The Business of Tech

• How cheap drones became the defining weapon of modern conflict

  Drones have gone from hobbyist toys to decisive tools of war and essential infrastructure for industry. Few people have had a better vantage point on that shift than FenixUAS founder Dr Andrew Shelley. In the latest episode of The Business of Tech podcast, the economist and aviation specialist explains how a decade of incremental innovation has transformed uncrewed aircraft into platforms that can reshape modern warfare, agritech and even search and rescue.​ From DIY quadcopters to smart weapons New Zealand’s first drone rules arrived ten years ago, when the technology was still rudimentary and often home‑built. “Pretty much every part of drone technology has improved,” Shelley said. Better batteries and lighter and stronger materials have almost doubled flight time, while mass‑manufactured airframes have brought the price of drones down. and far more capable sensors and onboard software. Other advances, such as sensor technology and onboard software, have flowed into features many consumers now take for granted, such as obstacle avoidance, rock‑solid position hold and follow‑me modes, as well as increasingly autonomous flight profiles.​ The Ukraine war, now approaching four years in duration, has been characterised by the use of drones by both Ukrainian and Russian forces. The changing face of warfare Shelley recalled watching footage of a small first‑person‑view drone in Ukraine flying straight past a Russian electronic warfare vehicle “festooned with antennas” and striking the armoured vehicle ahead of it. The drone was trailing a hair-thin fibre-optic cable, allowing it to avoid radio jamming systems. “To a certain extent, what we’re seeing in Ukraine is that the old is new again,” said Shelley, pointing out that the current generation of drones echo some of the cruise‑missile tactics from the early 1990s.​ Shelley traces a clear line from ISIS workshops that assembled drones from AliExpress parts, through Turkey’s TB2 Bayraktar successes and Russia’s use of DJI’s Aeroscope detection tools, to today’s battlefields where consumer‑grade quadcopters handle intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and precision strikes. The West, he argues, has been complacent: “Turkey was leading the way with its Bayraktar TB2, Iran is clearly leading the way with its Shahed series drones and we are playing catch-up,” he said, pointing out that the US is now reverse‑engineering an Iranian drone rather than setting the pace.​ Artificial intelligence is only beginning to make its mark in commercial uses in New Zealand, but Shelley says the leading edge is already visible in applications like Christchurch‑based SPS Automation’s large agricultural drones. These systems can autonomously identify wilding pines and apply “a small amount of chemical herbicide” to individual plants, an approach he argues could transform conservation economics by reaching areas that are “almost impossible on foot” or too expensive to service with crewed aircraft.​ Agritech, data and the search and rescue gap If the military implications dominate headlines, Shelley sees at least as much untapped potential in agritech and emergency response. He cites spray drones that can drop slug bait on vulnerable crops in muddy conditions where tractors would churn up soil and helicopters are cost‑prohibitive, turning marginal blocks into productive land. Pasture management is another frontier. Instead of consultants walking paddocks with pasture meters or towing instruments behind quad bikes, he expects drones to fly automated grids soon to map grass cover and optimise feed wedges across entire farms, backed by “clever software” to interpret the imagery.​ Search and rescue, he argues, is “one of the things we haven’t done well with”, despite New Zealand’s vast coastline, mountains and national parks. Shelley believes agencies need to change their mindset and accept that in bad weather or hazardous terrain, “we have to move into a mindset where we’re happy to lose the technology,” risking a $100,000 drone instead of a multi‑million‑dollar helicopter and its crew to find people in distress.​ Building a drone industry – and workforce FenixUAS sits at the centre of the fledgling drone ecosystem, training over a thousand civilian and government operators a year, including the New Zealand Defence Force, and certifying many of the country’s advanced drone operators. That gives Shelley what he calls a broader overview of what everyone’s doing with drones than perhaps anyone else in the country, from agritech to infrastructure inspection. While firms like Tauranga-based Syos, and SPS Automation point to a growing UAV scene, he says the real bottleneck is software talent, with drone companies crying out for mechatronics and software engineers who can turn raw imagery into usable insights.