There’s a good chance that someone on the team is using an AI tool to complete a task in practically every small business in Wellington or Auckland right now, and they’re probably not making a big deal out of it. That image is made more tangible by a recent worldwide report from Employment Hero. Businesses in New Zealand are not adopting AI as quickly as those in the UK, Australia, and Canada, but those who do are doing so covertly, sometimes without their employers’ knowledge, and frequently with a persistent feeling that they probably shouldn’t.
When AI helps them produce better work, 37% of Kiwi workers say they feel bad about it. It’s an odd kind of distinction, but that’s the lowest guilt-to-usage ratio of any market surveyed. Over 25% use AI tools that aren’t approved by their employer. Instead of receiving any official instruction, more than half learned how to use these platforms on YouTube and TikTok. That final number is telling in some way. Employers, the government, and educational institutions are obviously not keeping up with workers who are self-educating through short-form videos to remain competitive in their jobs.
The National AI Strategy of the New Zealand government was just unveiled under the heading “Investing with Confidence.” In essence, the message to businesses is that there is a clear path ahead, regulations won’t stand in your way, and current laws are sufficiently broad to cover the majority of situations. This lax stance places New Zealand, along with Singapore and Japan, on the more permissive end of the global spectrum, far from the comprehensive AI Act of the European Union. The course of the next few years will determine whether that is a strategic advantage or a gap that is about to become a problem, and it’s honestly unclear at this point.
The difference between readiness and access is less unclear. When talking about similar dynamics in the Canadian market, Denis Panariti, head of financial lines at Beazley Canada, put it simply: just because you have access to a tool doesn’t mean you’re prepared to use it. That observation is widely disseminated. It’s possible that small businesses in New Zealand are clicking “accept” on AI tools without fully understanding what happens to their data once it enters a public model, whether the outputs they rely on are accurate, or what their liability is in the event that something goes wrong. Despite its careful wording, the government’s voluntary guidance document lacks the internal expertise that most SMEs need to create a governance framework from the ground up. voluntary.
Beneath all of this is a real and likely underreported workplace anxiety. 42% of Kiwi workers are concerned that employing AI will make them appear interchangeable. That is not a minor issue. People’s work habits, what they tell managers, and whether they develop real skills or merely learn to pass off outputs as their own are all influenced by this type of low-grade tension. According to Neil Webster of Employment Hero, skilled workers are the most conflicted because they both recognize the benefits of the tool and are afraid of it. Being in that situation is difficult, particularly in the absence of clear employer guidelines or a national framework to normalize responsible use.
Meanwhile, the tertiary sector in New Zealand has been reducing staff and courses. Government funding for humanities research on AI ethics has been denied on the grounds that it does not promote economic growth. It’s easy to understand the reasoning behind that calculation, but it’s also difficult to ignore the possibility that it is flawed. Out of 47 countries polled, the nation comes in third to last for trust in AI. In a different survey, 66% of New Zealanders said they were anxious about its effects. It will be difficult for a government strategy to gain the public trust it claims it wants if it ignores these issues, Treaty obligations, and the particular ways AI systems trained elsewhere could harm Mฤori communities.
It won’t be implemented until at least 2027. The tools are already widely available. The majority of the risk resides in that gap.
