Shadow AI: your team is already using AI. The question is how.

Team exploring AI tools together at a laptop

Here is a prediction we make confidently in almost every leadership meeting: your team is already using AI. The only question is whether anyone in charge knows which tools, with which data, under which accounts. The New Zealand picture Datacom’s 2025 State of AI Index found 87% of NZ organisations now use AI in some […]

Backups that actually restore: the difference that decides incidents

Clean monitoring dashboards in daylight

Every organisation we meet has backups. A surprising number have never restored from them. That distinction — between having backups and having recovery — is usually discovered at the worst possible moment, with an incident underway and the business offline. Backups fail quietly Backup jobs report success while quietly missing the databases that matter. Agents […]

“Too small to be a target?” What New Zealand’s incident numbers actually say

A New Zealand business at work

“We are too small to be worth attacking.” It is the most common sentence we hear from New Zealand business owners — and the country’s own cyber agency has now addressed it directly. In its 2025 Cyber Threat Report, the National Cyber Security Centre writes that many organisations make the mistake of “assuming they are […]

The 26-minute question: what Copilot actually saves

Colleagues collaborating on modern work

When leaders ask us whether Microsoft Copilot is worth it, they usually expect a sales pitch. Here is the more useful answer: the largest real-world trial ever run gives us an actual number, and you can do the maths yourself. The trial worth knowing about The UK Government ran Copilot across roughly 20,000 public servants […]

Copilot and Cowork: why your AI bill now has two parts

Working together in Microsoft 365

Microsoft Copilot pricing used to be simple: a licence per person per month. Since Cowork reached general availability in June 2026, your AI bill has two distinct parts — and the second one is the part most budgets miss. Bill one: the licence Copilot remains an add-on to Microsoft 365. Microsoft lists Copilot Business at […]

Will your cyber insurance actually pay out?

Security analyst monitoring systems

Cyber insurance has quietly changed. A few years ago you filled in a form and got a certificate. Today insurers ask detailed questions about your security controls — and when a claim lands, they check whether your answers were true. The uncomfortable industry reality: policies respond to the security you actually had on the day, […]