The SME Stream

Salesforce New Zealand country manager Richard Phillimore-Smith says the next phase of artificial intelligence will hinge on whether organisations can put trusted data, established workflows and people together to solve real business problems.
Speaking to The Business of Tech at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Phillimore-Smith said the event reflected an industry at a turning point. The gathering brought together some of AI’s most influential figures, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff.
The mood, as is always the case at Dreamforce, a mecca for marketing and sales tech folk, was upbeat. But the keynotes reflected the broader unease about the pace of AI development and the potential for AI to go rogue.
Amodei has urged greater coordination among AI companies on safety and oversight, a collaborative effort to slow down development as required, while pointing out that businesses are still using only 5 - 10% of the capabilities AI already delivers.
An opportunity to lift productivity
Phillimore-Smith said that the immediate opportunity, epitomised by the rise of AI agents and Agentforce, the Salesforce agentic platform, and Claudeforce, which debuted at Dreamforce, is far more practical and less scary. They are using AI agents to improve customer interactions, equip employees with better information and increase productivity.
“We know that we have got an opportunity to lift productivity. We know we’ve got an opportunity to lift customer experience. We know we’ve got an opportunity to lift employee experience,” he said.
“It has to start with data. Businesses organise to get the data right. AI as a tool can then surface that in the way that customers need it to be.”
Phillimore-Smith pointed to Salesforce customer Fisher & Paykel Appliances, where an AI-enabled service experience is built on thousands of existing product and support articles.
On the conference floor at Dreamforce, I caught up with Rudi Khoury, chief digital officer at Fisher & Paykel Appliances, who told me that the whiteware maker has seen nearly 45% of service bookings completed online and a 50% reduction in call-handling times since installing an AI agent to handle customer queries.
“It's like having more people, but this one can scale more,” he said.
“One agent can do a different scale to one person, but they still require management and leadership like a person does, and I think that's often forgotten about in the business context.”
Don't forget the dishwasher knob!
Agents are now also powering the apps Fisher & Paykel field service technicians use to prepare for in-home visits, with the app serving up detailed information about the customer and suggesting which spare parts to bring on the job.
Khoury said running AI agents involved treating them like digital employees, monitoring their performance and output to improve how they operated.
“When we first put Agentforce in, the feedback to [Salesforce] was, I need more observability. I need to know how it's going. And over the course of time, they provided those tools- really, really cool testing tools. So actually, we're able to simulate how the agent will perform before we deploy it. That's really great."
Xero, another key New Zealand Salesforce customer, deployed an AI customer service agent on its website in April, which is accessible to around five million Xero accounting software users worldwide.
“It creates capacity for our people, our specialists, the deep, deep knowledge people, to still be involved, to still be part of it," says Nigel Piper, executive general manager, customer at Xero, which separately has created Just Ask Xero (JAX), an AI agent for use within the Xero interface that accesses a customer's financial data to serve up information quickly.
Agritech company Halter, which has seen its Salesforce grow to 300 people internationally as it scales up its smart cow collar business in the US, Europe, and South America, uses AI agents to deliver company data stored in Salesforce to the Halter app.
Agents on the ranch
A demo at Dreamforce showed how salespeople driving between farms in their company utes can interact with Halter’s voice agent via the app to set up meetings, adjust contracts and get an update on their sales targets.
Dreamforce’s major Salesforce announcement was “AI Force”, an approach designed to let organisations access Salesforce data and workflows through the interface that best suits them – whether that is Salesforce’s own software, Slack, Anthropic’s Claude or another AI front end.
Phillimore-Smith described it as a move towards greater customer choice, while retaining the security, governance and workflow controls that sit beneath the interface.
“Salesforce is saying that our platforms continue to provide everything they have done for 25 years around the trust, the security, the governance, the semantics and all those workflows that your business runs on are still there,” he said.
AI at a tipping point
But AI Force is also an acknowledgement that the future of software companies is not owning the interface, instead focusing on maintaining and organising high-quality business data so it can be accessed by your AI agents of choice.
But the harder task for the majority of Kiwi businesses remains scaling pilots into business-as-usual deployments and building workforce capability.
“We’re at that kind of tipping point now,” Phillimore-Smith told me.
“Businesses, organisations can see that the technology does work, it’s trusted, and I think we’re now seeing an up-skilling coming off the back of that.”
