Re:Gen AI Event: People as the Driving Force Behind AI

The next generation of AI in the Waikato gathered on 31 July 2026 through the Re:Gen AI event, hosted by Benny Pan of InspiraEd. Headline sponsored by Enlighten Designs, the event gathered almost 80 university students, young professionals, and high school students at the University of Waikato. Every attendee was at a different stage of their AI journey but navigated together to learn about using AI in different ways from editing AI images to building webpages with better prompting.

The event showcased how AI can be a helpful tool in capable hands and highlighted its speed plus the quality of its output. But like every other tool, having a human in the loop is always the most important factor. And that’s the lesson this night revolved around.

Needless to say, everyone was curious about AI and had plenty to ask about.

Lessons From Key Speakers

Kang Zhou opened with a problem most people never think to solve. AI generates images as pixel files you cannot edit as individual shapes, so he discussed his method of converting images into fully editable vectors.

Luca Fossen talked about the concept of comprehension debt, where accepting AI output without checking it leads to less and less reliable detection of mistakes. The main thought throughout his talk was the concept of “speed without understanding is a cost that adds up,” which scales fast in the context of AI.

Then, Andeed Ma took the stage and mentioned that AI holds no values of its own. It simply amplifies your own concepts, and outcomes depend on the person behind it.

And then it was Enlighten’s turn to present.

Enlighten’s AI Presentation

Rachel Martin and Tony Xia ran an interactive live demo where the audience participated and decided the outcome. The room voted on the topic and visual theme that the AI would follow. But before they asked the audience to decide what the website would look like, Enlighten’s speakers had already provided the AI with hours' worth of work, including refining the prompts to keep the AI from guessing and to produce the quality they wanted the first time. And within ten minutes, the AI built a fully functional, interactive HTML webpage that everyone can access.

Rachel made a point at the start of the presentation. “Think of AI as like a power drill. Imagine turning on a power drill and letting it loose on your workspace. It's probably just going to go everywhere and make a big mess. AI is exactly the same. If you let it loose with no instructions, it will probably just ruin the work.”

“AI needs to be guided. You need to steer it in the direction that you want and review every draft and every single output. The first output that you get is likely not correct and not done really well. How do you steer it? Better prompts. Better prompting allows you to tell the AI exactly what you want and when you want it,” she added.

The ten-minute interactive demo showcased the speed of AI in creating websites with the help of good prompting, but behind this was preparation from the presenters and highlights how their planning made all the difference.

Tony also made a good point when he said, “This is not shortcutting. We're not cheating. This is simply leveraging AI to become more productive. So, all the things that you're about to see in our presentation for the demonstration is such as the hover states, the working lights, and the full colour scheme, Rachel and I actually spent hours preparing for it.”

How Enlighten Designs Use AI

The presentation gives the audience a glimpse of the speed and quality at which AI operates, but how does that translate into actual work?

Tony shared that, “...AI leverages the work, but without us, there will be no content.” He also added that, “...Without a proper person driving behind the wheel, it will give us a lot of AI slop. So AI is exceptionally good at writing things. It types really fast, and it produces good outcomes if it were given proper instructions.”

And that’s exactly how Enlighten handles and uses AI at work. We assign the right expert to the right task and equip them with AI to make work more accurate. While AI is generally believed to make work faster, our deeper findings and study make it clear that AI makes delivery more stable.

On top of that, our human AI experts are always in the loop when checking the output that the AI produces. We make it a point that people are behind the wheel when AI work is involved, especially in QA work. Having someone check an AI output is what keeps the quality consistent.

That same commitment to quality can be seen when we deploy solutions to real clients that revolve around AI. Our human AI experts utilise the full capability of AI to deliver precise solutions for analysing survey data, as can be seen in a previous case study we did about Creating Communities Australia (CCA).

The Genuine Takes

People as the driving force behind AI is the takeaway from every presenter that night. The young professionals and the future of the Waikato learned how AI can be a useful tool as long as we ensure it’s given all the information and context it needs through better prompting.

And the takes about AI didn’t end at the event as Rachel and Tony had more to share. Rachel said it like this, “The central lesson of our talk was to not imagine AI as a cheat code for getting work done, but a tool (like a calculator) which lightens the load and, when used correctly, can produce a high-quality output that matches exactly what you need from it.”

As for Tony, he said, “I think the message is that human in the loop is super important, and AI can do a lot under proper guidance.”

In the end, the Re:Gen AI Event was a success thanks to both the presenters and attendees. Everyone had gained new insights on AI and left the event equipped with new knowledge.

If you want to watch the presentation by Enlighten yourself, the recorded video is up on YouTube through this link. And if you’re interested in the other details of the event including photos, the agenda and presentations from the other speakers, InspiraEd has all the resources you can access here.