The Business of Tech

New Zealand is quietly dismantling the productive base that built its prosperity – and we’re doing it without anything resembling a plan.
Over the past decade, the country has shed around 20,000 manufacturing jobs while the sector’s share of GDP has steadily eroded. Factories producing everything from pulp and paper to frozen foods and wood products have scaled back or shut down entirely, including household names such as Wattie’s and McCain.
For regional centres like Westport and Kaitāia, each closure is an economic shock that ripples through the whole community. The blow would be blunted somewhat if we had a plan B to revive manufacturing and offer employment prospects in the regions. But we don’t.
Some economists and industry leaders now openly talk about the “deindustrialisation” of New Zealand. Manufacturing is responsible for roughly 60% of our exports and employs close to one in ten workers, yet it has slipped down the priority list in Wellington.
Other countries – Australia, Singapore, the UK and the US among them – have modern industrial strategies and long-term Industry 4.0 programmes. New Zealand, by contrast, shelved its industry transformation plans and has yet to articulate what kind of manufacturing base it wants to have in 10 or 20 years.
Energy costs sit at the heart of the problem. For many manufacturers, electricity and gas now rank among their top 2 - 3 operating costs. The rapid push to electrify process heat, combined with volatile spot prices and an uncertain gas transition, has left some plants badly exposed. At the same time, manufacturers face chronic skills shortages, conservative lenders demanding personal guarantees for capital upgrades, and resource consent processes that add cost and delay to even straightforward investments.
In the latest episode of The Business of Tech podcast, I’m joined by Christchurch-based manufacturing expert Sean Doherty to delve into what’s gone wrong – and what can still be salvaged.
Beyond plug-in AI fixes
After a 30‑year career that includes a long stint at Rockwell Automation and leading the advanced manufacturing programme at Callaghan Innovation, Doherty has had a front‑row seat to thousands of technology and productivity projects. He’s blunt about the structural issues and the policy vacuum, but he also insists manufacturers are not powerless.
Rather than chasing silver bullets or “plug‑in AI” fixes, Doherty argues for a disciplined focus on small, practical productivity and efficiency initiatives: getting real‑time data off the factory floor, tightening basic management practices, and investing in people alongside machines.
In a tough, high-cost environment, those incremental gains can spell the difference between slow decline and a credible growth story you can take to the bank – and, collectively, between a country that drifts into deindustrialisation and one that chooses to rebuild its industrial backbone.
Listen to the entire episode of The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Show notes
Factories in retreat: inside NZ’s deindustrialisation crisis - The Post
Sean Doherty on LinkedIn
Aotearoa’s Industry 4.0 Journey - Callaghan Innovation report
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Artificial intelligence isn’t coming to the New Zealand public sector – it’s already here.
AI is shaping everything from your tax bill to how quickly police process crime reports. And right now, it’s happening in a way that’s fast, fragmented and largely hidden from public view.
On the latest episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to BusinessDesk journalist Cécile Meier about her multi‑part investigation into the use of AI across government – an investigation built on a trove of Official Information Act responses from major agencies. What she found is both encouraging and unsettling.
Real efficiency gains and cost savings
There are genuine wins. Police have slashed processing times for lower‑severity crime cases from eight to ten minutes per file to as little as one to three minutes using an AI‑powered workflow tool – a saving estimated at 18,000 hours and around $1 million a year. Inland Revenue is using AI in its debt collection models, helping secure tens of millions of dollars in payment arrangements in just weeks. ACC and others report large productivity gains from Microsoft’s Copilot baked into everyday tools.
But scratch the surface, as Meier has, and the story gets a lot more complicated. There is a public‑service‑wide AI framework governing how these tools should be deployed, but it is not binding. Agencies have guidlines for adoption but are largely left to design their own pilots, measure their own “time saved”, and often rely on the very vendors selling them AI to prove the return on investment. Quality, error rates and real‑world impacts on citizens barely get a look‑in.
The AI deployment divide
Her reporting also exposes a stark divide. Some agencies – IRD, ACC, Police and DOC – are forging ahead, training thousands of staff and embedding AI deep into decision‑support systems. Others, like Oranga Tamariki and Corrections, are so wary of the risks that they’ve blocked external AI tools and confined usage to tightly constrained, low‑stakes tasks. All of this is happening under the same loose, non‑binding guidance.
AI tools are stumbling over te reo Māori and Māori legal concepts, raising obvious concerns about bias and fairness. There's growing reliance on a handful of US tech giants to supply and measure government AI, and a rising wave of “shadow AI”, as public servants quietly use banned tools on personal devices because they’re simply too useful to ignore.
Listen to The Business of Tech for the full interview, and hear how AI is quietly rewiring the state, often without the scrutiny it deserves. Streaming on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Show notes
'Slippery slope': Concerns millions spent on AI may not be delivering for public - BusinessDesk
Light rules, high stakes: Agencies push AI into frontline work - BusinessDesk
Government AI spending hits $20.2m with real cost likely far higher - BusinessDesk
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Big organisations love to talk about innovation. They set up labs, hire “transformation” teams, and run hackathons.
Yet inside many companies, the best ideas still die in PowerPoint decks or get buried in cautious business cases.
In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to Gravity cofounder James Boult, an innovation specialist who has spent years inside large New Zealand organisations, watching this play out in real time.
Boult’s verdict is that most corporates are structurally set up to smother genuinely new ideas, even when the will – and the talent – is there.
Boult’s core advice is to treat every significant new idea as if it were a venture‑backed startup inside your organisation. That means giving it a dedicated budget, a finite runway, clear deliverables, and hard stage gates where the project must “earn” the right to continue. No more quietly funding side projects from the core P&L. No more open‑ended experiments that drift for years without real customers.
The gatekeepers and the fear factor
Instead, project owners should be forced to pitch for the next tranche of funding just like founders fronting up to investors. That shift, says Boult, changes behaviour overnight. Teams become sharper on the problem they’re solving and far less likely to hide behind internal politics or legacy metrics.
The episode also digs into the human side of corporate innovation – the “gatekeepers” who can make or break new ideas. These people aren’t cartoon villains. They’re often acting out of fear about budgets, risk, or their own roles. Boult explains how to identify them early, understand their motivations, and design an innovation process that works with – rather than around – those emotional realities.
For frustrated “intrapreneurs” who feel like they’re “going mad” inside a big company, Boult offers a practical playbook for testing startup thinking without immediately quitting the day job. And for senior leaders, he lays out why outsourcing innovation, spinning up venture arms, or re‑branding old projects as “agile” won’t work unless the underlying incentives and governance change.
If you work in a large organisation that talks a big game on innovation but struggles to ship anything truly new, this episode is required listening. Listen to The Business of Tech wherever you get your podcasts.