Listen to the entire conversation with Richard Phillimore-Smith on The Business of Tech, streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Peter Griffin attended Dreamforce as a guest of Salesforce.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What if becoming a better leader isn't about adding more to your toolkit, but knowing what to let go of?
In this episode of HR Unlocked, Lisa Oakley sits down with Heather Langton, Chief People Officer at Spark, to explore what leadership, HR, and human capability need to look like in a rapidly changing world.
Drawing on more than 20 years of experience across human resources, transformation, talent, leadership development, and succession planning, Heather shares a thoughtful perspective on what she calls the "great unlearning" of leadership.
Rather than continually asking what else leaders need to add, Heather argues that leaders need to reflect on what has worked in the past, what may no longer be relevant, and how they need to reset for the future.
The conversation explores adaptive leadership, feedback, intergenerational learning, reverse mentoring, executive collaboration, AI, human intelligence, wellbeing, and the importance of relationship building.
Heather also shares why curiosity remains one of her most valuable leadership tools, why HR is fundamentally about partnership, and why leaders need to become more comfortable operating without all the answers.
From supporting mature workers and learning from younger generations to developing stronger middle leaders and embedding wellbeing into everyday work, this episode offers practical lessons for anyone navigating leadership in a complex and changing environment.
What You'll Learn
Why Heather believes leadership is entering a period of "great unlearning"
Why leadership development needs to be more continuous and adaptive
How in-the-moment feedback can support stronger leadership
Why clarity matters even when leaders don't have all the answers
How reverse mentoring can strengthen intergenerational learning
Why power imbalances matter in leadership and workplace culture
How mature workers can continue contributing in different ways
Why curiosity is one of the most valuable capabilities for enterprise leader.
How HR can operate as a genuine business partner
Why strong executive teams require ongoing work and honest conversations
How AI is increasing the importance of human intelligence
Why middle leaders will play a critical role in the future of work
How smaller businesses can approach leadership development and AI without huge budgets
How Spark embedded wellbeing more directly into the organisation
Why systems thinking is an important capability for future HR leaders
Key Takeaways
Leadership development isn't always about adding more skills. Sometimes it requires unlearning what no longer works.
Leaders need to reflect more frequently on their impact rather than relying on annual development plans.
Clear leadership does not mean having every answer. It means giving people clarity about direction.
Regular, in-the-moment feedback helps make development more natural and less threatening.
Intergenerational workplaces create an opportunity for reciprocal learning.
Reverse mentoring can help senior leaders challenge assumptions and better understand emerging generations.
Great enterprise leaders remain curious and ask strong questions rather than trying to know everything.
HR is fundamentally about partnership, not people pleasing.
Strong executive teams need to continually work on collaboration, trust, and shared accountability.
AI will increase the value of human intelligence, including judgement, context, insight, and relationship building.
Leadership development does not need to be large, expensive, or overly complicated to have an impact.
Wellbeing is more effective when it is embedded into the organisation rather than sitting on the edge.
Future HR leaders need strong relationship-building skills, self-awareness, and systems thinking.
Sometimes the best approach is to "hasten slowly" by pausing long enough to consider the wider system before acting.
About Heather Langton
Heather Langton is Chief People Officer at Spark, one of New Zealand's leading telecommunications and digital services organisations.
Heather joined Spark in 2013 and was appointed People and Culture Director in 2019. She has more than 20 years of experience in human resources, with expertise spanning business transformation, talent management, leadership development, and succession planning.
Her career has included senior HR roles across FMCG, retail, hospitality, technology, and communications.
At Spark, Heather has played a key role in developing leadership capability, building high-performing teams, strengthening organisational culture, and helping the business navigate significant transformation and technological change.
She is passionate about adaptive leadership, intergenerational learning, human intelligence, and creating organisations where people can continue learning and contributing throughout their careers.
Why This Episode Matters
Leadership is becoming more complex as organisations navigate AI, changing workforce expectations, multiple generations at work, and increasing uncertainty.
This episode offers a practical and deeply human perspective on what leaders need to do differently.
Rather than trying to become experts in everything, Heather encourages leaders to remain curious, build strong relationships, seek different perspectives, and become comfortable adapting their approach as circumstances change.
For HR professionals, People & Culture leaders, executives, business owners, and managers, this conversation provides practical ideas for developing leaders, strengthening workplace relationships, embracing technology, and building organisations that are ready for the future.
