Frances Valintine on risk of AI knowledge gap: ‘We're not using it in any way like we should be’
Saturday, 18 April 2026
Tech futurist Frances Valintine says artificial intelligence is accelerating at an exponential pace and is set to sit at the centre of daily life — but she’s concerned New Zealand isn’t harnessing its full potential.
Speaking to The Post, the entrepreneur, who has been head down working on a new education platform for those aged over 60, says she fears the country is going to miss the boat when it comes to becoming a frontrunner and early adopter of the technology.
AI and technology advancements have been the focus for The Mind Lab and Tech Futures Lab founder for the past 12 years. But Valintine says her predictions for what the technology could do has far exceeded her initial expectations - both good and bad.
Valintine said the industry’s understanding of AI had shifted dramatically in recent years, noting that what was imagined five years ago looked very different after the arrival of generative AI in 2022. She said early uses focused on simple tasks, but that phase “superseded very quickly” as the sector moved into agent‑based systems and ambient AI, which she described as all‑encompassing and ever‑present.
Valintine says not enough New Zealand companies are embracing AI. And the technology was rarely discussed at board level.
“My fear is I don't know whether New Zealand knows what it wants to be in five or 10 years’ time.
She said the experience of Covid, followed now by the oil crisis, had highlighted how far New Zealand was from key markets. If travel became too expensive, or climate concerns reduced flying, and with the country having moved away from manufacturing, she questioned what options would remain.
“It makes sense for us to be in the digital economy and focus on that because it's a well-paid industry,” says Valintine.
“We've got a small workforce, declining with the birth rate. But to compete in the digital economy, we have to decide which part of technology to focus on. We're a trusted nation … we could become the country people want to deal with when they're talking about AI through the lens of health or data or data sovereignty or culture, and build partnerships and capability around what that looks like - and leave those who want to just make extraordinary amounts of money and sell data and exploit AI to other markets.”
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Valintine said New Zealand had half-heartedly tried this in the past with the knowledge economy. “Ten, 20 years ago, New Zealand was really leaning into this, and we didn't really do it then. But if we don't do [it now], we are going to have a real challenge with the future economic environment because the sectors we're in right now are not scalable.”
With fewer people in the workforce, and more reaching retirement age a crunch was coming. The current ratio of four workers for every superannuitant was expected to decline to two, and Valentine said when it reached that point, ”you want the two people working to be able to bring the best possible return to the country and themselves“.
“We don't want them working necessarily in the hospitality industry, serving a tourism market where the rich and famous come and we become just a destination for those who can afford to get here. These are the things that worry me more than AI … but we can decide who we are as a country, and how we think about what AI is for us and where we play in the world.”
Valintine thinks of it as “a bit like a nuclear-free moment” for the country.
To do so, however, there would need to be a “very different approach” in terms of collective thinking, politics and the priorities.
Valintine, who was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2018 for her services to education and the technology sector, says AI today is different to what she imagined in 2016, when she studied the technology at Singularity University, and subsequently set up Tech Futures Lab, which helps professionals and organisations upskill in AI and emerging technology.
“Back then we saw it in a machine learning way; crunching numbers, giving us better insights, being able to have that widely embedded into health and diagnostics; how you could predict things in engineering, so that you could think about architecture and design in different ways, and procurement and logistics of efficiencies everywhere,” she says.
“What we didn't expect was the processes or the GPUs that came out of places like Nvidia, which have enabled these absolutely massive data sets. Back then we weren't aware of the volume of data, but also what the GPUs would be able to do with that data.”
The large language models are “incomprehensible in size for a market like New Zealand” she says, and in the past two months alone have made huge advances and become much more autonomous.
Who made decisions about guardrails - what they’ll be and whether or not they’ll be applied - is a “scary” consideration attracting some bad actors, Valintine says.
“Because the advances are happening so quickly, and we’re still grappling with early questions around ethics and risk, I don't know that we've got the ability to fully understand once these are activated and accessible, what others could use them for.”
Despite some risks, Valintine says, AI is fantastic for complex problems and for strategising. “Every company should be doing that. We would want to make sure that government, our hospitals, our education department are using it. But we also want to make sure our retailers, who bring in the things that we need, and supermarket chains, are all using it to plan for all possible scenarios.
“New Zealand is a good adopter of AI, but at a very low level. We're still a little bit back in that generative AI stage of writing funny emails,” she says.
“When I go to advise into boards, I'm still astounded at how little AI has been used in any formative way. Chief technology officers and chief information officers are pretty good, and data people, but they're using it more in a very narrow way, not necessarily looking across the broad sector or business. It's still seen as a tech tool, and not enough as a business analytics tool.”
Valintine says her work through higher education platform academyEx, found most people were holding back on fully utilising AI due to the cost involved.
She says the current “wait‑and‑see” approach poses a real risk, arguing that New Zealand needs to view AI as an investment in the same way it had once approached the shift to cloud computing.
At the moment people were experimenting with free tools, but not recognising the significant difference in capability between free and paid AI systems, which she describes as “completely different in terms of what can be achieved”.
“This is creating some big conversations inside corporates where they're saying, ‘If we open this up, how do we fund this going forward’, given that last month's best model is something different this month,” says Valintine.
“I think by the end of this year, we will be seeing AI in a very different way. It will be across the most progressive companies, across every part of the operations, and it will be integrated within all of their back of house, all the emails, all the interactions, in a very trusted, safe environment.”
Love Heart
Valintine’s latest venture - and newest education platform - Love Heart aims to bridge the AI and technology gap for those aged 60 and over, along with a wide range of other topics.
Designed with a focus on in-person social learning courses, Valintine says they cover topics that keep older folk engaged and could be used as a learning tool to upskill in the workforce.
She says for older generations, not understanding how to use or adopt AI safely will become increasingly detrimental.
She says that for older people wanting to stay in the workforce, understanding how to use AI will be increasingly important. There will soon be a clear divide between candidates who could explain how they used AI in a first interview and those who could not — a gap that risked leaving some applicants “on the wrong side of opportunity”.
“In 10 years’ time when it becomes even more ubiquitous … there will potentially be a big knowledge gap between the new generation.
“It'll be the way you interact with your hospital or your doctor, to the way that you connect in with holidays and friends and communicate with your grandchildren. It's going to be so prominent across everything and fairly invisible. It's not like you're going to see it as such, but if you don't understand how to get in you’ll certainly see.”
Valintine has spent 30 years working in higher education and set Love Heart up as a social enterprise. Fees are charged to cover costs, with anything left over to be reinvested back into the business and courses to make them more accessible.
Love Heart, co-founded by fellow businesswoman Fee Webby, who Valintine spent 10 years building The Mind Lab with, launched in Hawke’s Bay last week and will expand into Auckland in June.
Valintine believes the over-60s market - now New Zealand’s biggest population group - has been under-served for a long time. Of those aged 65 to 70 in New Zealand, about 50% were still working in some capacity.
“The benefits are longevity, cognitive improvement, but social connection is a big part of it. The more socially connected people are over the age of 60 and through to the rest of their lives, the healthier they are.”