​ Listen to Episode 130 of The Business of Tech podcast featuring Dr Andrew Shelley, streaming on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. Your weekly tech reading list The year the tech billionaires won (again) - BusinessDesk Canaries in the code mine: what AI is doing to first jobs for Generation Z - BusinessDesk ChatGPT’s New Internet Browser Can Run 80% of a One-Person Business - Entrepreneur The Data on Self-Driving Cars Is Clear. We Have to Change Course - New York Times AI-Powered Browsers Are Failing Badly - Futurism China set to limit access to Nvidia’s H200 chips despite Trump export approval - FT Australia's ban on social media for users aged under 16 comes into effect; platforms that do not comply risk fines of up to AU$49.5M - The Guardian OpenAI Staffer Quits, Alleging Company’s Economic Research Is Drifting Into AI Advocacy - Wired SpaceX to Pursue 2026 IPO Raising Far Above $30 Billion - Bloomberg From Llamas to Avocados: Meta’s shifting AI strategy is causing internal confusion - CNBC See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• The Kiwi fintech startup hacking the admin hell out of financial advice

  In the creaky world of financial advising, where compliance paperwork devours hours and clunky software feels like a relic from the dial-up era, a New Zealand startup is deploying AI to free advisers from the drudgery. Marloo, co-founded by Hardy Michel, who cut his teeth as head of operations at Wellington-based share trading platform Sharesies, isn't building robo-advisers to supplant humans. Instead, he is using artificial intelligence to free up advisors so they can focus on the trust-building conversations that truly matter to their clients. In the latest episode of The Business of Tech podcast, Michel shares how his London-based venture is already winning paying customers across four countries, proving New Zealand fintech can scale globally from day one. Relocating to London in 2022, Michel joined Estonian-founded investing platform Lightyear, helping it launch across 22 European countries amid regulatory mazes far more complex than New Zealand's. "I felt like I'd really rounded out probably the missing piece of my knowledge and learning, which was kind of how do you build the machine at scale?" Michel told me. Freeing advisors from low-value admin That experience, combined with angel investing via Blackbird Ventures, convinced him to co-found Marloo with fellow Sharesies alum Shakeel Lala. Marloo’s mission? Financial advice is potentially transformational but inaccessible, the founders realised. Advisers spend 70% of their time on low-value admin, from anti-money laundering checks to 50-page suitability reports that gather dust. Existing tools are clunky, with Michel describing the "Windows 95-esque" systems financial advisors had to choose from before Marloo arrived on the scene. Marloo offers a hyper-specialised AI note-taker for client meetings. Unlike transcription tools, it sifts through hours of chit-chat to extract the 5% that counts – goals, risk tolerance, fees – and structures it for compliance or client follow-ups. From there, the AI evolves into a full operating system, turning advisors into "reviewers, not doers", Michel said. Finish a meeting, and Marloo drafts an annual review letter in two minutes, 95% ready for a quick edit. "You no longer have to take notes after the meeting, have a second person in the meeting taking notes for them, or rely on anything else other than our product," Michel explained. The result? Advisors onboard more clients without burnout, firms cut outsourcing costs, and the human element, crucial for navigating life's emotional money milestones like retirement or inheritance, stays front and centre. Giving robo-advice a wide berth This augmentation ethos sets Marloo apart from robo-advice hype. "If robo-advice was kind of as good as it was cracked up to be, we'd all be using it right now. And the reality is we're not," Michel told me. He predicts regulators will be reluctant to green-light fully AI-driven advice, given the trust factor. Instead, Marloo aims to overhaul unit economics: lower fees, drop minimum balances (now often $500,000+), and make quality guidance available to more than just the wealthy. "The mission is [to] transform the underlying [profit and loss] in the unit economics of what it means to deliver advice to a customer so that we can actually reverse that," he said Marloo recently raised NZ$4.6 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate development. "We're going to raise a little bit of money to answer a true false question in 12 months... that we are confident we can spend the next 10 years working on this and it's going to be a massive business," he recounts of the Blackbird pitch. As AI bubbles inflate, Michel warns against shiny tech without substance. "It's never been easier to build... [but] also... to deliver a really shitty product experience," he said. Marloo, he added, prioritises delight – a consumer-grade user experience in a B2B world. For an industry pricing out everyday clients amid rising fees (up 6% in the UK last year), this could be the reset financial advice needs. Tune into episode 129 of The Business of Tech, powered by 2degrees, for the full conversation, where Michel dives deeper into Estonia's entrepreneurial edge, Sharesies' early battles, and why financial advice must stay human-powered. Available now on all major podcast platforms. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• How Tracksuit turned brand data into a global growth engine

