  4. Jul 1

    Heidi: the AI scribe shaking up NZ healthcare

    Australian startup Heidi Health has become one of the most visible examples of AI actually shifting the dial on healthcare productivity – and New Zealand is at the forefront of that story.  In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to Heidi co‑founder Yu Liu about the company’s journey from student training tool to AI “care partner” for clinicians, and its audacious goal of doubling global healthcare capacity. Heidi didn’t start life in the emergency department. Yu and his co‑founders first built Oscar, a chatbot that helped medical students practise exam skills – essentially simulated patients for training bedside manner and clinical questioning.  Oscar was useful, but the startup team struggled to find students willing to pay for it. In 2019, Liu and his co-founders, Dr Tom Kelly and Waleed Mussa, pivoted to tackling one of the biggest bottlenecks in healthcare – the hours clinicians lose every day to documentation and administration. Widespread use in emergency departments That created Heidi Scribe, an ambient AI scribe that sits in on consultations, listening to the conversation and producing high‑quality clinical notes tuned to each hospital’s templates and workflows. Clinicians were quick to adopt it. Liu describes doctors using Heidi in every consult and calling the founders directly when it went down, because they no longer wanted to go back to typing everything themselves. In New Zealand, that enthusiasm has translated into national‑scale deployment. Health New Zealand is rolling Heidi out across all emergency departments, with clinicians in places like Hawke’s Bay cutting documentation time per patient from roughly 17 minutes to around four minutes.  Heidi, which has now raised around US$100 million across several VC-backed fundraising rounds, blends frontier large language models with specialised, region‑local models trained on clinical language and medication names, hosted in‑region to satisfy data sovereignty requirements. That’s how it pushes accuracy toward the near‑99 per cent threshold clinicians need to trust AI‑generated notes, says Liu. Heidi wants to transform assistive AI into something closer to infrastructure. From scribe to evidence-gatherer Heidi doesn’t retain recordings of conversations, and while many doctors create transcriptions on their smartphones or laptops, the Heidi Remote is also available – a mobile recorder doctors and nurses can carry around clinics and hospitals for easy recording that doesn’t rely on an internet connection. The company is already moving beyond transcription. Heidi Evidence surfaces relevant clinical research and guidelines at the point of care, while Heidi is expanding into pre‑chart summaries, referrals and spoken commands that trigger real actions in electronic health record systems. The aim, says Liu, is to let doctors focus on diagnosis and human connection, and let AI handle everything else. In the episode, we dig into Heidi’s founding story, its rapid uptake in New Zealand’s public health system, and the governance and privacy questions that come with putting AI in the consult room.  Tune in to the full conversation with Heidi Health co-founder Yu Liu on The Business of Tech, available wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

  5. Jun 24

    Kiwi co-founded world‑builder hits $2.5 billion valuation

    Another New Zealander has joined the global AI big league.  Auckland-raised engineer Jeff Hawke is now co‑founder and chief technology officer of Odyssey, a Palo Alto‑ and London‑based frontier lab that has just raised an eye‑watering US$310 million at a US$1.45 (NZ$2.55 billion) valuation – making it one of the world’s hottest AI “world model” startups. On this week’s episode of The Business of Tech podcast, I talk to Hawke about how he went from tinkering with autonomous forklifts in New Zealand to helping shape the next era of artificial intelligence from Silicon Valley and Shoreditch. Odyssey isn’t building another large language model. The company is focused on “world models” – AI systems that learn from sight and sound to understand how the real world works and then simulate it. Instead of spitting out text, these models simulate the real world, allowing robots that learn like humans, and games that feel like living worlds. Amazon to power Odyssey’s models Global investors are piling in. Odyssey’s Series B is led by US fund Natural Capital, with Amazon, AMD, GV, EQT, IQT and other heavy hitters on the cap table, plus a who’s who of Silicon Valley angels. Amazon Web Services has also signed on as Odyssey’s preferred cloud provider, betting that its Trainium AI chips can give the lab an edge in what is rapidly becoming an arms race for compute. For Hawke, it’s the latest step in a deep‑tech odyssey. After studying mechatronics and computer science at the University of Auckland, he cut his teeth at a local autonomous forklift startup before heading offshore. Stints in the US and at the Oxford Robotics Institute led to him becoming the first technical hire at UK autonomous‑vehicle company Wayve, working alongside Kiwi founder Alex Kendall as they grew the company to a multibillion‑dollar valuation. In our conversation, Hawke explains why he thinks world models are the missing piece of the AI puzzle, how Odyssey plans to move from a “GPT‑2 era” of world simulation to its own ChatGPT‑style breakout moment, and what this means for robots, jobs and the balance of power between tech companies and governments. We also look at what his success says about New Zealand’s tech ecosystem – and why a new generation of Kiwi founders is quietly wiring itself into the very top tier of global AI. You can listen to the full interview with Jeff Hawke on The Business of Tech, available now on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

