No I’m not a naysayer, in fact a large part of my business is designing AI systems and helping to train organisations on its use and adoption. But for the same reason New Zealand sits at the naughty kids table for OECD productivity, AI will not replace your job.
There is no shadow of a doubt that AI in all its forms is absolutely transformative to both business and society. You’d have to be living under a rock to argue against that! The big fear though is that with its rise and rise, are our jobs safe? The answer like everything is nuanced but broadly yes, your job is safe – however, its not for the reason you might think.
New Zealand has a few things going for and against it when it comes to this tussle between the rise of AI and job security;
1. We are the second most geographically isolated country in the world. 1st being Nauru which I’m embarrassed to say I’d never heard of but they have a population of <10k and their nearest neighbor is the Solomon Islands 3,000km away. New Zealand by contrast is 1,500km from Australia and much further from the traditional major markets of Europe, Asia and North America.
2. We have an abundance of intelligent, hard-working and innovative people.
3. Our population is around 5.3million human souls. Placing us 124th out of 197 sovereign countries by population. i.e. we are a minnow in the vast ocean of countries.
These three factors combined have meant that we’ve developed incredible resilience and coping mechanisms to allow us to survive and compete in an ever increasingly globalized world. The result speak for themselves, we sit at #32 in the world by GDP per head of population. This is balanced by being consistently #1 in the global Life-Work Balance Index (www.remote.com, 2025). You’d have to admit that’s a huge success against all odds. Particularly taking our lack of mineral wealth into account.
Enough with the stats Jimmy, get to the point…
If AI is meant to meaningfully displace roles, then there must be a clear articulation of the type of role best suited for AI replacement, and there is – many. However, good luck finding a full FTE in a New Zealand company currently doing one specific role or even task that could legitimately be displaced with AI. We have already watched this play out when RPA (robotic process automation) rolled into town and had a minuscule blip of impact on our productivity stats. We simply don’t have the scale.
Its this very factor that in my experience will work against us in the AI race. Put simply, we are so used to wearing so many hats in our roles across all industries, innovating where possible or simply working harder in times of crisis while cutting corners to try and serve our tiny market that we simply don’t have the scale required for AI to have a meaningful job displacement impact.
Here’s a few more stats. NZ has 617,330 trading entities. i.e. registered companies with over $30k per annum in revenue. Of these, Stats NZ cite 2,838 with 100 staff or more. That’s only 0.46% of all comapnies. However, in my experience working with literally thousands of NZ companies over my career, it is only organisations over 2,000 staff that start to have multiple people in finance roles, or any back-office support roles in general that are ripe for whole FTE job displacement. There are no definitive numbers but my analysis of current business demography data suggests only around 70 to 90 companies sit in this bracket. No thats not a typo, seventy to ninety companies in all of New Zealand probably have the scale for AI and robotics to start to genuinely displace a whole FTE in a back office role. Lets assume for a moment that in these companies you could displace a whole role in each of the big departments; marketing, sales, finance, HR & logistics. You are looking at 400 people out of a workforce of 2.9M. That’s 0.014%. I’ll take those odds.
This scale gap is exactly why global headlines about ‘AI job displacement’ rarely apply here. In economies like the US or UK, the ‘long tail’ consists of massive corporations with thousands of staff performing hyper-specialised, repetitive tasks—the exact kind of roles AI eats for breakfast. In New Zealand, our ‘long tail’ is the opposite: a massive base of SMEs where employees are the ultimate Swiss Army Knives. When your ‘Accounts Person’ is also your ‘HR Manager’ and your ‘Social Media Coordinator,’ AI can’t replace the person; it can only augment the individual tasks. While a Wall Street firm might use AI to cut headcount, a Kiwi firm uses AI to finally give their overstretched team the breathing room to actually innovate.
So, lets not fixate on job displacement or job loss and instead focus on how leveraging AI can lift the quality of our work, raise our productive capacity and improve the quality of our products. There is SO much to be gained and so little to be lost that everyone participating in the workforce should be looking to upskill and figure out how AI can augment their current role. Employers should be training their staff on how to leverage AI correctly for their role. Employees should be embedding AI in their home and personal life. We need to embrace this change together for mutual benefit. We have everything to play for and virtually nothing to lose. We are perfectly positioned to lift our historically horrendous productivity stats while maintaining that coveted #1 “work-life balance” spot. With a small investment in time and a paid license to a reputable AI platform you are well on your way. Be part of the positive change and get amongst it!