From AI fear to AI fever - the mood flips at Spark tech summit

Friday, 14 November 2025

More than 650 people attended Spark’s technology summit this year.

The sense of doom and gloom around AI at last year’s Spark technology summit has shifted to a frisson of excitement about its potential, according to this year’s organiser.

The two-day summit, held at Auckland’s Viaduct Events Centre this week, drew in executives from some of the country’s largest companies to look at how businesses can harness artificial intelligence to drive innovation, resilience and growth.

Google New Zealand country manager Caroline Rainsford, Microsoft Australia and New Zealand chief technology officer Sarah Carney, Meta head of business AI Clara Shih and technology futurist Amanda Johnstone were among keynote speakers at the event.

Spark chief technology and AI officer Matt Bain said the summit - now in its second year - attracted more than 650 people including executives from most major and international companies operating in New Zealand.

Bain said executive attitudes towards AI were changing, with a stark difference in sentiment noticeable among leaders at this year’s summit.

Bain told The Post there was now an acceptance it was an inevitable change - whether wanted or not - and leadership teams were keen to learn how to embrace the changes widespread AI adoption would bring.

Consumers were still ahead of businesses when it came to adoption and regularly using the technology at this stage, he said.

“Last year there was a lot of doom and gloom and fear about the risks of AI and, a fear of getting started because of the risks. This year there's been a lot more optimism around how do we start to get on the front foot and make the most of this technology.”

A 5G drone used by Air New Zealand to assist with stocktaking at their warehouse, was one piece of many technologies and devices on display at Spark’s Accelerate technology summit held in Auckland this week.

Bain said the easiest place to implement AI into a business, and where it would make the biggest benefit, was in developing software.

Technology futurist Amanda Johnstone offered a glimpse into the future of AI and the impact it will have on society during her keynote speech.

While generative and agentic AI tools are what most businesses are dabbling with in this country, Johnstone said there were parts of the world, including in China, where far more advanced generations were being used, such as physical AI with robotics and emotion AI.

Amanda Johnstone during her keynote speech about emotion AI.

Johnstone spoke about how data can be harvested from the body, rather than your computer and used to help with the likes of advertising and how we communicate.

“Emotion AI, or the Internet of Bodies as I like to refer to it, harvests data from your 16 psychophysiological [the interaction between psychological and physiological processes] states of your body, such as facial recognition … and it is used in a lot of technologies such as cars now, for example, for driver fatigue sensing, right through to gut biome and cortisol.”

With deep fakes now so believable, Johnstone said society needed to look at the other parts of what makes us human, and “the other data that we can extrapolate from bodies, through things like our humble Apple Watch, Airpods or our Oura ring, or even our pacemakers, and use those to figure out what is real, who is human and that proof of human piece”.

Johnstone said there are already companies and societies using this type of data to improve their work and business, such as Apple which was already at work on how it could harvest data from brain waves.

“In the next few years you’ll simply be able to send a text message from your thoughts. We already have bone conduction technology in the likes of headphones that actually uses vibration technology through the skull, and that technology has also been built, tested and also deployed now, where people can simply send vibrations through their jaw or skull and that gets dictated through AI to speech.”

Johnstone said AI was able to give people more chances to communicate using technology.

Sarah Carney, national technology officer of Microsoft Australia and New Zealand, said it was “energising to see organisations start to move beyond the AI hype and focus on the substance and practicalities” of adoption.

She said AI adoption needed to be driven from the top of an organisation down for it to be experimented with and implemented safely.

“If AI is the spark, data is the fuel and culture is the accelerant,” said Carney.

“Acceleration happens when three switches flip together: solid data foundations, safety-by-design and a culture of collaboration. New Zealand is on the right track. The step‑change arrives as organisations hard‑wire AI outcomes into annual plans and sectors share repeatable playbooks so teams aren’t reinventing the wheel. When pilots become patterns and every deployment moves a real KPI, that’s when transformation compounds.”