  In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, Tracksuit co-founder and chief commercial officer Matt Herbert explains how the startup is using brand data to help marketers navigate an era of economic uncertainty, shifting consumer behaviour and AI-driven search. “The edge that we brought to it was simplifying the fundamentals and making it incredibly accessible,” he says of Tracksuit’s dashboard of brand tracking indicators, which is now used by over 1,000 customers globally to track around 10,000 brands.​ Herbert traces his obsession with brands back to childhood, recalling growing up playing football for Eastern Suburbs in Auckland, where McDonald’s Player of the Day branding made an impression on him. That early fascination with how brands connect with people ultimately led him through roles at Uber and Snapchat analytics startup Mish Guru, and on to founding Tracksuit.​ From those formative experiences, Herbert and friend and co-founder Connor Archbold drew a blueprint for global expansion that they are now applying at Tracksuit. Advertising and branding guru James Hurman came on board as a co-founder to apply his insights to the Tracksuit platform, incubating the company into his Previously Unavailable innovation studio. The Uber blueprint “Uber to me still has one of the best blueprints of how to scale globally fast and effectively… starting one market, win the next market, hire great people, empower and scale out and go where the demand is,” Herbert said of the ride-hailing platform. That thinking now underpins Tracksuit’s carefully sequenced move from New Zealand into Australia, the US and the UK.​​ Herbert’s mission is to shift marketers’ focus from short-term clicks to long-term brand building. “Most businesses have been so focused on sales and conversions and performance marketing where you put a dollar into Meta, and you get three dollars back,” he said. “Then it got to a point where you were putting a dollar in, and you were getting 80 cents back. Everybody had been so focused on converting at the expense of building your business and your brands over the long term.”​ To explain that imbalance, he shares a favourite thought experiment from marketing effectiveness expert and Tracksuit co-founder James Hurman. In a room of people, Herbert asks who is buying a phone in the next three months. Only a few hands go up. Then he asks who will buy a phone in the next two years. “Everybody's hand goes up,” he says. “That right there is the concept of what marketing's job [is] to do… you've also got to build awareness and familiarity and connection with those who aren't ready to buy from you right now, but will do down the track.” Tracksuit’s dashboard is designed to make that long-term job visible and measurable.​ Throw out the hundred-page PDF Tracksuit’s answer was to build a software platform that pulls the essence out of expensive research reports and puts it into a live, always-on view of brand health. “We were basically getting told we'd love just to see the exact summary of the big research reports that we're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on in a hundred-page PDF,” he recalled of early interviews with chief marketing officers. “We actually just want to see the exact summary. How big is our market? How well is our brand known and considered? What do people think and feel about us and how does that compare to the competitors?”​ That customer discovery led directly to Tracksuit’s first product and revenue. “After 67 conversations, we had 11 businesses pay us upfront annual licenses,” Herbert said. “We took the first $110,000 and built the first prototype of the product. We didn't have a product, but we had the likes of Simplicity and Allpress and Good George Beer and Auckland Council, all of these really early brands that took a punt on us, and we built the first version and from there we continue to scale out.”