The Kiwi business going against the AI grain
Sunday, 7 June 2026
AI has reached fever pitch, with New Zealand firms rolling it out left, right and centre. But one local company has said a hard no to chatbots, or any AI, interacting with its customers.
Rhys Greensill, founder and chief executive of Auckland and Christchurch-based software company Simplifi, says there is a lot AI can do well, but customer service isn’t one of them - at least not just yet.
While Greensill says he is “not a sceptic” of the technology, he is a sceptic of the capabilities it is purported to have currently.
“As incredibly powerful as AI is, I just don't believe it provides that sort of human connection and support [required]. I see incredible frustration when you're being asked to fill in a ticket and don't get responded to for sometimes days when you have an urgent problem,” Greensill told The Post.
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“At the end of the day it's humans that are still running businesses, still owning businesses… as a user, I want either to pick up a phone and ask for help and get somebody at the other end of the phone that can help me, or if I've got a query, bug or a problem, have that same sort of level of support.”
An AI interaction on the customer service front was not great right now, and in many cases less than ideal, he said.
An economist and management consultant by trade, Greensill said while he is at the helm of the Software as a Service (SaaS) business Simplifi will not use AI in its customer service.
“I'm happy to swim against the tide on this one,” he said.
It did not mean the company did not adopt AI at all.
“We're embracing it as hard and fast as we can. We're trying to work out where we could use AI to speed things up internally, and we're also building tools like optimisation engines that are going to help enhance our basic products, such as optimising what a roster looks like, for example.”
Simplifi first started out in the education sector, with software aimed at managing reliever teachers, and then expanded into the early childcare sector. Over the past 12 years it has grown into a full workforce management solution, with 2300 companies using its products.
It is used by over 50% of all primary and intermediate schools in New Zealand, and about 5000 reliever teachers using the app, doing 60,000 jobs a month.
Interest in AI adoption is at an all-time high, and trillions of dollars are being pumped into building out AI investment, amid a backdrop of chatter around over-valuations and an emerging bubble.
With so much private equity now involved in software businesses these days, there was increasingly a trend towards SaaS businesses working to remove customer support costs by putting in some tech solution to try and maximise profit levels, a lot of it clunky AI, Greensill said.
“There's lots of hype out there that says there's products that can do things well already, but when you really probe it, it’s all projections of what AI can do rather than reality. Everybody is expecting these things can be done by different pieces of software …. but realistically I see very few true examples,” he said.
“I'm old enough to remember going through when the internet got invented, and the way that affected business. Prior to running my own businesses, I was a management consultant, so I've had the luxury of looking at lots of businesses during that whole internet boom back in the 2000s.
'We use a lot of online services to support our business, a lot of software SaaS products that are now all being combined with AI tools.
“[But at the end of the day] SAAS is software as a service … so we've got to provide a service.”