The end of Intel? AI in schools, Tourism + iPhone 16 hands on

Episode Transcript (computer-generated)

Paul Spain:
Hey, folks, greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain, and great to have Jo Hilson, the chief technology officer at Tourism holdings, with us again. Great to have you back, Jo.

Jo Hilson:
It’s great to be here. Thank you.

Paul Spain:
It’s been a bit over two years since we had you on the show, so there’s been. Been a fair bit going on in that time. So I’m keen, as we get into the episode, to. To delve a little bit into, you know, all of that, because there’s a fair bit to unpack. You’ve had a merger, I think, doubled the head count in the business. A lot more going on internationally. Anything else? There’s a lot, right?

Jo Hilson:
A bit. Definitely a bit there.

Paul Spain:
So, yeah, that’s. Looking forward to that. And then we’re going to delve into, I guess, a range of topics, both local and international in terms of current tech news. And of course, it is that sort of time of year where we start getting our hands on the odd gadget or two. So I will mention some initial experiences with the iPhone 16 Pro Max and even the iOS 18.1 beta with its Apple intelligence. Amongst our varying other stories. Before we jump in, of course, a big thank you to our show partners to One NZ, Spark, HP, 2degrees and Gorrilla Technology.

Paul Spain:
So, first up on the New Zealand front, we’ve heard about police staff accessing what has been referred to as stalkerware by design staff utilising facial recognition sites, Pim eyes, which has had that description that it’s been used without authorisation by some staff, there’s another tool, face check id. These things have been catching a bit of attention. RNZ has covered these. What do you think’s going wrong here? Because you can’t completely control what people do with technology. But there is also a flip side. When you’re an organisation that needs the public’s trust, which, you know, we need to be able to trust our law enforcement services. When you’re a government entity, I think often there’s an expectation of the standards being high. We saw going back and I can’t remember how many years now, but not too many, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, where they, you know, they had a particular event and a program and they encouraged people to sign up and they hadn’t gone through a very thorough sort of technology selection process and, you know, the varying other elements of setting up what was a repository to store people’s passports and identifications and so on.

Paul Spain:
And invariably this particular site holding them got hacked. The WordPress site and it didn’t look good. And so these are the sorts, there’s things that happen when we don’t have those sort of right layers in place. What are your thoughts? Because you sit in that position as chief technology officer where you have to look at, well, how do we innovate and leverage technology as an organisation, but also how do we mitigate the risks?

Jo Hilson:
It’s a tough one. And in regards to the police, it’s interesting because initially I was like, oh, this is data privacy issues all over, but if it’s controlled and it’s for the right purpose, like policing, I definitely believe there’s a time and place for it provided to your point that the right security layers are there. But then you’re always looking for those security layers. You’re always fighting security layers, you’re always fighting legislation, regulation. My job is also chief privacy officer. So it’s hard. It’s really hard. But if it’s going to be used for good, the greater good, then I’m all for it.

Jo Hilson:
For the police, I think it’s a great opportunity and, you know, their jobs are hard enough. And if they can rely on technology that’s going to help fast track some of these, you know, warrants or arrests or whatever it’s going to be, then great. The problem you’ve got is just making sure that they’re going to arrest the right person. And, you know, you see that all the time with, you know, some of the cases overseas. But technology’s coming a long way in that respect as well. And government agencies like the police, they know what they’re doing. They’re going to be, well, you’re laughing, but they should know what they’re doing.

Paul Spain:
That’s a better way to put it.

Jo Hilson:
So you would hope that with the right structure and the right boundaries that they can take advantage of this. I don’t think it should be, or, no, their hands should be slapped. I think there’s an opportunity here that we should be enabling that if it’s for the greater good.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, look, it’s an interesting one. And, you know, a bit of jest there because of course, you know, we know New Zealand police do an incredible job in most areas of what they do. And I guess, you know, you could sort of assign that laughter probably to any organisation. Right. Because nobody gets things 100% correct. Right. But that is also part of the challenge when we’re dealing with tools involving privacy. And I mean, I think these particular tools that were referred to pimize face check, id and so on, they come within this sort of category of tools that you can jump in and use online.

