Artificial Intelligence Research Platform

BioAI Platform: Accelerating Export-Led Growth From New Zealand's Bioeconomy

The BioAI Platform harnesses artificial intelligence and New Zealand’s world-leading bioscience expertise to drive practical innovation in agriculture, aquaculture, and forestry; industries central to our prosperity. This initiative unites scientists, businesses, and Māori partners to co-create new tools for real-world challenges, from labour shortages and pest threats to climate resilience and premium export requirements.

New Zealand’s connected research-industry ecosystem and diverse landscapes make us the ideal place where world-class AI solutions can be rapidly developed, tested, refined, and scaled before going global. Imagine robots that remove weeds with pinpoint precision, AI predicting fish health issues before they spread, or tools helping farmers adapt to changing weather; all pioneered here and exported to the world.

By connecting research excellence with business know-how and industry needs, the BioAI Platform drives the creation of high-skilled jobs, innovative startups, and stronger export industries, turning science into economic opportunity and leadership.

With $70M, the Platform targets a 12:1 return; $840M in direct impact plus billions more in protected exports and market access. The BioAI Platform is New Zealand’s launchpad for growth, jobs, and global influence in the AI-powered bioeconomy.

Contact email: Axel Heiser

Aotearoa Institute for Autonomous Intelligence: AI Autonomy at the Edge

New Zealand is set to lead in intelligent autonomy. The Aotearoa Institute for Autonomous Intelligence (AIAI) will transform our nation into a global testbed for advanced AI and autonomous systems—driving high-value exports, creating innovation-led jobs, and future-proofing our economy. Leveraging our unique environment—vast oceans, rugged terrain, and extreme weather—AIAI will develop resilient, adaptable AI that excels where others falter.

AIAI brings together New Zealand’s top research talent, deep-tech innovators, and industry leaders, convened by Victoria University of Wellington and Earth Sciences New Zealand. This powerhouse consortium demonstrates the commercial and innovative strength of Aotearoa.

AIAI will invest in three sector-specific innovation tracks, starting with aerospace and marine, to accelerate research-to-commercialisation and open new pathways. By proving technologies in New Zealand’s toughest conditions, we’ll unlock solutions for agriculture, logistics, energy, and environmental monitoring—broadening economic activity and strengthening national resilience.

Our vision: AIAI is New Zealand’s AI epicentre, attracting global talent, investors, and partners. We’ll build a world-class talent pipeline, connect local expertise with international networks, and ensure advanced AI research benefits communities and businesses nationwide. With robust governance, collaborative leadership, and a commitment to Māori participation, AIAI will anchor New Zealand’s place on the global innovation map.

Email ai@earthsciences.nz for more information and to express interest in participating.

Aotearoa Agentic Ai Platform: A Productivity Multiplier

The Aotearoa Agentic Artificial Intelligence Platform (AAAIP) will augment our population of 5 million New Zealanders with 100 million AI assistants, creating a wealthier and fairer country. AI assistants, or ‘agents’, can carry out tasks like diagnosing illness in collaboration with clinicians, predicting risk of fungal disease in an orchard, or automating drug discovery.

However, to grasp the Agentic AI opportunity, New Zealand needs to carry out AI research to create the next generation of smart agents, while upskilling our country so it’s ready to use the new agents. Currently, AI agents wait for human inputs. The next generation will learn and maintain themselves by actively seeking and evaluating data and observing the physical world. These are the agents the AAAIP will deliver, in collaboration with industry.

We will develop agentic simulations of New Zealand to test AI agents and related policies for reliability, efficiency, and alignment with our values before they are tested in the real world, based on world-leading NZ capability in large-scale agentic simulations. We will embed processes in agent design and testing, to ensure AI agents are trustworthy contributors to our organisations, industries and societies.

Through AAAIP, Agentic AI will increase productivity, scaling-up our economy.

Contact email: mediateam@auckland.ac.nz

Aotearoa Creative Artificial Intelligence Research Institute

The Aotearoa Creative Artificial Intelligence Research Institute will position New Zealand to capture a multi-billion-dollar global market opportunity while creating new highly skilled jobs and enabling technology companies, providing essential AI services New Zealand businesses need to stay competitive.

