FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about Young Kiwis in AI.
Young Kiwis in AI (YKIA) is a nationwide community for young New Zealanders working with artificial intelligence: university and secondary students, self-taught builders, early-career developers, and founders. We run a monthly online catchup on Discord plus in-person meetups around the country, where members share what they are actually building. It is free to join and free to attend.
Start building. Pick a real problem in your own life, a friend’s, or a local business, and use AI coding tools to build a small solution for it. Almost every speaker we have hosted says the same two things: a handful of real projects beats a polished CV, and you have to talk publicly about the work so that people can find you. The third step is getting in a room with people already doing it, which is exactly what our meetups and monthly online catchup are for.
Anyone based in Aotearoa New Zealand who is young and keen on AI. That includes university students, secondary students, self-taught developers, early-career professionals, and founders building AI products. You do not need to work in AI already and you do not need a project on the go. Curiosity is genuinely enough.
Fill in the short join form on this site with your name, email, age, and a line about why you are interested. Most people get a Discord invite emailed straight back; a few applications get a quick look from a human first. Once you are in, introduce yourself in the #introductions channel and you will start seeing event announcements and member channels.
Yes, completely. Joining is free, the Discord is free, and our meetups and online catchups are free to attend. Venues are usually provided by companies who host us, like Zuru’s Auckland HQ, so there is nothing to pay at the door.
We have run events in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, Hamilton and Palmerston North. Meetups in Tauranga, Napier-Hastings, New Plymouth and Nelson are in planning, and we will announce dates once venues are confirmed. Wherever you are in Aotearoa, the monthly online catchup on Discord is open to everyone, so you do not have to live in one of those cities to take part.
A typical in-person meetup runs a couple of hours in the evening and draws somewhere between 20 and 30 people. There are usually one or two member spotlights, where someone talks through what they are building, what went wrong, and what they would tell their younger self, followed by questions and open networking. Past spotlights have covered AI engineering at Trade Me and Zuru, marketing automation, insurance workflow automation, and AI in infrastructure. We also run pitch nights and workshops, and every talk gets written up on our blog.
No. Members and speakers in this community have come in from commerce, marketing, mechatronics, graphic design, and straight out of school. A degree helps with problem solving and domain knowledge, but nearly everyone we have hosted learned the technical AI side on the job, because tertiary study has not kept pace with how fast the field moves. What counts more is being able to show something you have built.
You are still welcome. Plenty of members come from marketing, commerce, design, and operations backgrounds. A lot of the highest-value AI work in New Zealand right now is not model building at all, it is spotting the repetitive thing a business does every week and automating it. If you can think in systems and communicate clearly, you can contribute long before you can code.
The community is built for young people, roughly under 35, and the meetups, the Discord, and the conference are all designed around that. Applications from people further along get read by a human rather than approved automatically, and there is almost always a good way to be involved as a mentor, speaker, or sponsor. If you are keen, apply and tell us why.
Yes. The join form accepts applications from age 13, and secondary students are some of the most motivated people in the community. If you are under 18, have a chat with a parent or guardian before you sign up, and read our code of conduct, which applies to everyone in the Discord and at our events.
Yes, and the people hiring keep telling us they cannot find enough young AI talent. Community members work in AI roles at New Zealand companies including Trade Me, Zuru, and RUSH, and members have been hired through the community by NZ consultancies. We share roles, internships, and freelance opportunities in the Discord as they come up.
It runs on the last Monday of every month at 5:30pm NZ time on Discord. It is deliberately relaxed: a member spotlight or two, whatever people are building at the moment, and plenty of questions. You do not need to present or have a project on the go to come along.
Yes to both. Member spotlights are the core of our meetups, so if you are building something we would like you to talk about it. Companies can help by hosting a meetup at their office, sponsoring an event, offering mentoring, or opening roles and internships to the community. Email blake@harknessai.nz and we will take it from there.
Yes. YKIA National Conference 2027 is New Zealand's first national conference for young Kiwis in AI. It runs Friday 12 February 2027, 8:30am - 5:00pm, at the Novotel Auckland Airport, with a full day of keynotes, panels, a hands-on workshop, demos, awards, and networking. Registration opens later in 2026. Join the waitlist on our conference page to be first to know.
Getting Started
How to get into AI in New Zealand
There is no tidy route into AI work in New Zealand, and nobody in this community took one. What follows is the advice that keeps coming up from the people who have already done it: members now working as AI engineers at Trade Me, Zuru and RUSH, and founders running their own AI consultancies. It is drawn from talks given at our meetups, not from a careers brochure.
1. Build something small and real
The single most repeated piece of advice is to stop consuming and start doing. Pick a problem in your own life, a friend's, or a local business, and build a solution for it with AI coding tools. It does not have to relate to your degree. Our founder's first build was a small web app that scanned a makeup product and found cheaper alternatives, which taught him how to take someone's problem and ship something for it. Both of the people he has since hired got in the door the same way, one with a side project for indexing lecture notes with AI, the other by running his own tests on a newly released model before anyone asked him to.
2. Go deep on one tool rather than wide on ten
It is impossible to keep up with everything in AI, and trying to is the mistake almost every speaker admits to. Pick one tool and learn it properly. As one of our members at Trade Me puts it, most tools are the same thing in a different font, so the skills transfer once you have gone deep once. Give yourself time to absorb what you learn instead of watching every video that lands in your feed.
3. Pair AI skill with domain knowledge and critical thinking
AI skill on its own is not worth much. What makes you valuable is the blend of knowing the tools, being able to look at a process and ask why it has been done the same way for twenty years, and understanding the field you are working in well enough to spot when the answer is wrong. AI is confidently incorrect, and if you pass on a polished report that turns out to be rubbish, you own it. Communication matters just as much, both with the people you work with and with the models themselves.
4. Talk about the work in public
In the New Zealand graduate market you are competing with hundreds of people holding AI-polished CVs, and applying harder does not fix that. Almost nobody here posts publicly about the engineering and AI work they actually do, which means the bar to stand out is remarkably low. Our founder went from cold applying to seven inbound job offers across New Zealand and one in Australia within six months of starting to post, with nothing spent on advertising. Do the work first, then talk about it: content without real results behind it does not land.
5. Get in the room
However good you are, if nobody knows who you are it does not count. Go to meetups, hackathons and events, and talk to people already doing the job. One coffee chat, one message or one talk is often the thing that changes everything, and those small conversations compound. That is the whole reason Young Kiwis in AI exists: a room full of young New Zealanders working on the same problems, plus a monthly online catchup for everyone who cannot get to one in person.
6. Do not wait until you feel ready
Enthusiasm beats experience in a field that changes weekly, and nobody can claim to know all of it. One of our members applied for his AI role at Zuru without believing he would get it, and genuine interest plus a bit of hands-on building was enough. The best time to start was yesterday. The second best time is right now.
Read the full talks
Every point above comes from a talk given at one of our meetups, and each one is written up in full on our blog, including Breaking Into AI: Advice From Young Kiwi AI Engineers. If you would rather ask your questions in person, our upcoming events are free, and joining the community takes about a minute.