AgentCamp Christchurch

In 2025 I organised a Global AI Bootcamp event in Christchurch and had a great response, there was a thirst to learn more about AI in a community conference setting. Yesterday, the follow-on event AgentCamp was held at Ara Institute of Canterbury, with a focus on Agentic AI.

Agentic AI is AI that can autonomously achieve a goal, by planning tasks, choosing the tools and actions to take and then executing the tasks. Agentic AI can also adapt its approach based on results, sometimes with human oversight and feedback.

Throughout the event we heard from experts including AI experts from Ara and our local IT community. I structured the event to allow people time to ask questions and interact, starting with a challenge for everyone to ask a question, talk to someone they don’t know and join their local user groups to keep connected and learning.

In my Keynote address, I framed the state of Agentic AI in New Zealand covering where were are now, the challenges ahead and a question, “what can we do?”.

Some of the challenges for New Zealand Organisations:

We need more than Agents. We need to reimagine your processes to understand where Agents can help and focus our investment.
Data quality issues will become more visible and can take considerable effort to fix.
Inadequate risk controls and poor governance will impact trust.
Fragmented user experience can impact user adoption and customer experience.
Unclear ROI can result in the business walking away.

Christchurch has a vibrant local tech sector, that exports technology to the world but we hardly ever make the headlines. The headlines talk about how tourism is booming once again and our primary industry exporters are hitting new records, but quietly working away here is our tech industry that contributed $24Billion to the New Zealand economy in 2024, including $11.5Billion in export earnings. We have 119,000 people working in tech, smart and capable people.

New Zealand also has some challenges to overcome, and that needs good leadership. According to a government report on AI, 40% of New Zealand businesses are in the lowest quartile of digital readiness when measured globally. We also have an AI skills gap, with an incredible 79% of businesses unsure on how to train staff effectively. There is a big gap to close and we need to focus. Don’t miss the opportunity.

120 people registered for the event and throughout the day, I spoke to people from all sorts of backgrounds. Students from Ara, Lincoln University and Canterbury University finishing degrees in Applied Information Systems, Computer Science, and Data Science, who need practical experience to start their careers. Engineers, Accountants, Lawyers, Software Developers and IT professionals. There was a theme, everyone was looking for opportunities to learn more about AI. Many didn’t know where to start.

I would like to extend a huge thank you to Ara Institute of Canterbury, my co-organiser Bryn Lewis and our fabulous speakers:

Nathan Rose – Agenting, Automating, and Copiloting: who gives a shift?
Mazharuddin Syed Ahmed, PhD – AI Literacy for Everyone: Fundamentals of AI, LLM, Agents, Agentic AI, ANI, AG
Sudeep Ghatak – Build an auto triage AI agent with Copilot Studio
Caelan Huntress – Context Engineering: The Foundation of Agentic Design
Steve Fox – Moving from “Block It” to Build It Safely: Managing AI Agent Risk
Rich Burdes – Lets create Word Documents with Copilot Studio, slot filling and prompts!
Ash L – The Agent Academy Crash Course: Get Your Recruit Badge!
Hamish Watson – Shipping Agents Like Software: CI/CD and Reliability for Agentic AI
Alan San Agustin – Total Recall: Curing Copilot Studio’s “Goldfish Memory”
Blake Burgess – Local agents: Replacing vibes and magic with engineering and math
Bryn Lewis – Breaking the Python Habit: Lightweight Edge AI
Amit Sarkar, PhD – Cases of Privacy-aware Intelligent Environments

These sessions covered both technical and non-technical topics. Have 3 Power Platform Microsoft MVP’s and two industry experts demonstrating the power of Copilot Studio reinforced by other speakers who covered industry research, practical hands on experience and learning. The biggest take away from all of this, is that you need to try things out and tune the models to meet your needs. Amit Sarkar said you can’t expect the tech giants who build the models, to understand your unique environment and requirements. I couldn’t agree more.

To help make the impact of this event extend beyond the post event drinks, I challenged everyone to take away something actionable and to keep connected with others they met on the day. This is important, because AI is changing at a rapid pace and none of us can learn this on our own.

In his presentation, Mazharuddin Syed Ahmed described it this way, “We are moving from the age of knowledge (how) to the age of wisdom (why)”. This has a profound implication for how we learn, work and engage with the world. AI does the work, people provide the wisdom. Wise words indeed.