16 September 2026, Te Pae Convention Centre, Christchurch
Members of our Christchurch team spent the day at Tech Summit ’26, held at Te Pae Convention Centre. It is a fixture in their event’s calendar, a full day they make time for every year as the programme reaches well beyond New Zealand.
Christchurch on a world stage
Ali Adams of ChristchurchNZ set the tone, making the case that the city is deliberately backing a focused set of sectors, cleantech and energy among them, where it can compete on the world stage. That is exactly the space we work in.
An event like this is an expert gathering, a chance to sit with the people building and deploying technology and compare notes on where things are heading, at home and around the globe. For a company like ours, serving utilities in other markets, staying close to that global conversation matters as much as the local one.
AI technology – Chances and Learnings
The sessions on AI engineering carried the strongest signal. Stefania Druga of Sakana AI in Tokyo made the case for AI you can actually trust, where organisations and governments keep control of their data, decide how outputs are judged, and manage bias, compliance and auditing. She pointed to Singapore as being ahead on sovereign AI, and argued for treating AI like a researcher, stating clear hypotheses, staying inspectable, and being honest about its limits. For anyone working in a regulated industry, that emphasis on trust and governance was hard to ignore.
The founder sessions echoed it from the commercial side. Hectre, whose fruit grading AI now runs in 22 countries, showed how far a focused product can travel. Two talks stood out at the close. James Fuller of Hnry, the service that automates tax for people who work for themselves, warned that automation can quietly kill the customer relationship, so Hnry uses AI to track sentiment and flag fraud while keeping real people in the loop.
CrescoNet team in step with time
The thread across all presenters is a simple one. Automate the busywork, keep real people in view, and don’t sell the AI, sell the outcome, because customers care whether the thing works, not what sits under the hood.
“The sessions that stuck with me weren’t about AI for its own sake, they were about building technology that people actually trust and use. That is exactly the conversation our customers are having, wherever they are in the world, and it is why the team keeps coming back every year.”
Ashley Johnston, CrescoNet CTO
Thanks to the organizers of TechSummit for another successful year of networking and glimpse into global tech innovations!