  6. Jun 17

    China’s AI and robot revolution

    China is racing ahead in artificial intelligence and robotics – and New Zealand risks being left on the sidelines if it doesn’t pay close attention. In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to two Kiwis who’ve just had a rare front‑row seat on China’s AI boom – Auckland-based ElementX co‑founder and chief technology officer Ming Cheuk, and Christchurch AI engineer and consultant Blake Harkness. They’ve returned from an AI discovery tour organised by the AI Forum and the New Zealand China Council that took them inside some of China’s most advanced AI labs, hyperscale cloud providers, hospitals, banks, councils and robotics manufacturers. What they describe is a country where AI has moved well beyond pilots and proofs of concept and is now deeply embedded in everyday life and industrial processes. The AI hospital In healthcare, they visited a single hospital serving around five million patients a year, where AI chatbots handle initial triage in multiple languages, imaging tools cut the time to analyse scans by 80%, and robots in the pharmacy automatically pick and dispense prescriptions. Everything is done with the scan of a QR code. For a country like New Zealand, grappling with an ageing population and over‑stretched health services, it’s a glimpse of what fully scaled AI-enabled care could look like. They also met with frontier large language model labs and firms building China’s own AI tech stack, often with a strong open-source ethos. Models that can be deployed on customers’ own infrastructure – even as part of sovereign AI arrangements – are central to China’s strategy, allowing overseas organisations to adopt Chinese AI without sending data back to Beijing. It’s a clever way to sidestep geopolitical mistrust while still extending technological influence. On the robotics front, Ming and Blake toured factories producing humanoid robots and agile robotic “dogs” that are already off‑the‑shelf tools for search and rescue, asset inspection and industrial maintenance. The sheer number of robotics companies, and the pace at which they’re iterating on hardware and control systems, underscore how serious China is about becoming a global robotics powerhouse. The tech divide Yet geopolitics is never far from the surface. Export controls, national security concerns and shifting alliances mean much of this technology may never be directly available to Western buyers. Even so, Ming and Blake see real opportunities for New Zealand in partnering around open-source models, sovereign AI builds and targeted robotics deployments in sectors like infrastructure, manufacturing and agriculture. If you want to understand where AI and robotics are really heading – and what that means for New Zealand’s economy, workforce and policy choices – this is an episode you won’t want to miss.  Listen to The Business of Tech on your favourite podcast platform, or via iHeartRadio. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