Paul Spain:
And so you upload an image that goes into their database. So what was a New Zealand police image is now in a public database with a. A whole lot of other images that come from maybe not the best of sources. You know, we’ll break the terms of Facebook and we’ll scrape every image we can find on Facebook and link up some data and sell, you know, put that online as a service and so on. Right. So there’s some complexities and nuances, and I certainly don’t have all the answers to that, but it is. Some of these things do keep coming up. So I’m going to work with Joanne, our producer, to try and maybe put together a little bit of a panel because I think it would be in future, be good to sort of delve into some of these, because I think it’s.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Understanding what are those sort of potential uplifts. And I think we probably have some pretty good ideas on the potential uplifts just from watching science fiction and so on, because these things have been coming and imagine for a long time now they’re kind of here. But we’re also probably in the clearest position to see what are the risks and the downsides. And we’ve certainly chatted through numerous kind of data breaches and the likes over the years that have related to things like images and so on that shouldn’t have been made public by governments or otherwise, but somebody managed to, you know, make them public. So some challenge, just a little one. So we might agree to disagree on exactly what that pace and what’s appropriate. But yeah, I think it’s a good topic to probably delve into a little bit further.

Paul Spain:
Now, Spark have shared that they’ve been chosen to refresh the transpowers network called Transgo, which is a fiber optic telecommunication system, which I guess is really critical cause it connects up sort of substations and sites for transpower, enabling their real time control of the power grid. So I guess this is sort of this journey, isn’t it, that as a country, we’re seeing more and more of our infrastructure become more digitally enabled, more online. Obviously, that’s great when it’s all working, when it’s working well, but not always so good if there are connectivity problems, which is partly why a company like transpower now and other, you know, big entities that maybe in the past have had their own communications capabilities and so on, we’d really want to leverage an absolute specialist to look after that stuff. Right?

Jo Hilson:
Definitely. Good backup plan.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. So, yeah, just, you know, it’s interesting to hear of some of these things going on in the background, but, you know, a big project in spark say they’re collaborating with Nokia on this and it’s a project that’s expected to conclude in 2028. So a pretty sizable, you know, piece of work. So it’s quite a big win for SParC.

Jo Hilson:
That’s great. It’s good news for them. Definitely a lot of confidence, I would say, as part of that.

Paul Spain:
Now, we’ve heard in the past, I think, in the education sector, around some payroll dramas. Do you remember, do you remember any of that stuff?

Jo Hilson:
I think everyone remembers, don’t they?

Paul Spain:
Well, it was interesting to hear that health New Zealand te whara, or are diverting digital upgrade funding towards their payroll system. So millions of dollars from that were destined for other digital upgrades, are now going towards stabilizing their own fragile payroll systems. So, yeah, it’s really hard to prioritize when you have limited funding. And I guess we all probably look back on the Waikato district health board and say their cyber security issues and some of the things we learned afterwards around the board saying, well, we’d prefer to put money into a bit of medical equipment rather than into the information technology and cyber security. We understand those pressures, but times you just have to make tough calls. And I would say now is one of those times. And this must be the cause for a fair bit of angst, I would imagine, within Te Whura at this stage, because there were a whole lot of people really passionate around the different upgrades that they were going to be doing. And now that funding has shifted and there won’t be, I guess, the same level of investment in some of those.

Jo Hilson:
Other areas, no, I mean, that was a big call, and to have their budget slashed the way that they did, they had no choice but to prioritize. Even thinking about that prioritisation process, just going through the elements of how do you get to the actual end result? It must be so detailed. And to your point, when you’re on these massive programs of work, everyone’s fully invested, everyone believes it’s the best thing that’s going to happen for any organisation. So there’ll be definitely some emotions that come out the back of that and even the delays to those other initiatives, because they all sounded quite critical. So, you know, I take my hat off to the fact that they have been able to do this, but when it’s technology and it’s end of life and it’s causing a lot of issues, it’s a tough situation and even deferring it, it’s going to make those other initiatives probably worse to some degree as well, you know, while they’re waiting. But when your hands are tied and it comes down to money, it is what it is and that’s what happens in a lot of organisations, just probably not at the same kind of level as the budgets that we’re talking about here.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, well it happens for individuals, happens for families, happens for organisations. Right. There’s x amount of money and it’s not necessarily easy to live within our means. And I guess from a sort of societal point of view, credit’s so easy to get hold of now. It’s like we’re not always the best disciplined at doing so, but actually the consequences of not doing so eventually come home to roost. So there is that sort of balancing act and we’ve tended to have that with differing governments. Some governments will go a bit more. Let’s double down, let’s invest in this stuff.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, we can’t really, we don’t really have the income to support it but it needs to be done. So we’ll push to get that done. Other government comes in is like, well actually at some point we’ve got to live within our means. Both of those are kind of right at different times. Now it’d be nice if you could find the right balance to sort of steer through it, but that doesn’t tend to happen with the cycles of government. So on both sides difficult decisions are being made and hopefully mostly for good reasons. Absolutely horrible to, you know, to be a part of that, you know, the tough sides of that. So, you know, I really feel for, you know, those who are, you know, being impacted.