Led by Academy Award winning Wētā FX, the Institute will position New Zealand at the forefront of AI innovation - developing breakthrough technology in computer vision, generative models, digital twins, physically plausible datasets and AI rights management. Wētā FX’s 30 years of pioneering research into digitally recreating the physical world uniquely positions the Institute to lead the next decade of creative and physical AI research, where understanding and generating physically plausible worlds becomes critical across industries from robotics to digital twins.

These capabilities, built through 7 years of substantial private R&D investment in AI, will be shared with New Zealand's research and business communities, multiplying their economic impact. Universities would gain access to production scale datasets and infrastructure for training world class AI researchers. Startups could build on proven AI frameworks and tools, accelerating time to market. Established companies could access creative and physical AI to apply to their own challenges – improving medical imaging, optimising manufacturing processes, and advancing environmental research.

Contact email: publicity@wetafx.co.nz

Physical AI: Building Global Leadership in Outdoor Edge Intelligence

Physical AI (PAI) will help New Zealand lead the world in intelligent systems that can sense, learn, and act outdoors, on farms, in forests, on worksites, and along our coasts. Led by the University of Waikato with national partners, the New Zealand Institute for Physical AI will build a shared, open platform that turns research into practical tools:

• low‑power AI for sensors, drones, and robots
• a network of real‑world test sites
• clear safety and certification playbooks
• regular software releases that businesses can use and build on.

Public benefits are tangible:

• higher productivity and export earnings
• reduced chemical use through precision application
• safer workplaces as machines take on hazardous tasks
• better environmental monitoring and resilience.

The programme is co‑governed with Māori and embeds Māori data sovereignty and tikanga from the start to ensure trusted adoption and shared benefit.

We will also invest in people—training Masters and PhD students, offering industry placements, and supporting new start‑ups—so high‑value jobs and know‑how will grow in New Zealand. By sharing methods, data, and software nationally, this investment will create reusable assets for every researcher and firm.

Contact email: Professor Albert Bifet

New Zealand AI Platform

Aotearoa, New Zealand has some of the most interesting and challenging places in the world to use Artificial Intelligence. Our farms, forests, coasts, hospitals, factories, and communities are constantly changing and full of real-world complexity. These are exactly the kinds of environments where today’s AI often struggles.

We are building a new national AI Platform that will change that. It brings together leading NZ and international researchers, industry partners, and Māori leadership to create AI tools that genuinely work for us. This includes AI that can cope with uncertainty, support better decisions, protect our environment, boost productivity, and help people and businesses make the most of digital opportunities.

Our Platform will trial new ideas in real settings in orchards and farms, energy networks, and health technologies to quickly move innovations from early research to useful tools. It will support the growth of new high-tech companies and future-focused jobs.

A key part of the programme is developing talent. We will train students, upskill workers, and grow partnerships that ensure AI in Aotearoa is trustworthy, useful, and aligned with community values, including Māori data sovereignty.

This investment will help NZ to lead, not follow, in the fast-moving world of AI innovation.

Contact email: Kathryn Mackinven

Dr. Ian Foster is the Director of Argonne’s Data Science and Learning Division, Argonne Senior Scientist and Distinguished Fellow and the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He is also a leader of the Trillion Parameter Consortium, which aims to bring together groups interested in building, training, and using large-scale models with those who are building and operating large-scale computing systems.

Ian’s research contributions span high-performance computing, distributed systems, and data-driven discovery. He has published hundreds of scientific papers and 8 books on these and other topics. Methods and software developed under his leadership underpin many large national and international cyberinfrastructures. Ian has a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Canterbury and a PhD in Computer Science from the Imperial College London.

Professor Mary-Anne Williams is the Michael J Crouch Chair for Innovation at UNSW Sydney, where she is founder and lead for the UNSW Business AI Lab and serves as Deputy Director of the UNSW AI Institute. She is affiliated faculty at Stanford University and internationally recognised for her pioneering research in Artificial Intelligence, innovation strategy, and human-AI collaboration. Her work focuses on decision-making under uncertainty, human-centred AI, and the orchestration of intelligent agents to align with human values.