Resources & Links
Spark: https://www.spark.co.nz/
Connect with Heather Langton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heather-langton-0ba45b3a/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Let's start with the good news. The annual State of the Thriving Nation report prepared for the Business Leaders Health and Safety Forum says workplace injury claims have fallen 28% over the past decade, and some of the biggest drops have come in the industries with the worst histories of harm, those like forestry and construction and the like. Although the report says rates of harm are still much higher than in Australia or the United Kingdom – that's the bad news. And that work related mental wellbeing is the one area getting consistently worse.
One of the reasons for the lower rates of workplace injuries in other countries, according to the Forum CEO Francois Barton, is that it costs businesses more in Australia and the UK if their workers come to grief, as he told Ryan Bridge.
"In short, it's more expensive in those countries when we get safety wrong. In Great Britain and Australia, there are much clearer signals, I think, to business and workers alike from the regulatory system, the insurance system is obviously a different industrial makeup over there. So it can sound a little brutal, but in essence it's cheaper to injure and hurt people in New Zealand than some of these other countries."
The Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill passed its third reading at the beginning of July. Workplace Relations and Safety Minister, as she was then, Brooke van Velden, argued the existing regime was confusing and expensive for businesses without making workers safer, and that attention should go to the risks most likely to cause death, serious injury or serious illness. Labour's promised to repeal the bill and will go one step further, introducing a corporate homicide law that could send employers to prison for life when failures kill workers.
The Government's argument is that smaller businesses shouldn't have to go through the red tape and the hoops and hoopla that larger businesses do. But if you look at some of the worst workplace accidents, there was a Timaru lumberyard, which would be classified as a small business, where one of the young workers was crushed to death on a conveyor belt that didn't have a guard on it. And a year earlier, a three-year-old boy was crushed to death after a stack of logs collapsed and rolled on him while he was visiting his dad at the same yard. So this is a small business that presumably wouldn't have to go through the bells and whistles that some of the larger businesses do, and yet it's clearly an unsafe working environment.
The young scaffolder, Jaden Nelson, who lost both his arms when he was electrocuted setting up scaffolding back in 2022, that one still fills me with horror, that poor young father of three is having to navigate life now without his arms after numerous surgeries to repair his kidneys and his heart and his organs after a massive electric shock. That scaffolding business would have been a small business too.
The Business Leaders Health and Safety Forum says neither more legislation nor lighter rules will fix a system that businesses struggle to navigate in the first place. The report says we need better regulatory practice, not more law. National argues, or the coalition government argues, that the Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill will make things less confusing, that businesses won't have to read through all practice for all business, only that which relates to their particular way of doing things, like an accounting firm wouldn't have to go through the same hoopla as a lumberyard, perhaps.
There has been more money for workplace safety inspections, but as Sharmabel Jacob says, who prepared the annual State of the Thriving Nation report, you can't inspect your way to a safe workplace. There just simply aren't the inspectors to do that. You are dependent on the owners of the businesses doing that.
Should small businesses carry lighter health and safety duties, or should the same rules apply to every workplace? I would have thought it would depend on the business. If you are a timberyard, it wouldn't matter if you employ three people or 300, you should have the same safety practices, whereas if you're an accountancy firm, surely you wouldn't have to go through the same standards and the same procedures, the same kind of box ticking exercise as somebody working in forestry?
According to the report, there's quite enough law already designed to protect workers, it's just the way it's interpreted, it's the way it's followed, it's the willingness of employers to put procedures in place to keep their workers safe and to insist that they use the safety gear they've provided and follow the rules that they've laid out. Because I've heard from a number of employers that they do all they can to protect their workers, who continually refuse to wear the glasses because they fog up, or won't clip themselves to safety harnesses because they can't get to where they need to get to.
I'd love to hear from you on this one if you're an employer, and indeed if you're a worker working in an unsafe environment. Are your concerns listened to? Do you feel protected? And in many cases, the workers who have been injured are uneasy about the business and the business practices, they think it's a bit shonky, that they're cutting corners, but they don't feel they can speak out otherwise they'll lose their job.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

New data shows insurance disputes have risen to record levels for the year ended 30 June 2026.
The Insurance & Financial Services Ombudsman Scheme reported handling 3,977 cases during this time period, including 2,602 complaints - with dispute volumes increasing almost 190 percent over the past five years.
NZ Herald Wellington business editor Jenee Tibshraeny says much of this increase was driven by health insurance claims, and this data reflects growing pressures on the health system.
LISTEN ABOVE
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

High-profile leaders open letter to political parties, asking to consider private property investors in New Zealand
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.