Luke Kemeys

Business owners are struggling to see in the next three months, let alone 12 months, that

So, yeah, it's a bit sad to see the momentum that was there suddenly get evaporated.

Well I read some interesting data from CPA Australia and basically when Kiwi business owners in the SME space think about investing in technology,

only one in four of them think that it will improve their profitability and probably therefore maybe productivity as well.

So if three out of four of them are basically saying, well, it's not going to make me more profitable, make it easier, why would I do it?

That's not a good thing.

But Kiwi small business owners believe that investing technology is hardware.

So probably...

upgrading the Mac, getting some podcast kit, buying some computer equipment and technology, but the Asia Pacific answer to that is AI, investing in AI.

So I'm always a little bit concerned about how we kind of gas ourselves up a little bit in New Zealand about how we're market leaders and doing all these things, but in the SME world where I play,

it's very hard to convince people to get moving on different forms of technology.

It might be a payment gateway, it might be some form of efficiency tool, it might be a calendar booking tool, just things like that.

It's like, oh, do we really need to?

But what I have noticed over this last year is just about every business owner that we speak to, when we talk to them about AI, they aren't sort of dismissing it or saying, oh, I don't use that.

They're basically, yeah, yeah, cool, I'll do that.

And I think that's promising, but I think

As always we just seem to be a little bit lagging behind our uptake with some of these things.

Well the data that they survey people from, I think 68% of those people are over the age of 50.

businesses run by business owners under the age of 40 are three times more likely to be growing.

So we rank last out of the 11 countries of did we grow last year and will we grow this year in New Zealand.