​ Fast-forward four and a half years and Herbert says Tracksuit has assembled “one of the largest data sets on brand health on consumer brands in the world.” The company raised $42 million in June in a series B funding round with the proceeds to be used to expand Tracksuit’s US presence and drive growth in Europe and Asia. The rise of agentic engine optimisation Herbert said Tracksuit had embraced artificial intelligence, which was helping reshape the brand landscape as internet search and digital marketing were transformed by it. Tracksuit is using AI to accelerate insight delivery and supercharge internal workflows. He pointed to a weekend hack by his vice president of strategy and operations: “Our chief of staff, Dan, was using some agentic AI workflows and built an [agentic engine optimisation] product. How well is your brand showing up in the likes of Claude and Perplexity, and ChatGPT? He did that within a weekend, six hours,” Herbert said.​​ Herbert argues brands now need to think about AEO in the same way they once grappled with search engine optimisation. Finally, Herbert shared his playbook for building a resilient business in choppy economic waters. “We founded Tracksuit at the back end of the pandemic. Since that time in 2021, I think there's probably been three different recessions or hints of recessions globally,” he said. “There'll always be something. And that's why it's really important for us to be building a sustainable, responsible business that isn't relying on continuing to raise external capital just to keep the lights on.” For brand leaders facing budget pressure, his advice is to invest wisely to understand how your brand is performing now, so you can make inroads when buying appetite improves. “If you can keep your marketing going through times of recessions, it's proven time and time again that you come out far stronger than when people cut budgets.”​ Listen to the full interview with Tracksuit’s Matt Herbert on The Business of Tech powered by 2degrees Business, streaming on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. Your weekly tech reading list Home Markets Rebecca Stevenson Fisher & Paykel Healthcare cracks $1b milestone, ups profit guidance - BusinessDesk Startup Winely goes into liquidation owing $2.2m - BusinessDesk A year of tech milestones: Exports, AI, and innovation in 2025 - BusinessDesk Blackpearl Group joins the ASX: Which deep-pocketed Aussie investors are backing the Kiwi tech company - BusinessDesk Ruminant Biotech raises $17m at $132m valuation for its cow pill that will slash methane emissions - NZ Herald CrowdStrike catches insider feeding information to hackers - Bleeping Computer Rocket Lab chief opens up about Neutron delays, New Glenn’s success, and NASA science - ArsTechnica Warner Music drops lawsuit against AI music platform Suno in exchange for licensing agreement - Engadget Roblox is a problem — but it’s a symptom of something worse - Platformer Robots and AI Are Already Remaking the Chinese Economy - Wall Street JournalSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• Inside the AI race: Energy use, agents and the real impact on work

  Reporting from the front line of the artificial intelligence revolution, Time magazine reporter Harry Booth has a unique perspective on the technology moving markets and transforming business. The London-based University of Auckland graduate has been part of Time’s team of AI reporters for the last 16 months, his byline regularly appearing in the pages of the iconic news magazine. This week’s episode of The Business of Tech podcast features an in-depth conversation with Booth, who gave me a tour of how AI is reshaping the world of work, explained the technology’s breakneck pace of development, looming questions over its energy use, and the critical signals to watch as 2026 approaches. Is AI really cleaning up? Despite dire predictions that white-collar jobs would be decimated, Booth finds reality to be more complex and, in some ways, more sobering. In areas like translation, seasoned professionals aren’t being replaced outright. Instead, their roles have shifted. Translators Booth interviewed are now tasked with correcting AI-generated text – a role rebranded as “AI cleanup” – which brings downward pressure on rates without necessarily delivering true productivity gains. Surprisingly, fixing flawed machine translation can take as long as translating from scratch, eroding job satisfaction and earnings for skilled workers.​ The same story, Booth notes, is playing out in other “canary in the coal mine” sectors. A frequently cited study found that software engineers using AI coding assistants believed their workload to be 20% faster. But empirical measurement showed a 20% slowdown. This suggests productivity impacts are far from settled, with AI often under-delivering unless carefully tailored to fit the workflow.