Christchurch Artificial Intelligence

5:30–6:00 pm — Drinks & Networking
6:00–6:45 pm — Agent Management: The Next High-Value Skillset — Caelan Huntress
6:45–7:30 pm — Agent Habits with an Engineer's Mindset — Blake Burgess
7:30–8:00 pm — Drinks & Open Q&A

This month's Meetup dives into the management skills agentic AI demands, and the daily habits of an engineer already working alongside agents.

Agent Management: The Next High-Value Skillset — Caelan Huntress
AI agents are changing the way work gets done. As agentic systems become more capable, our real advantage will not come from technical proficiency. It will come from knowing how to manage AI agents well.

Scoping agentic projects, managing autonomous systems, evaluating their performance, and designing the information environments that make agents effective — these are the skills of the future. This intermediate-level session is for proficient AI operators, team leaders, and decision-makers who want to understand the next layer of AI capability.

In this session, you will learn:

• What AI agents are, and how they differ from simple chat-based tools
• Which new skills matter when agents start taking action on your behalf
• How organisations can identify useful agentic projects
• What tools can be used to build agent harnesses
• What it takes to manage, monitor, and improve AI agents in production
• Why context engineering, system prompts, and performance evaluation are becoming core professional capabilities

Agent Habits with an Engineer's Mindset — Blake Burgess
What are AI agents, really, and what can they actually do? Blake brings 20 years of programming experience to a motivational, actionable walkthrough of agents in practice. Expect serious local agents and cloud agents, explained simply.

We will work through some jargon because words are important, and with a newfound understanding of "harnesses" and "models" we will look at how a senior engineer approaches agents — for work stuff, and other stuff. You will start to see the habits, hooks, and opportunities where agents can play a part, and then you can try it, too.

You will learn:

• The difference between local agents and cloud agents in everyday use
• How a senior engineer thinks about harnesses and models
• Where agents fit into existing workflows without rebuilding them
• Practical habits and hooks you can adopt straight away

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When: Monday, 8 June, 5:30–8:00 pm
Where: EPIC Innovation, Christchurch
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Sponsored by the AI Coaching Academy. Come have some 🍻 beer and wine🍷 and raise a glass with your local AI Community!
https://ai-coaching.academy/

5:30–6:00 pm — Drinks & Networking
6:00–6:45 pm — AI Is Not Neutral: Designing Healthcare AI for Real Work, Real Risk — Rowena Woolgar
6:45–7:30 pm — AI in Agri-Food: Real Opportunities and Smarter Growth — Dr Harold Mayaba
7:30–8:00 pm — Drinks & Open Q&A

This month's Meetup dives into two industry verticals where AI is already changing how decisions get made: healthcare and agri-food.

AI Is Not Neutral: Designing Healthcare AI for Real Work, Real Risk — Rowena Woolgar
AI in healthcare is never just a technical decision. It reshapes judgement, accountability, and trust. This session explores how AI must be designed and implemented differently across healthcare roles, from administrators and clinicians through to multidisciplinary teams, service delivery, and national system integration.

Drawing on real-world healthcare experience across local, national, and international services, Rowena traces how AI can safely support administrative flow, augment clinical reasoning, and scale insight across services without eroding safety or equity. The discussion extends to managerial and system-level considerations, including national datasets, governance, and service commissioning.

In this session, you will learn:

• How AI must be designed differently across healthcare roles and contexts
• Where AI can safely support administrative, clinical, and system-level work
• What national datasets, governance, and commissioning require from AI
• Why transparency, ethics, and human-centred design are non-negotiable
• What responsible AI delivery actually looks like in practice

AI in Agri-Food: Real Opportunities and Smarter Growth — Dr Harold Mayaba
Agri-food is one of New Zealand's most strategically important industries, and one where AI adoption is still uneven. Dr Harold Mayaba is an Agri-Food and Market Consultant, motivational speaker, and coach with a PhD in Applied Economics from Lincoln University. He works at the intersection of AI, market intelligence, consumer behaviour, business growth, and human resilience.

Harold has been building practical AI systems for the agri-food sector that help producers, exporters, and organisations focus on real opportunities, sharpen market positioning, and improve decision-making. In this session, he will show how AI can move beyond hype to become a working tool inside agri-food and adjacent industries — solving real problems, surfacing real opportunities, and supporting smarter strategic growth.

You will learn:

• How AI is being applied inside agri-food and market intelligence
• Where AI sharpens decisions in producer, exporter, and consumer-facing work
• How market signals and consumer behaviour data become AI-driven advantage
• How non-technical professionals in primary industries can start using AI
• Examples from working AI systems already in use across the sector

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When: Monday, 13 July, 5:30–8:00 pm
Where: EPIC Innovation, Christchurch
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Sponsored by the AI Coaching Academy. Come have some 🍻 beer and wine🍷 and raise a glass with your local AI Community!
https://ai-coaching.academy/