The most useful AI story in New Zealand right now has nothing to do with robots taking jobs. It is about a chartered accounting firm using a $20,000 grant to cut rework and free up hundreds of hours for client-facing advice. That is a productivity gain any business owner can put a dollar figure on.
It is also a reminder that the winning AI use cases are narrow, unglamorous and aimed squarely at repetitive review work that eats senior time.
Private money, not the public purse
The grant comes from First Focus, a Kiwi IT and managed services company, which in August ran a $100,000 AI Investment Fund giving five businesses $20,000 each plus consulting, development and implementation support to build a working tool.
The winners’ projects say a lot. Fitzgerald Construction is building an assistant to read tender and contract documents, turn them into scope, risk and action summaries, flag missing information and draft RFIs. Drumm Nevatt and Associates, the accounting firm, is building a pre-review assistant that checks annual accounts, tax returns, minutes and workpapers for consistency before a manager sees them, then produces an exception report.
Be clear about what this is. It is vendor-funded, and First Focus gets case studies and future consulting work out of it. That is not a criticism. It is the market doing what it should, with a supplier putting its own money behind proving a product works, no taxpayer required. Another winner, investment analysis firm Lipman Burgon & Partners, is using its tool to take the manual first pass out of due diligence, the slow document grind that caps how much work each analyst can handle.
Firms already know what to automate
First Focus’s analysis of the 108 project ideas submitted found almost half targeted workflow, administration, sales, quoting or customer experience: pricing jobs from architectural plans, turning handwritten dispatch notes into sales orders, reviewing contracts, monitoring project margins.
Philip Barton, chief customer officer at First Focus, put it bluntly in the same report: most applicants “did not need help inventing an AI use case. They had already found work that was taking too long, relying on manual checks or tying up experienced employees.” The hard part, he said, was deciding which idea came first, whether the data was ready and what result would prove value.
That is the real barrier. Awareness is not the problem. Execution is.
The gap between dabbling and redesigning
Most businesses are not getting Drumm Nevatt-style results. Point16’s August analysis found only 15 percent of NZ SMEs use AI extensively enough to reshape how they operate, while 44 percent use it task by task without changing workflows. Generic time savings, such as the one working day a week reported by AI-using owners in Xero’s May research, are easily copied by competitors. The edge comes from rebuilding the process, not bolting a chatbot onto it.
Size matters too. MYOB data cited by Point16 shows 64 percent of businesses with 20-plus staff proactively use AI, against just 30 percent of those with one to five staff. Five $20,000 grants will not close that gap on their own.
The money is real
The macro numbers back the micro wins. A Deloitte Access Economics study commissioned by 2degrees found the average AI-adopting SME earned around $400,000 more in FY25 than comparable non-adopters. Treat telco-commissioned research with appropriate caution, but the direction is consistent. Liza van der Merwe, lead partner at Deloitte Access Economics, said “AI itself will not lift productivity”, with benefits depending on how well organisations integrate it and build capability.
The displacement fears have not matched reality either. In 2024, a Callaghan Innovation survey found only 8 percent of AI-using organisations reported replacing any employees. In 2025, the AI Forum put the figure at 7 percent. The pattern held: AI redeploys senior time far more often than it eliminates roles.
Where the taxpayer fits
The government runs its own track, the AI Advisory Pilot Programme through MBIE’s Regional Business Partner Network, offering co-funding and advice. It has drawn questions over whether a handful of funded pilots can lift productivity across the economy. That is a fair challenge, and First Focus’s experience suggests the answer lies less in subsidy and more in picking one painful, well-defined process and fixing it properly.
What owners should take from it
The lesson for any professional services firm is simple. Find the review work your best people hate doing, the reconciliations, consistency checks and first-pass document reads, and start there. The returns come from handing hours back to people who can bill them.
The next test is whether these five pilots scale beyond the grant period, and whether smaller firms can copy the template without a vendor cheque. If they can, New Zealand’s productivity story may finally have a practical chapter worth writing.
Sources
- Stuff: Turning repetitive review work into more time for clients (2026-10-17)
- First Focus: 5 NZ Businesses Win First Focus $100k AI Fund (2026-08-21)
- First Focus: AI Investment Fund Case Study, Lipman Burgon & Partners
- First Focus: What 100+ New Zealand businesses want to build with AI (2026-10-06)
- Point16: Why isn’t AI saving your business any time? (2026-08-18)
- 2degrees: AI moves from hype to hard results for Kiwi businesses (2026)
- Callaghan Innovation: AI Business Productivity Report, September 2024 (2024-09)
- AI Forum: AI in Action, Report 2, March 2025 (2025-03)
- Business.govt.nz: AI Advisory Pilot Programme, explore AI for your business
- BusinessDesk: Taxpayer-funded AI pilot for SMEs raises productivity questions
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