The Small Business Project: Navigating the space between AI hype, bubble and exponential promise
Monday, 2 March 2026
The Small Business Project is a weekly series that shines the spotlight on Kiwi small businesses doing interesting and unusual things in their industries.
Entrepreneur Gareth Lawrence, founder of Wellington-based technology consultancy Koan, is working with government and the public sector to modernise and improve clients’ technology stack. Lawrence tells Aimee Shaw how he balances excitement for fast developing technology such as generative AI, and walking the line between discovery and protecting clients’ sensitive data.
What has your venture set out to achieve?
Koan is a cloud and software development consultancy. We're also an advanced AWS (Amazon Web Services) partner, and this version of the business in the current form started four or five years ago. Prior to that, it was providing development services to New York businesses. This time around, there's a lot of work to be done in public sector; there was a missing open source AWS shop in Wellington, where we transform applications and platforms using open source and AWS cloud services.
In the public sector Health New Zealand is one of our key customers. We've also done modernisation work with Met Service to help remove old technology and reduce licensing cost, and were a AWS partner for Wellington City Council. We’ve worked with Hnry in the past, helping them scale, and we've been a development partner for World Rugby since 2022, working on three applications for them.
How much time and money have you invested?
We’ve been running consistently over the past five years as a consultancy, so we haven't gone and raised capital. We've traded the income that we've had conservatively and built out some reserves through those years. The amount of hours that we've put in is massive, but I've also been incredibly lucky to find amazing people in New Zealand and in Wellington, able to do amazing things. You definitely work a lot of hours as a founder.
What’s the biggest challenge your business is facing?
There's a lot of change in this industry. Seeing if you can switch from the older consulting model, which is hourly based, to the outcomes-based model, is one of them. That's a change that we're seeing working with customers. I wouldn't say that's necessarily harder, but we do want to do a better job than the big four or five who aren't New Zealand-owned, who get a lot of work in local government.
What’s the biggest issue impacting your industry?
Generative AI. As a consultancy, we are navigating how to use it efficiently, and how far to go between on one side, hype, and to the far side, the bubble. But it is an important piece of technology to be up to date with.
We've been using tools like Claude Code for at least 18 months, and Opus 4.5 came out recently - for developing code it’s probably one of the best models out there. Then you also have other use cases to try to apply as a consultancy for customers using generative AI - they are different again.
In most cases generative AI works really well. There’s an ongoing torrent of information, and so we have to be conservative first because we've got citizens’ data that we're managing, and security is very important. Data can't be leaked, and so we’re always watching developments.
How do you feel about how fast AI is developing right now?
As technologists, we're always excited about seeing change in the industry and the new tools that come out. We embrace change. There is certainly a lot to be gained by using those tools, and most people are using them already - you might go to Google and see a Gemini pop up, for example. Those Large Language Models (LLMs) have trillions of parameters, and are definitely an advancement. But on the other side they do require a lot of power to run.
We're excited to see what these systems can do to improve outcomes for our customers. As business people watching the glass centre side of things, you have Nvidia shipping chips, and most of the hyperscalers, like AWS and Oracle, building out data centres, so we need a lot of compute and a lot of energy to runs those LLMs, and we have a balanced view on that.
What’s next for Koan?
We're looking to extend our go-to market into legacy modernisation, which we've been traditionally strong in; transforming applications. In simple terms, we want to continue to do more of what we are doing already.
In three years’ time you will be …
In the next two to three years, we'd like to continue to grow, add new customers, some in enterprise and maybe a bank or two. We'd also like to be able to provide larger projects, where delivering outcomes feels like we’re making a difference. Competing and getting into the tendering process on larger projects and increasing our size is a focus. We’d also like to double in size in the next three years.
Most helpful piece of advice you have ever received?
We want customers to work with us because of our values, because we want to do things differently. We want to be better, and so I think integrity and values are really important in business - it gives people the ability to relate and want to work with you.