Paul Spain:
That said, people do need to get paid and need to get paid reliably. Otherwise, you know, you’re in the same bind from a personal perspective. So. Absolutely, you know, teachers are warning about, you know, students using AI to, what’s the polite word? I’m not sure. Cheat is what it says in my notes, cheat on assessments. So yeah, we’ve got this feedback which is not necessarily new because really as soon as generative AI tools became available, this was, you know, a common topic in the news and certainly, you know, something I’ve discussed on, you know, tv and radio around the challenges. But yeah, I guess teachers are now having to face some of the realities that you can’t make every assignment something that is designed to incorporate generative AI being part of the picture. And look, I feel we do need to have our education system adopt, understand, take advantage of the latest of technologies, but also when it comes to the internal hiring processes of my business, I apologize and I put people in a room and I say this is a closed book, no GPT, no googling.

Paul Spain:
And I want your best answers that you can provide for, you know, for part of the process. Right. There’s not absolutely everything that can be done in an educational sense or otherwise that needs to leverage these tools. What do you think about this?

Jo Hilson:
Someone’s going to do that interviewing for you and it’s not going to be a human, so you’ll be few and far between is what I think. I’m completely the other end. I think that the schools need to adopt a lot faster to enable AI, generative AI all the way through. The reality is it’s here, it’s not going to go away. It’s actually going to get closer to human capabilities as the years progress. And if they don’t adopt to that faster, the kids are going to be left behind. Yes, there is a concern that there’s some just basic fundamental skills that the students won’t have, but those basic fundamental skills are going to change as well because technology is going to figure it all out for them. So maybe at the moment it might be a bit premature that everything becomes technical and we lose those basic skills.

Jo Hilson:
But I do believe that when you’re in a working environment and when you’re just in your own personal space, you can use tools to your free will and you should. And so finding, and I’m glad I’m not in charge of setting the curriculum for schools.

Paul Spain:
And that’s part of the challenge, isn’t it? Is the pace at which sometimes the education system legislation so on, you know, for the rest of the world to catch up with technology because it moves.

Jo Hilson:
So quickly, but they’ll be smarter at things that you and I would never, would have dreamed of. And we just don’t probably know what that is yet because it’s a little bit hard to kind of see that. And I get your point, but I’m all about technology. I encourage it with my daughters all the time. You know, I’ve just been doing studies part time and the university was open to generative AI as long as you disclosed it. At the end of the day, you’re still fact checking, you’re still taking in the responses and learning. So there’s definitely a fine line, but I’m definitely more at the extreme of the more tech that can do it for you in order to make life, the better, without leaving us redundant.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And I think that’s where some of the challenge lies. Right. I remember with my son and thinking, actually I find it really handy that I can calculate a whole bunch of stuff in my head that I know my times tables and these sorts of basic things. Admittedly, we’re all wired a little bit differently on some of these things, but I figured, well, I picked that stuff up super, super easy as a youngster and there’s a few small techniques that taught and practiced and those things become very easy. And so I think there are some elements where it’s good to be able to do things without the technology as well. And my pick from this particular bit of coverage that we were reading out or reading about was referencing St. Patrick’s College, Wellington, and it was their head of science, Doug Walker, who was talking about these particular challenges in a particular type of assessment that they wanted to be.

Paul Spain:
And they’d asked students up front, hey, make this completely your work without the leverage of AI. And I think there is still a place for that is my pick. But hey, the world is gonna change and maybe that will not be an option at all sometime soon. But I certainly think it’s important that we encourage and we work in how to facilitate AI into all of these steps. But do you want your AI interviewer interviewing somebody else’s AI and not theme? You know there’s going to be some limits, right?

Jo Hilson:
True, true. Or will there be limits?