Mary-Anne’s career spans academia, industry, and policy. She is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE), and chairs the Digital Futures Forum at ATSE. Mary-Anne has been awarded the Australasian AI Distinguished Research Contribution Award (2022), and prestigious Faculty Awards from industry leaders like IBM and Google (2019 and 2021). Her academic journey includes a PhD in AI from the University of Sydney, an LL.M. in Innovation, Law and Technology from the University of Edinburgh, and executive education at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Industry and government partners for her research have included Roche, EY, IBM, Google, Disrupt, LinkedIn, Relay Robotics, Amazon, Visual Risk, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Denmark's National Bank, Samsung, Sony, and Softbank.

Mary-Anne guides and invests in start-ups and currently serves advisory boards including Kit, Defence Trailblazer, South Western Sydney Local Health District (Innovation reference group) and is a board member of the Australian SKA Regional Centre. Mary-Anne also teaches corporate innovation the Australian Graduate School of Management, where she gives Masterclasses on innovation and AI.

Stephen Gould is a Professor of Computer Science at the Australian National University (ANU) and a former Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow. He is internationally recognised for his contributions to computer vision, machine learning, and deep learning, with a particular focus on semantic, dynamic, and geometric understanding of images and video.

Stephen’s career spans academia, industry, and innovation. He has held roles as an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow, Microsoft Faculty Fellow, Contributed Researcher at Data61, Principal Research Scientist at Amazon Inc, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Robotic Vision, and Amazon Scholar. He also co-founded Sensory Networks, a startup later acquired by Intel. His academic journey includes degrees in mathematics, computer science, and electrical engineering from the University of Sydney, a master’s from Stanford University, and a PhD also from Stanford.

Stephen’s research has led to advances in structured probabilistic models, declarative networks, and large-scale scene understanding. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications and actively collaborates with industry to translate research into real-world impact.

Dr. Sean Gourley is a physicist and entrepreneur renowned for his work in artificial intelligence, complex systems, and data science. He provides advice and strategic input as an Independent Director of Serko Ltd and an Advisor for EdgeRunner AI, Cyber Sierra, Samsung Global Research, Dawn Aerospace and Starboard Maritime Intelligence.

Sean is the founder and former CEO of Primer AI, a San Francisco based artificial intelligence company building mission-critical applications to support the protection of security and democracy. Prior to this, he was CTO of Quid, a data visualisation company he co-founded in 2009. Sean also worked on self-repairing nano circuits at NASA and holds a PhD in Physics from Oxford, where his research as a Rhodes Scholar focused on complex systems and the mathematical patterns underlying modern war. Sean also holds a Master’s degree in Physics, Nanotechnology from the University of Canterbury. He has served as a political advisor, briefed USCENTCOM at the Pentagon, and addressed the United Nations in Vienna. He has served as a director at Anadarko, a Fortune 100 energy company, published scientific research on the cover of Nature and is a two-time National Decathlon champion.

Megan is a Technology leader with 25 years of experience delivering outcomes for global organisations across the finance industry in London, Europe, New York and Auckland, fostering transformation and innovation in a digital age and improving customer outcomes.

Ngāti Whakaue ki Tai, Ngāti Pikiao and Ngāti Raukawa ki te Tonga, Megan is the General Manager Technology NZ, Enterprise & Pacific at ANZ NZ Bank, accountable for Payments, Business, Institutional and Markets delivery for ANZ Bank in NZ and across the Pacific. External to ANZ, Megan holds multiple industry roles focused on growing emerging or Indigenous technology capabilities. She is a member of the Te Ao Matihiko a Māori Digital Board est. to position Māori as contributors, beneficiaries, and leaders, within the digital age, a board member of NZTech, and a member of the New Zealand Police expert panel on emerging technology. Until recently she held the Chair of the AI Forum NZ for 5 years, which focuses on bringing together the Aotearoa community of Artificial Intelligent innovators, users, investor groups, regulators, researchers, educators & entrepreneurs. They work to promote, connect and strengthen the adoption of AI in NZ including a focus on diversity, inclusion, safe and ethical AI. Megan is also the founder and member of the AI Forum Kāhui Māori.