​ From assistants to agents Much has been made in the past year of the rise of “AI agents” – systems that operate independently and can execute multi-step tasks, not just answer queries. “We’re seeing the emergence of agentic AI — these aren’t just chatbots, but systems that can carry out tasks, fetch data, and increasingly do things in the world on our behalf,” Booth told me. He believes we’re still in the early innings. Some AI can now complete longer software engineering tasks. The length of time an AI system can work independently has roughly doubled every four to seven months. If that trend holds, Booth suggests we could see agents capable of a full workday by 2027. However, today’s agents remain far from being true digital employees. Meaningful productivity gains only appear when companies design AI tools that address specific, high-value pain points using both language models and smart software engineering.​ Energy, infrastructure, and the next bottleneck On the infrastructure side, AI’s growing thirst for energy is emerging as a defining challenge. Far from being a personal moral issue (a single AI prompt’s carbon footprint is tiny, Booth points out), energy is a strategic concern for the giants racing to train ever-larger models. “AI isn’t a climate disaster at the individual level, but as companies multiply their data centres, the real bottleneck for development is shifting – from talent and chips to energy itself,” he said. With global electricity production growing slowly and massive datacenter builds underway, companies are securing long-term energy deals – sometimes using the rhetoric of AI’s needs as justification for keeping older, dirtier power sources online.​ But Booth also highlights a surprising upside: the same AI giants are pouring fresh capital into clean-energy tech, particularly nuclear fusion. Projects previously imagined as decades away are suddenly within striking distance. Fusion investment has exploded from US$2 billion to $15 billion in just three years, with players like OpenAI, Google, and Softbank on board. New Zealand’s own OpenStar is part of this story, pursuing commercial fusion with techniques borrowed from the scrappy world of startups. While a fusion-powered data centre is still years away, the influx of funding is credibly accelerating commercial viability, with some experts predicting net-positive fusion within a decade.​ What Harry Booth is watching in 2026 As AI accelerates, Booth will keep his investigative lens focused on several fronts in 2026: Will the time horizon, how long an AI agent can independently operate, keep doubling at today’s pace? How will new training techniques, like direct observation of professionals and ever-more-complex simulation environments, impact AI capability? Will scaling models with ever-greater compute keep delivering breakthroughs, or are diminishing returns setting in? Most importantly, can the infrastructure, both silicon and power, keep up? Can the effort to make AI safer and more transparent move as quickly as the technology itself?​ Tune in to this week’s The Business of Tech to hear the full conversation with Harry Booth, streaming on iHeartRadio and wherever you get your podcasts. Your weekly tech reading list AI is reshaping work – but not the way you think - BusinessDesk The zombie apocalypse is where NZ games maker PikPok thrives - BusinessDesk Big banks eye warnings on legacy Open Banking technology - BusinessDesk Serko adds 70 staff in India, GetThere acquisition powers 71% booking lift - BusinessDesk ACC's use of AI to help decide who gets help shocks advocate - RNZ Small Bitcoin spends, big headaches: why buying coffee triggers tax admin - BusinessDesk Big content is taking on AI – but it’s far from the David v Goliath tale they’d have you believe - The Guardian Google wants to bring its driverless taxis to Sydney’s streets - Sydney Morning Herald Google is launching Gemini 3, its ‘most intelligent’ AI model yet - The Verge Meta Wins FTC Antitrust Trial Over Instagram, WhatsApp Deals - BloombergSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• Banking unleashed: What the new open banking regime means for consumers and fintech players

  After years of anticipation and frustration over slow progress, New Zealand’s open banking era is about to become a reality. On December 1, official regulations come into effect, bringing sweeping change to how Kiwis access and control their financial data. Akahu co-founder Josh Daniell, whose platform already integrates with more than 85 products that draw on consumers’ bank data thanks to voluntary agreements in place, joined the Business of Tech podcast to unpack what the new regime will mean for consumers, fintechs, and the banking giants themselves.​ Daniell explained the significance of the shift underway: “Over the last 20 years, there has been a buildup of consumer demand for this type of connectivity to a point where there’s more than a million Kiwis each year in New Zealand using unregulated, open banking methods,” he told me. The old model was a messy patchwork – screen-scraping bots, voluntary deals, and inconsistent application programming interfaces (APIs) that left customers with little transparency or control. “Consumers didn’t have full control of how those connections worked,” Daniell said, “and any product that wants those kind of data feeds, either has to go and get a contract with each bank, or do it in a way that isn’t sanctioned by the bank”.