Paul Spain:
I sent my AI along to the interview and it gave you the perfect answers that the AI knew you wanted. It’s complete B’s in terms of how it relates to me. But hey, it ticked the boxes and I got the job.

Jo Hilson:
Needs to learn more about you. Do it again. Second interview.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, so, interesting times. Now on the international front, we’re aware that Qualcomm are reportedly considering takeover buyout of intel. Intel, of course, have struggled in recent years for a whole bunch of reasons. This has actually given intel stock a little bit of a boost, as does tend to happen. But if you look at intel stock, they’ve, they’ve been on a downward trajectory now for probably at least half a decade. So. Yeah, and a much smaller entity than Qualcomm. And this is kind of in some ways somewhat hard to get your head around that.

Paul Spain:
Qualcomm are worth in the direction of twice what intel are worth, which Qualcomm was at times considered a very different sort of entity. But yeah, these days they’ve just really gone, I guess, from strength to strength over quite a period. But particularly over the last 20 years or so, they’ve just done better and better.

Jo Hilson:
Like you were saying before, say goodbye to potentially the little stickers on your laptop. It’s just like they’ll be changing out.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that would be strange, wouldn’t it? I would wonder, what is the value of that intel intel brand? And if you have two brands, if you had Qualcomm and Intel. Yeah. I don’t actually know. To the average consumer, maybe somebody in the tech world looking at the two would think, actually a Qualcomm computer is better.

Jo Hilson:
That’s a good point, actually.

Paul Spain:
It is interesting times. Just today I’ve had the. Was it the business version of one of the new Microsoft Surface laptops arrive? So the consumer versions have been here for sure how many weeks or months? But I’ve been spending a bit of time with the consumer Qualcomm based laptops and there’s certainly something to be said for the battery life of these arm based laptops. But it’s hard to say whether this is going to be the death knell for intel. Right. Because look, they’ve been around a very long time. Still, most of our laptops today are intel based. Intel are telling everyone they’re going to be fighting back with better battery life on their next generation, which is a matter of weeks away.

Paul Spain:
But, yeah, whether we would see an acquisition like this take place, and it’s not just Qualcomm. There’s at least one other sort of suitor there looking to see if they can take over and take ownership of intel. So, interesting period ahead. Would there be regulatory challenges when you’ve got two very big brands like this coming together? I mean, that’s the thing to me is. Well, that could be an insurmountable challenge.

Jo Hilson:
That’s a good point, actually. It’d be months, maybe years before we even get a decision. And that would be the same with any buyer. I would suspect they’re all beyond that sort of par it, actually.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, I would. We’ve had deals before that have fallen over during a process like this. And sometimes the harm that that actual process caused can be irreparable or close to it. I remember even locally, when we look at the Skyd Sky TV and Vodafone NZ and that merger was on the cards and eventually got blocked by commerce commission and at the end of the process, and I was quite surprised, I think I did an interview with RNZ within a few minutes of it getting announced and I was quite surprised that it had been blocked. It wasn’t what I expected was going to happen. And then we heard soon after that sky must have been in a similar boat, because all their planning was towards this merger happening and it didn’t. And so, actually, that scuttled a whole lot of plans that they’d been working on and there weren’t backup plans in place. And, you know, of course, an executive, you know, with these sorts of, you know, a big thing like this, there’ll be so much time that would go focused in on the merger.

Paul Spain:
And if it didn’t happen, the negative impact on the businesses can be huge, too. Just a huge distraction.

Jo Hilson:
Hopefully, the lawyers are prepping them for either way.

Paul Spain:
So we’re going to talk a little bit about the merger or acquisition that tourism holdings has done, but let’s jump on. There were a couple of other topics we’re reading that the European Union’s Digital Markets act, which has mandated Apple to ensure operability of iOS for basically opening them up in the European market. IPhones to third party app stores and so on. They’re now looking at integrations in relation to third party smartwatches and headphones and how that might change the picture as well. So an interesting one to follow now onto new gadgets. Google have overnight launched their Google TV streamer, 4K, which is the replacement, you could say, for the Chromecast type tools. And it’s a little bit more in the direction of an Apple tv. It’s got an ethernet port in the back of it.

Paul Spain:
There’s even a way to find the remote so you can press a button on the back and your remote’s going to beep at you. I don’t think I’m the only one that sometimes mislays the remote. Have you been there?

