2 posts tagged with "capability"

There is a tendency to discuss Māori technology futures at very large scale: sovereign clouds, Māori foundation models, national infrastructure and major programmes. Those ambitions may have value, but meaningful capability can also begin with much smaller and more practical steps.

The hardware and software threshold for local AI has fallen rapidly. Organisations can now experiment with open-weight models, local document retrieval and offline inference without building a research laboratory. The important opportunity is not to chase every new model. It is to deliberately build enough technical capability that Māori organisations can make their own choices about architecture, data and use.

Microsoft Copilot will be the first substantial organisational encounter with generative AI for many people in Aotearoa. There are understandable reasons for that. Microsoft 365 is already deeply embedded across government and business, identity and permissions already exist, documents are already in SharePoint and OneDrive, and security teams already understand the platform.

There is nothing inherently wrong with using Copilot. The danger is subtler: we may allow one product to define what we think AI is. If Māori organisations want real choice over future AI systems, product literacy needs to grow into broader technical capability.