The NZ AI Benchmark · Free · 20 minutes
How does your business stack up?
A free 20 minute benchmark for New Zealand organisations. Forty questions, eight dimensions, and your stage on the AI Playbook's five, with the one move that takes you one stage up. Not five.
How it works
Twenty minutes to know where you stand.
No account needed to start. Tell us four things about your organisation, answer honestly, and pick the row that sounds like a normal Tuesday, not the row you aspire to. Not sure is a valid answer: it counts as a visibility gap, never as a low score.
Answer forty questions.
Five per dimension, each a plain description of what a normal week looks like. Role, size, industry and region first, so your answers can be benchmarked.
See your stage.
Your stage on the AI Playbook's five, the trap at that stage, a radar of all eight dimensions and what you cannot see yet. Straight away.
Get the full report and the next move.
Leave your work email for the detailed breakdown: commentary for every dimension, the patterns in your answers, how you stack up against other New Zealand organisations, and the one move that takes you one stage up.
The framework
Eight dimensions, six steps.
The AI Playbook's six steps, plus leadership and the knowledge that feeds every tool. The tool question is the last question, so it carries the least weight.
Strategy & Leadership
Is there a number AI is meant to move, and does a leader own it?
People & Culture
Is there an AI Ambassador, and does one person's improvement become everyone's baseline?
Data & Knowledge
Is how you do your best work written down somewhere an AI can use it?
Tools & Systems
Managed accounts, an approved list people can name, and tools that add up to a system.
Use Cases & Workflows
Has one workflow been redesigned around AI, and where does the saved time go?
Governance & Protocols
Who decides, how fast, and is the data boundary enforced by tools rather than trust?
Skills & Training
A baseline before tool access, training on real work, and a verification habit.
Risk, Privacy & Responsible AI
Existing New Zealand law, disclosure and consent, Māori data as practice, and agents with checkpoints.
Five stages
One letter is the whole game.
Most New Zealand organisations sit between Experimenting and Adopting and believe they are further along. The gap that matters is between stage 3 and stage 4: making the old work faster, or redesigning the work itself. Adopting or adapting.
Aware
Leaders reading headlines. The trap: mistaking awareness for progress.
Experimenting
Ad hoc use, no policy, no standard. The trap: this is the highest risk stage, not the safest.
Adopting
Policy, training and tools live. Work is faster. The trap: the adoption ceiling.
Adapting
Workflows redesigned around AI. Operating logic has changed. The trap: adapting everything at once.
Frontier
Agents run adapted workflows in production. The trap: forgetting the discipline.
87 percent of New Zealand organisations use some form of AI and only 12 percent have scaled it across the whole business (Datacom State of AI Index 2025). The distance between those two figures is the Adaptation Gap, and it is where the benchmark places you.
The benchmark
Against best practice now. Against other New Zealand organisations as the cohort grows.
Best practice, from day one.
Every dimension shows the stage you are at, the stage above it, and what good looks like there: a named number with an owner and a baseline, low risk decisions inside five working days, a training baseline before tool access, agents with a folder rather than a drive.
Your peers, once there are enough of them.
When at least 20 organisations in your industry, size band or region have completed the benchmark, you see where you sit among them. Until then you see how many have taken it so far. Respondents to the benchmark, not a representative sample, and we say so on the page.
Free, and the next move is always one stage up
Find out how you stack up. Then make one move.
Take the benchmark now, or book a free CEO briefing call and we will walk through your stage, the pattern in your answers, and the one or two moves worth making first.