Jo Hilson:
Or maybe do not confirm or deny.

Paul Spain:
So, yeah, it’s interesting to see this evolution, and part of it is they’re building in Google’s Gemini within there, so there’s that level of AI capability. I got one in advance and it was just interesting to fire it up, try it out. Very nice integration with all of the bits and pieces that you want, whether it’s Apple streaming or what have you. Of course, YouTube side’s going to be fairly native being a Google device, but, yeah, a nice experience, I think. If I remember correctly, it’s launching. Actually, I better check the price because I might have in my head 179 New Zealand dollars. Yeah. So the price I had in my head was 99, which I think is the us price.

Paul Spain:
Convert that, add GST, and you’ve got $180 it’s not bad. So, yeah, I think, you know. Yeah. Very nice. Very capable device. Able to take over the control of your volume and turning on an offer, your tv and so on. Sometimes you get that kind of disconnect where it’s like, oh, I need this remote for that thing, and so on. So most of the modern bits you expect.

Paul Spain:
Right.

Jo Hilson:
Does it pick up, you’ve fallen asleep and it’ll turn itself off. Is it that clever yet?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I’m not sure.

Jo Hilson:
There we go.

Paul Spain:
There’s a feature that probably could be built in, couldn’t it, from an AI perspective? It picks up the snoring.

Jo Hilson:
Something.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Jo Hilson:
No movement or something.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jo Hilson:
It’s an opportunity.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Well, it does tap into. It’ll tap into all your smart home devices. So it’s actually. Yeah, it’s actually. Who do you want to message? Oh, look, there’s the Apple watch jumping in.

Jo Hilson:
Change it back to an Apple Watch.

Paul Spain:
I was gonna mention that, but it was able to mention it itself that. Still listening to it. Apple still have a little bit of work to do on their AI smarts there anyway. Yeah. So there’s some interesting smart home things that are built in. So, yeah, I think a bit of a step up, really, with their new gadget and, yes, certainly from a competitive perspective with the Apple TV, I think really competitive offerings. So worth a look and a consideration if you’re in the Apple ecosystem and you’ve got your little microphone on there so you can tap it and start telling it what content to look for, and it’ll look across all your different things, whether it’s Apple TV or YouTube or Netflix or Amazon or TVNZ on.

Jo Hilson:
Demand stuff, that whole assistant thing coming.

Paul Spain:
These things are starting to actually work. Some of the dreams that have been there for a long time, they’re getting smarter and smarter, finally. But there’s always a shortcoming or two. So onto the iPhone now, what was your first comment when you picked up the iPhone 16 Pro Max? Jo?

Jo Hilson:
Definitely lighter. Yeah, lighter than my 13.

Paul Spain:
And I was forgetting that there was a change where they had the stainless steel, which was actually quite heavy in some generations, and then now they’ve got the titanium edging with them. Somebody told me over the weekend that there was a kind of a tear down. And apparently there’s $9, probably us, worth of titanium in the phone. So there you go.

Jo Hilson:
That’s one. The titanium part.

Paul Spain:
Pretty strong and pretty light. So, yeah, a weight difference there. I think it was about. Was it about 16 or 18 grammes? When I looked up the difference between the two, but noticeable enough that you really picked that straight away? Definitely, yeah. So I haven’t, you know, it’s only been a few days. I had the joy of, and I’m joking here, transitioning from one device to another, there’s always a little bit of pain in that, isn’t there? A, like, you know, just. Yeah. So anyway, I go, how many times.

Jo Hilson:
Do we do it? And there’s always that, oh, I missed this.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. So, you know, getting your authenticators running, getting all of your apps kind of, you know, re operationalized, shall we say. And some things just work. Some. Some don’t transition very well. I got the message when I put the two phones, you put them sort of side by side, and it gave me the option of transferring, using sort of phone to phone. And it said 40 to 50 minutes. And I thought, okay, I’ll be without etcetera.

Paul Spain:
You’ll be without your phone. You can’t do anything for 40 to 50 minutes. I thought that could be okay, but these times aren’t necessarily accurate. So what if that were two or 3 hours? Would I be bothered? That could actually get annoying, depending on the time of day that happens. Right. And, yeah, not ideal. The other option was the icloud option that said you’d be back up and running in 15 minutes, within the caveat that it was going to need to restore everything in the background. And so I thought, well, actually, I probably need to make sure I’m as contactable as possible, so I’ll go for the 15 minutes option.