​ Encouraging the mavericks Under the new regulatory system, a product provider or intermediary like Akahu can become accredited and access secure, standardised APIs from any major bank, a move Daniell believes will “put the consumer more in the driving seat” and sweep away the old system’s uncertainty. This reform is not just about convenience. It is intended to foster greater competition and innovation. “If there was a challenger in the banking sector…they can make it simple for people to connect their external accounts and then switch across to those better products,” Daniell explained. The Commerce Commission’s recent market study recommended open banking precisely for this reason – to unlock bottlenecks and foster a more vibrant sector.​ But New Zealand’s adoption of an official open banking regime is well behind other countries, such as Australia and the United Kingdom, where uptake of open banking services has been limited. Daniell is upbeat about the New Zealand system’s design. Lessons from the Aussies and Brits “We think MBIE really learned from those regimes that have gone in front of us, and we think the regulation is well designed. It’s simple, it sets out a data sharing system, and it doesn’t try to move into things like data protection, which is left to the Privacy Act,” he said. He argues New Zealand’s system is more streamlined than Australia’s, which “over-engineered some aspects…and as a result, some organisations haven’t actually transitioned”.​ On launch day, the Big Four banks, ANZ, ASB, BNZ, and Westpac, will be designated as official data holders, required to offer open banking APIs to any accredited party. “It turns it from a voluntary offering…to a mandatory offering,” Daniell said, “and it also means that you don’t need a contract with each bank. You become accredited centrally, and then you have access to all regulated APIs in that system”.​ Payment innovation is another headline benefit. Daniell points to future use cases, such as convenient bank-to-bank payments, app-to-app transactions, and avoiding credit card fees. “With open banking, you can essentially put your bank account on file, like putting a card on file, so you can have exactly the same experience. You leave the Uber, and you’re paying via a bank payment rather than a card payment. And the benefit here is a cost one. It’s just cheaper to process an account-to-account payment than it is to process that same payment over the card network”. Trust and value will rule​ Concerns about privacy and security remain, but Daniell is clear that trust and value will always be central for consumers. “People absolutely need to consider the party that they’re dealing with and decide whether they trust them with sensitive data. Regulated open banking doesn’t change the decision they need to make there,” he says. Accredited companies face strict requirements – insurance, fit and proper tests, and security obligations – but consumers must weigh “how much value they’re going to get from sharing their data”.​ Looking ahead, Daniell is bullish about rapid adoption as the voluntary phase ends: “I would like to think that we have hundreds of thousands of Kiwis using the regulated open banking system before the end of next year…within three years, I’ll be disappointed if we don’t have a million Kiwis having used it. I think that’s viable, given all of the unregulated use of open banking that currently exists”.​ Listen to the full conversation with Josh Daniell in the latest episode of The Business of Tech podcast, streaming on iHeartRadio and wherever you get your podcasts. Your weekly tech reading list Xero founder Rod Drury funds secure-messaging startup Corro - BusinessDesk Rocket Lab delays Neutron rocket launch but shares jump - BusinessDesk Dutch carbon tech startup Skytree plans to put down roots in NZ - BusinessDesk So far so good for NZ’s space station mission - BusinessDesk After three days of blunders, Microsoft finally delivers on 365 refund – but some of the fine print still annoys - NZ Herald Inside the data centres that train AI and drain the electrical grid - New Yorker Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show - Reuters Anthropic Is on Track to Turn a Profit Much Faster Than OpenAI - Wall Street Journal The next iPhone Air has reportedly been delayed - The Verge Apple TV execs dismiss introducing an ad tier, buying Warner Bros. Discovery - Ars TechnicaSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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