  7. Jun 10

    AI vs public sector jobs

    The Government’s plan to cut 8,700 public sector jobs and save $2.4 billion has been framed largely as a brutal cost‑cutting exercise.  In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech podcast, Hamilton‑based technologist Brandon Hutcheson argues it could instead be the catalyst for a once‑in‑a‑generation redesign of how government works – if we get the AI strategy right. He admits, that's a big "if". Hutcheson, head of quantum at Netherlands-based IT services firm HSO and co‑founder of AI specialist Aware Group, has published a detailed catalogue of 160 ways artificial intelligence could transform the public sector. The ideas range from obvious efficiency wins – such as shared AI‑enabled contact centres and common cloud HR and payroll platforms – through to more ambitious proposals like synthetic populations for policy testing and real‑time legislation impact simulators. Rather than starting with “who can we cut?”, Hutcheson wants agencies to map their processes into four buckets: fully automatable, automatable with a transition plan, partially automatable with permanent human oversight, and human‑only functions. That discipline, he argues, is missing today, with agencies scrambling to bolt on AI tools in isolation, baking in the next wave of technical debt and eroding public trust. The next wave of computing He’s particularly critical of the way the cuts have been communicated – telling public servants their jobs are on the line while expecting them to lead the automation of their own roles. In his view, the smarter play is to frame AI as a way to improve citizen experience, reduce low‑value manual work, and spin out new export‑focused ventures built on New Zealand’s deep public‑sector expertise. The episode also looks ahead to the next wave of computing that will sit behind many of these changes. Hutcheson has just returned from Microsoft’s quantum labs in Redmond, where the company is racing to build fault‑tolerant quantum machines. He explains what he saw on the ground, why quantum should already be on the radar of boards and CIOs, and how it could combine with AI to reshape industries that rely on complex simulations – from materials and manufacturing to agriculture and finance. For business leaders, technologists and policy makers, this conversation is a roadmap to what’s possible – and a warning about the architectural decisions we make now. Listen to The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

  8. Jun 3

    From Uber to Exaba: AJ Tills takes on Big Tech storage

    When it comes to scaling high‑growth tech companies, AJ Tills has been in the engine room.  As one of Uber’s earliest hires in New Zealand, he helped the ride‑hailing giant push through regulatory resistance and turn the controversial startup into a default verb for getting around town, briefly serving as Uber’s US and Canada marketing chief of staff in New York.  Later, as chief marketing officer at Jamie Beaton’s startup Crimson Education, he helped the Kiwi‑founded edtech unicorn build a virtual high school and launchpad for students seeking entrance to top universities. He then went on to lead international growth for the world’s largest online wedding marketplace, The Knot Worldwide, spanning over a dozen countries Now Tills is back in New Zealand and backing a very different kind of disruption – this time in the unsexy but critical world of data storage. On the latest episode of The Business of Tech podcast, Tills tells me about his new role leading the customer push at Exaba. This Hamilton‑based startup wants to change how enterprises store and protect their data. Exaba has raised almost $12 million in seeding funding – one of the largest in New Zealand – to deepen its local footprint and expand into Australia and the US. Rising from the ashes of Nyriad The company was founded by Dr. Stuart Inglis and Peter Boyle, former executives of Nyriad, which developed ultrafast, GPU-accelerated data storage technology, but was wound down in 2024 after failing to gain sufficient market traction. Tech entrepreneur Guy Haddleton, who had backed Nyriad, bought some of the company’s assets and doubled down on his support for Inglis and Boyle to create a company with a slightly different proposition. Exaba aims to exploit the data centre boom and shifting sentiment towards the dominant hyperscale public cloud providers. For the past two decades, the default move has been to throw everything into the big public clouds, from AWS to Azure and Google Cloud. That brought convenience and scale, but it also introduced spiralling storage costs, punishing egress fees, and growing unease about data sovereignty and security. Exaba is building a cheaper, local alternative. Its software runs on standard, commodity hardware and turns managed service providers into “local scalers” who can offer their own on‑premise or locally hosted storage to customers. The company claims it can be up to ten times cheaper than the hyperscalers for storage, with predictable pricing instead of nasty surprises when you try to get your data back out. Tills, who joined Exaba six months ago and serves as its chief customer officer and US president, goes into why data residency and sovereignty are suddenly board‑level issues, and how Exaba is building post‑quantum‑secure storage for a world where attackers can “harvest now, decrypt later”.  We also explore how Tills is applying Uber‑era playbooks to win over managed service providers in the US and future‑proof their business models in the age of AI. Listen to the discussion in its entirety on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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About

The Business of Tech, hosted by leading tech journalist Peter Griffin. Every week they take a deep dive into emerging technology and news from the sector to help guide the important decisions all Business leaders make. Issues such as cybersecurity, retaining trust after a cyberattack, business IT needs, purchasing SaaS tools and more. New Episodes out every Thursday. Follow or subscribe to get it delivered straight to your favourite podcatcher. @petergnz @businessdesk_nz Proudly sponsored by 2degrees Business!  

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