Paul Spain:
About half an hour or so later, I was looking at my phone and it said 24 hours to go. Oh, so this was after choosing the 15 minutes option.

Jo Hilson:
Unwind, unwind.

Paul Spain:
So I was kind of showing that around the office. And anyway, a few minutes later it came back and it had jumped to 2 hours. So that was, you know, minor heart attacks. Encouraging. Yeah, I’m trying to think, like, you know, challenges, get into the car. There’s so many things we do with our phones now. Right. And anyway, it didn’t take too long, and I don’t think it even took the 2 hours, but it certainly was longer than the 15 minutes that was.

Paul Spain:
That was predicted to get operating again. And then all up. It was in the 20 to 24 hours to restore 250 gigs worth of data from icloud back onto the phone. So it was a lot of data, and actually that was pretty okay in my book, although there were times where it just paused and virtually no data moved for big chunks of time. Then other times when it was clocking over quite quickly. So just something to be aware of if you’re going through these changes. The big thing on the, on both of the new iPhones is a camera control. The curiosity here is, well, if you can have an extra button, is it actually helpful? Is it going to save you some time? Now, my friend told me that it was taking him up to 3 seconds to get to his phone, kind of clear a pin number, face id, whatever, get into the camera and to take a photo much quicker with a camera control, you just tap the camera control button and then a fraction of a second.

Paul Spain:
I found sometimes you can then click the button too quick and it doesn’t take a photo, but dramatically quicker. So those sort of scenarios, which I guess Apple are really looking for this to be a differentiator, I think they are genuinely there where there’s an opportunity for a photo and you miss it two or 3 seconds. Helpful.

Jo Hilson:
True.

Paul Spain:
What do you think? What do you think? Possibly you have those situations or you know what?

Jo Hilson:
I actually just don’t take photos anymore.

Paul Spain:
There you go.

Jo Hilson:
Unlike my children, so they’ll probably appreciate it more. Yeah, I actually. This might help me. This might be a good thing for me. So it’ll encourage me to take more photos. Cause you kind of get through the years and you regret not having anything.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Jo Hilson:
So could be the feature for me.

Paul Spain:
So anyway, I thought that was when I saw it initially, I was thinking, is that helpful? And then you’ve got your ability to sort of slide your finger on there and adjust things. Such as? Such as zoom. So that’s helpful. A bit of a slide, but be all and end all. Not really. I’m curious how third parties might use this, because there is an API. So things like Instagram, anything else that uses photos can tap in and use that capability. So curious.

Paul Spain:
One of my team was saying, well, I hope that you’ll be able to do it across other apps as well, which could be helpful. But I think that Apple’s purpose at the moment for it is it’s all about the photo and video side. So maybe not so much luck on that front, at least in the short term. One last thing on what’s happening in the Apple world. On my other iPhone, I loaded the iOS 18.1 beta. Wanted to see what their new Apple intelligence was all about. Now, admittedly, not too much time on it, but we did look at the cleanup feature, didn’t we, Jo?

Jo Hilson:
We did.

Paul Spain:
So this is where you take a photo. And I took a photo here in the studio and we had some glasses on the table, a glass bottle, and Jo was sitting on the sofa. When you hit the cleanup feature, it makes the, what it considers sort of objects or people and so on in the image that potentially could be removed shimmer. And it actually looks quite cool and he can tap on them or draw and make them go away. What were your thoughts on the results, Jo?

Jo Hilson:
You need more practice.

Paul Spain:
Ok. So it’s.

Jo Hilson:
That’s my thoughts. End user erade.

Paul Spain:
End user problem. My personal feeling is they’ve got a little bit of a way to go on the cleanup. The shadows from the glass and the different. What the light did coming onto the table. Not quite replicated, probably not the best use cases. And most of the demo images we see with these kind of rubout features take an individual person that’s in the background out of the photo and you might not notice the other stuff. Yeah. What it did to the sofa and so on was not quite picture perfect for the result.

Jo Hilson:
I might be hard on you then.

Paul Spain:
It might be hard on you, but I’ll take the blame.

Jo Hilson:
It’s all me.

Paul Spain:
All right, well, so that’s our tech news for the week. Time to delve into what’s been happening in your world. Jo, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your role at tourism holdings and what that encompasses.

