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.
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