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Forget soy, pea, or lab-grown meat – the next frontier in sustainable food might just be hiding in plain sight. Specifically, in the leaves of everyday plants growing across New Zealand’s farmland.
In the latest episode of The Business of Tech podcast, I talk to Ross Milne, the CEO of Rolleston-based startup Leaft Foods, which has pioneered a breakthrough technique to extract and process Rubisco, a naturally occurring protein found in every green leaf.
Scientists have long known Rubisco’s potential, calling it the “utopia protein” for its rich nutritional profile and low environmental footprint. What’s been missing until now is a practical way to isolate it for use in food and animal feed.
From milk to leafy greens
Milne, a former process engineer who worked for some of the world’s largest food companies, saw an opening for innovation back home in New Zealand, teaming up with Leaft Food founders John Penno (Synlait Milk co-founder) and Maury Leyland Penno. Leaft’s approach promises not just a powerful alternative to traditional protein sources, but a clever circular system where farmers can use the high-protein byproducts as feed supplements, boosting productivity while cutting emissions.
The engineering ingenuity allowing Leaft to extract sufficient quantities of Rubisco is what caught the eye of global investors in 2020, when Leaft raised US$15 million in a Series A round. Among Leaft’s backers is Khosla Ventures, the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm known for betting early on world-changing green technologies.
Low-impact protein
Working mainly with alfalfa crops in the Canterbury region, Leaft harvests and processes the leaves, extracting the protein which is sold to food suppliers and which features in Leaft Blade, the company’s line of nutritional products. The leftover leaves are used by farmers for supplementary feed.
“The interesting thing about [Alfalfa] from a grower point of view is it regrows straight away,” Milne told me.
“So about six weeks later, for example, we're back in that same paddock harvesting it again. And we just constantly do that. It's a perennial which stays in the ground for multiple years.”
As the world races to find scalable, low-impact protein sources, Leaft’s innovation could place Canterbury at the center of the solution. For Milne, it’s a mission to transform the food system from scratch.
Listen to the entire conversation on The Business of Tech podcast to find out how this Kiwi startup is redefining what we eat, how we grow it, and why the leaves in your backyard might hold the key to feeding the future.
Streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Show notes
Developing a new plant-based protein - Science Learning Hub
An IPO could be on the cards for Leaft Foods one day - BusinessDesk
NZ green protein producer sprouts new deal with Asian food giant - RNZ
Leaft protein boosted from ground up - Farmers Weekly
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New Zealand drivers are about to discover a whole new way of paying to use the roads – and for most, it will be a shock.
For decades, petrol and diesel motorists have funded the transport network through fuel excise quietly folded into every litre at the pump - currently a 70c tax.
Soon, that largely invisible tax will give way to something much more visible – paying per kilometre under an expanded road user charge (RUC) system.
On the latest episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to Dunedin-based entrepreneur Adam Johnston about what may be the biggest shake-up to transport funding in 50 years. Light vehicle owners who have never had to think about RUC before will be pulled into a regime that currently applies to heavy vehicles, diesel cars and electric vehicles. Petrol vehicles currently make up around 55% of the national fleet.
Instead of passively paying when you fill up, you’ll be actively buying distance in advance, tracking your odometer, and keeping on the good side of Waka Kotahi.
A new marketplace for RUC payments

That sounds like a recipe for confusion and admin overload, especially in a cost-of-living crisis where drivers are already stressed about the price of petrol and diesel. But this shift is also opening the door to a wave of innovation. As the government hands more of the RUC system over to private providers, a new marketplace will emerge around how you pay to drive.
It will likely be in the form of apps that let you buy and manage your RUC from your phone, real-time dashboards that show how much you’ve used, and even telematics devices that automate the whole process by reporting your mileage in the background. Payment platforms will sit in the middle, clipping the ticket on every transaction. Start-ups and incumbents alike will compete to become your go-to RUC retailer, bundling services and perks to win your attention and loyalty.
Johnston and his co-founder, Briyarne Pascoe, both former Delivery Easy workers, are among the entrepreneurs racing to shape this new ecosystem. Building on their RUC Hub project, a free-to-access platform that tells you everything you need to know about road user charges, they saw an opportunity to make a complex system more transparent and user-friendly, while preventing the market from devolving into a cosy oligopoly. The pair plan to become a retail player in the emerging RUC ecosystem.
In the episode, Johnston explains the trade-offs between better digital experiences and the extra transaction costs that could quietly inflate what you pay overall.
This episode unpacks what’s coming, how your relationship with your car and your wallet is about to change, and the tools that could make surviving the new RUC era a little less painful. Streaming on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
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