Jo Hilson:
Yeah, sure. Still chief technology officer, so that’s good news. So for me, being at tourism holdings, goodness, three years. So, tourism holdings, for those of you that haven’t heard of us, we are a global company. We specialise in rvs. So the biggest provider of rvs and campervans. So from a retail and a rental perspective, we’ve got a manufacturing arm and a tourism arm as well. So over 30 brands across those key parts of the business that we have globally.

Jo Hilson:
Some of the brands you might recognize, like Maui Brits, Apollo Action manufacturing and tourism, there’s the Kiwi experience bus that goes up and down New Zealand and the Waitomo caves. So, yeah, it’s a fabulous job being in a position where the global responsibility makes it extremely exciting and full of opportunities. And being at the other side of COVID now, it’s definitely working in the right. Well, going in the right direction. Really enjoying it. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve got the chief privacy officer component of it as well. So always about data and securing your data and everything else that comes with that. But we’ve got a big team for technology across New Zealand, and we’ve got a team in Melbourne and Brisbane in Australia and smaller teams in LA and up in Calgary as well and in the UK.

Jo Hilson:
So there’s plenty going on and I’m sure we’ll talk about that soon. But yeah, that’s definitely a job that I’m absolutely loving.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. Fantastic. Yeah, I think when we last spoke, you know, there’d been, you know, a really, you know, heavy time of turmoil because of what the pandemic, you know, the impact that it had on tourism, which was. Was massive, wasn’t it?

Jo Hilson:
Huge. Huge. And that’s just nothing for our own company, but every company around the globe from a tourism perspective. And we’re seeing that tourism is definitely growing where the numbers are well and truly improving different parts of the globe, these areas of tourism that are stronger than others. So it’s not perfect and it’s not at the optimal everywhere. But also we’re facing into the challenges still of the cost of living. So that cost of living and even things like aviation costs going up does mean that impacts the pocket that we have as consumers. So we’ve definitely still got that challenge.

Jo Hilson:
But from two years ago, you know, we are very much in a stronger, solid position and hoping to see more of it.

Paul Spain:
And where does technology make the most difference, do you think, within the business for you?

Jo Hilson:
I think there’s many areas with technology, so not just in. When I think about technology, it’s not just engineering, my engineering team, but manufacturing. So we’re constantly trying to think about that sustainable tourism. You know, the challenge for us is building campervans and towables that are eco friendly, I should say.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Where’s your solar powered camper vans, Jo? Where’s the technology?

Jo Hilson:
You know, maybe not solar power, I’m joking. But, you know, we’re definitely on that journey. Like a lot of companies in the automotive industry, so we’re very mindful about that. And as an organisation, we take that responsibility deeper. So, and I may have talked about this last time, but recycling and being mindful about sustainability is part of our DNA. You know, when we have crew come on board, there’s so many different initiatives that we have around that. It’s front and center, we’re reporting on it where you’ve got teams that are in, you know, working with global teams just to understand obviously the advancements and then those considerations. So there’s the technology from the manufacturing perspective, technology from the experience, the customer experience.

Jo Hilson:
So, you know, when we get the customers, when we get the tourists, we want them to stay, we want them to come back. And so there’s such a huge amount of opportunity there to give them that amazing experience. And, you know, driving an rv can be quite overwhelming. So you want to know that they’re confident and comfortable in that experience and anything that they need is easily accessible and understood and to the point where from the pick up to the drop off to the on road care. So that whole end to end process of that journey is so many different areas of innovation and opportunity from a technology point of view, whether it’s part of the self check in process where it can be automated all the way through and so they’re not delayed. The on road care, if there’s any questions that they’ve got, it’s easily accessible on an app where they want to go, the itineraries all thought out through it for them, and it’s just they can take it easy and really enjoy their holiday without those extra stresses. And then, you know, digital transformation, there’s just always transformation in general. And to your point, after the merger, we’re on a significant journey now of simplification, and you always acquire technology under any sort of M and A.

Jo Hilson:
And so we’re going through a phase now and we’ve got seven major programs of work going on in that area. New HR systems, backer House, payroll. Payroll’s part of the HR. Yes. And, you know, there’s. Which is great, because there’s just always something to do and a bit similar to you point their conversation before. We want to make sure that we are also balancing that with the BAU and more of that innovation, because innovation is just happening at such a rate, such a huge rate. And being global, you’re hearing that feedback from different perspectives and weighing that up and figuring out how to prioritise all that again, like we were talking about before, but all good challenges and all very much supported with the rest of the executive team.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, and you’ve had this merger. Walk us through a little bit about that, because that must have really changed your world, you know, quite massively.

