Meet the four finalists of the Best Implementation of AI in Aotearoa award

Most of the worry about adopting AI comes down to one thing; that AI means automation and automation means less jobs. The four finalists for the award we sponsored at this year's Aotearoa AI Summit showcased a different pattern. New Zealand is reshaping work and boosting productivity. This allows AI to automate repetitive and time-consuming jobs, allowing teams to focus on more complex tasks. The four finalists may have handed over the work nobody wanted but still left the decision exactly where it needs to be. With a human.

Enlighten Designs sponsored the Aotearoa AI award for Best Implementation of AI in Aotearoa. This award acknowledges those teams and organisations that used AI to influence a business positively, helping with business productivity and proving measurable results.

The finalists were announced at the Aotearoa AI summit in Wellington. Each of them was shortlisted for taking one process and implementing AI properly to work inside it.

Four Finalists in the Best Implementation of AI in Aotearoa award

Tripp Andrews Surveyors

Reinventing Engineering in Land Development.

Tripp Andrew Surveyors built two AI systems that run engineering calculations and applied council condition checks for land development. Engineering calculations and condition checks in land development used to be manual and slow. They built the two systems in production on Azure and Claude Code. One system handles the standard based calculations and the other reads project conditions while assigning responsibility automatically. On a recent project, specification for a full subdivision job used to take two to four hours now takes ten minutes. Every output still carries a chartered engineer’s sign-off. Five months ago, nobody in the team was using AI. Today more than half of the team does.

EDconnect and Scribo

Accelerated Online Writing Tool Implementation

Scribo is a purpose-built, secure AI tool that coaches students in real time as they write rather than writing for them, accompanied by in-person training from EDconnect. The team found 61% of year 8 students were more than a year behind in writing. In two months, the tool reached 1,800 teachers, 40,000 students and 450 schools, with students producing 20 million words across 100,000 assignments. Teacher confidence in the tool sat at 92.5%, and up to 81% of students improved their writing scores.

Nodey

Structural Engineering Reimagined

Nodey built a structural engineering platform which runs a full structural analysis with design compliance checks against New Zealand standards. Their AI layer explores design options, optimises layouts, and recommends it in front of an engineer to review and approve. Every recommendation is traceable, so the engineer can see the calculation and the reasoning behind it. Structural engineering has a problem that AI cannot solve on its own. Every calculation must be deterministic, where the same input always produces the same result, and most generative AI is probabilistic by nature. Nodey’s AI platform took a complex residential project that once took two weeks now takes under 40 minutes. The model can also recalculate automatically whenever a architect changes the design

Awa Digital

Tuhi AI

Awa Digital built Tuhi, a New Zealand sovereign ambient scribe AI tool developed in partnership with Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora. Clinicians found they lose many hours a day to document consultation, which is the time that belongs to patients. With consent, Tuhi listens to the consultation and drafts the clinical note in seconds, built for New Zealand accents, clinical terminology and Te Reo Māori with every note reviewed and approved by the clinician. It is in production across hospitals, primary care and emergency departments and saves around an hour of documentation per clinic session. This is equivalent to seeing three to four patients in a day.

Four Industries, one thing in common

Not one of them took the person out of the decision. The engineer still approves the design. The clinician still signs the note. The surveyor still signs off the subdivision. The teacher is still the one who teaches. What got handed over was the repetitive, well-understood work sitting around those jobs.

The summit discussed the fear of AI introducing job losses. The New Zealand work being recognised points the other way. Keeping a person in the loop and allowing human judgement ensures accuracy, safety, and accountability instead of total replacement.

You can read more about the finalists for the best implementation award and the other finalists from the other award categories through this website and cast your vote for the People’s AI Choice award winner.