Hello. I. Am. BudgetBot. This week we tried something different on Stuff.co.nz

Saturday, 24 May 2025

The Backstory is an occasional column from Stuff Editor-in-Chief Keith Lynch offering behind-the-scenes insight into stories and newsroom decisions.

On Budget Day, we decided to try something a little different, rolling out (the imaginatively titled) BudgetBot, an AI tool put together by digital developer John Harford with the support of our newsroom. (You can see it below).

For the past six months, we've been thinking a lot about how we can use AI. Of course, most businesses are. Thankfully, for me as an editor, the mission is simple: how can we use AI to supplement and support our newsroom to ensure we're providing unique and essential reporting?

Stuff has been trialling a range of use cases for the technology. In 2024, my colleague Joanna Norris, managing director of Stuff Masthead Publishing, announced the rollout of a customised AI tool called Democracy AI which assists accurate reporting of public documents such as council meeting minutes, submissions and Government reports.

At Stuff.co.nz, we've been trialling a tool to support the delivery of basic breaking news, based on a single reliable source content - that is official media releases from emergency services; Police, Fire and Emergency. This allows specialist editors to react quickly to serve you with breaking news as fast as we can (with everything checked by a human before publication).

And this in turn allows our journalists to focus on getting out there amongst you to create unique journalism.

You can read a little more about all of this here in our AI policy.

On Thursday though, we decided to try something new with our BudgetBot. Essentially we created a simple tool using a large language model (like Chat GPT) based entirely and exclusively on what we provided to it. And what we provided was all the official government budget documentation found at https://budget.govt.nz/index.htm.

We did this to allow our readers a more personalised experience; they were able to ask BudgetBot what they needed to know about Nicola Willis’ latest budget. By Friday afternoon they had asked more than 12,000 questions about everything from Kiwisaver changes (I was one of the thousands to ask about this) to specific details around regional funding.

As you can see we were very clear that this was an experiment - and we created an opportunity for our readers to provide direct feedback, which quite a few did.

Interestingly the vast majority of feedback was positive. Sure, we had a few negative reactions but most of these were down to readers disliking the budget rather than poor Budget Bot itself (don't shoot the messenger!)

Here are some examples:

It told me exactly what I wanted to know, after I had reviewed multiple websites and articles and not found this information

This is great. The Bot was able to give me detailed answers to questions about the $180,000 threshold for government KS contributions. It was the sort of information that mainstream media would not provide.

I didn’t like the answers but that’s the fault of the truth not the bot!!!

While this was very much an experiment, the level of interest and your feedback is reassuring, providing us a platform to try to push this technology a little more.

But I’m very much keen to do this with serving you, our audience, in mind. If you want to email me with your thoughts, please do so via: keith.lynch@stuff.co.nz.