NZ Entrepreneur spoke with Dave Howden, CEO of SupaHuman AI, to get some of the history and approach of SupaHuman and pick his brain for his thoughts on the three key AI trends that business leaders should watch for in 2025.
By now, AI is no longer a futuristic concept—it’s a present reality reshaping industries at an unprecedented pace. The past year has seen generative AI move beyond its early hype into real-world application, transforming how businesses operate.
As generative AI platform ChatGPT turned two, like a child of the same age, it found its feet and began to reach for fragile things on the shelves of businesses everywhere, and some things started to break.
Meanwhile, big tech companies piled on the investment into their own AI tools, jumping not so much onto a bandwagon, but more of a thundering juggernaut of a technology paradigm shift – the impact of which is still reverberating with new AI tool DeepSeek making waves – and will no doubt continue to do so in 2025.
Into that scene stepped SupaHuman AI, a Kiwi company determined not to create its own AI tool, but rather provide advice, guidance and inspiration – or “people, process and platform”, as they say – to businesses seeking to understand and leverage AI tools for their companies.
Freeing smart minds from tedious work
“When we started SupaHuman, we could see that the playbook that was going to play out across the business sector with AI was the same one that played out with mobile, the internet, and all the major big technology trends – that is, the tech is awesome, but how do you translate that into business adoption and business value,” says Howden.
“With the emergence of generative AI as a core technology capability, we believed that it was going to be bigger than the internet once adopted, and significantly bigger in terms of its transformational power – and there was zero way we were going to compete on the world stage in terms of adoption if we didn’t create an organisation that was focused on that.
“The reason for that was that we have telcos that connect everyone together, but they’re not going to be the ones that make the country more intelligent with this technology. They’re technology businesses. They’re not human-led intelligence organisations. They’re not the ones that are going to drive the adoption.”
Howden says they saw an opportunity to create a centre of excellence for anyone that has crafted their career in intelligence, be it machine learning or AI before it was cool.
“We said, let’s create a single focused organisation that’s here to do one thing, which is free smart minds from tedious work using this new technology stack that’s going to be evolving over the next 10 years called generative AI. So that’s what we did.
“We believe that businesses need the right people, processes and platforms around them to embrace AI, so they can survive and thrive in an age where all of the tedious work that costs businesses can be removed through the adoption of these technologies.
Howden says SupaHuman helps businesses with the people, the processes and the technology to remove the tedious work from their smart people so they can continue to do one of three things, either grow, be more efficient, or manage their risk.
“That’s the mission we’ve been on for the last year – freeing smart minds from tedious work. We do that by automating work with Gen AI and being that partner of choice for organisations, big, small and in-between.”
TREND ONE – AI is about the business, not the tech.
“2024 was the year that AI proved that it can do what it says it can do. But 2025 is going to be the year that AI matures into ‘productionising intelligence’ for those businesses that have done proofs-of-concepts in 2024,” says Howden.
“If you went back a year, any time Open AI released a new model it would make headlines. Now, there’s Anthropic, Open AI, Google, and they’re releasing new model variants every week, and the response is: So what? Who cares? The technology is so good and works so well that the ‘next big thing’ is only improving the technology by small percentages.
Howden cites the recent example of Sora – the new text-to-video model developed by Open AI – as a key example of this trend.
“Arguably, Sora is one the most disruptive new technology tools for the creative industry, and yet everyone has already moved on from it. What this shows is that AI tech itself is not going to be the trend in 2025. What’s going to be key is the education that goes on around how AI will actually do work for you,” says Howden.
“Essentially, in 2025 there’s going to be a significant realisation that AI is not a technology conversation, it’s a business change conversation – and that will mean a lot of businesses going back to the drawing board around how they use AI.
“There’ll be businesses that have put technical individuals and teams onto developing AI projects, who will start realising that transforming a business into an intelligent organisation is going to take a lot of work, because it’s not about the tech at that point – it’s about what your business does, which is a much more existential question.”
TREND TWO – AI will democratise repetitive work, at a cost
Howden expects that 2025 is going to see the beginning of what he calls a “brutal realisation” for many businesses looking to harness the power of AI agents.
“Within the next two to five years, a lot of businesses just aren’t going to be around because of what AI will be able to do,” he says.
“If you think about what the internet did for democratising access to data, generative AI is going to do the same for repetitive work – and there are businesses out there that are currently paid just to do repetitive things, like business processing.
“Once you’ve outsourced your repetitive work to an AI agent that can do it for cents on the dollar, why would you ever outsource that work to a human ever again? The second you move a human out of the loop of a business process, you can’t compete.
“I think there’s going to be a huge amount of disruption in the whole area of ‘human outsourcing’, as AI agents are going to come in and solve those issues for business.
“Basically, 2025 will be the year that AI agents come for repetitive work.”
TREND THREE – Digital transformation is going to mean a whole new thing.
“There are businesses that have not had the opportunity to digitally transform before at all because of the ‘human limiting’ factor. And what I mean by that is, up until two years ago, there wasn’t anyone smarter than humans. We were the smart ones – but then we built tech around humans to help us do more stuff.
“Now we have machines that can think faster for us. That means that there is work that is no longer deemed reasonable to be done by a human.
“A simple example of this is earthworks. Humans used to dig everything by hand, using shovels. But as soon as we developed the excavator, there was no going back to hand digging. Email is another example. We used to send letters, but now email takes care of more of that.
“AI is another of these monumental shifts. There are businesses that essentially will either need to fully redefine what they do, or they will die.
“Anything in the advisory field, or areas like compliance – once this is digitised into AI agents that automate this work, you won’t need to spend $300 per hour on a human specialist in this area – you can spend 50 bucks a month and get a faster, better job.”
Preparing for the new world of AI
“The reason we do what we do and how we do it, is our market research has indicated that the New Zealand market wants someone local who’s a specialist. They want someone who doesn’t want to flog a product, but wants to get to know your business intimately,” says Howden.
“Being a partner on that intelligence journey is what SupaHuman is all about – so our advice to any business wanting to take AI seriously and harness its power of AI is don’t do it alone.
“Work with someone who has the proof that they can get it done. Find a partner who can come into your business, learn your intellectual property and help you build intelligence around it, or you will likely be disappointed.”
Story by Brendan Boughen