Jo Hilson:
It was massive. And, you know, two years ago, it was just like, oh, didn’t probably appreciate how big it was unless you were, you know, hands deep into the whole merge process yourself in acquisition. So with Apollo, they are one of the bigger brands. They’ve come with a number of extra brands around the retail and rental side, the manufacturing part, and further afield in Australia and in Canada. So for me and my team in technology, I think, first of all was just learning to grow the systems, to be able to adapt to those extra brands, for example. And even the staff we doubled to almost 2000 crew over the last couple of years. And that’s through a combination of acquisition and just general growth. So, you know, for me it was more about taking the time to get to understand who we are now and becoming back to one, becoming back to THL and being that company that everyone understands and, and what we offer.

Jo Hilson:
So the journey has really just been a learning curve. Learning, oh, I didn’t know what’s that brand? Is that a caravan or is that a. Or is that a trailer? So there’s little things like that that are all part of that learning journey. And then the obvious part is definitely around the technology and understanding what it is we have now is like, oh, okay, we’ve got five of those and we’ve got none of those and do we need that? So a huge amount of analysis going on and even with the people at crew is just learning and getting to understand their strengths and areas of opportunity and what they’ve done really well before the merger and they were experts in something and like, well, we had experts in that too. So learning to work together has been a really, really interesting road. And, you know, I was saying to you before, it just feels like we’ve been one big family forever. And the great thing about this particular change was our cultures were very similar anyway and that just makes such a big difference. And, you know, the experience was so similar, so it was probably easier, you know, because of that.

Jo Hilson:
And it’s continued to be, you know, a strength for all of us. And even as an executive team, we’ve changed and we’re all getting to know who each other is and their different styles and experience. So it’s, yeah, we’re very fortunate, I would say.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Now, one thing I’m always curious about with these sorts of processes and it seems to vary far and wide. So I’m kind of curious to hear what happened in this circumstances. Where is the consideration when you’re looking at bringing two businesses like this together? Where is the consideration for the technology and how well those are going to come together or whether there’s some deep, dark technology secrets or issues that maybe get uncovered later and so on? And, you know, is there an element in this case where things got landed on you that you found out or was there a discovery process? How did that look to get a feel for it? Because the norm seems to be very much around looking at the finances, of course, but technology doesn’t always get the same level of respect or is considered as important. It’s just like, ah, yeah, the CTO and the tech team will deal with all that stuff later. That’s not a problem. We don’t need to know anything about that.

Jo Hilson:
I think there’s probably an element of both happened and, you know, like I said, I’m two years down the track and I’m only finding out things now, but I haven’t had to find out about them either because it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have been a deal breaker in any way. Again, the luxury we had was because of organisations been in the same field. You kind of know what each organisation uses. It’s very similar technology across, you know, the competitors and we also knew a lot about their fleet management system, they knew a lot about ours, we knew about, you know, their dealer management systems and so on and so forth. So in this case we were, I guess, a little bit more lucky because we had that awareness and people had worked with for other companies before as well. So a lot of that experience and knowledge existed and, you know, again, just the transparency and the opportunity was definitely encouraged for us to delve deeper into anything further that we needed to know. I don’t think technology has been an issue at all as part of this and it wouldn’t be something that I would be going, you got this so wrong. Don’t do this to me ever again.

Jo Hilson:
But I know, you know, in previous organisations. Absolutely. That’s definitely, you know, we just got this payroll system, now we need to prioritize it. So again, very fortunate.

Paul Spain:
Oh, that’s great. And so what are the interesting things that you’ve got? You’ve got on the, on the horizon with anything you can share?

Jo Hilson:
We. So we’re definitely finishing off these big transformation programs at work and like we all know that doesn’t happen overnight. You put transformation into the title. It’s got a series amount of months associated to that, if not years. So that’s definitely our focus. We as a company are moving in Auckland, so our Auckland branches are moving into the old villa Maria site near Mongery in Auckland. And so this will mean all the locations will come together from retail rental and group support and we’ll move in and have a massive opportunity to obviously work together, showroom space and just set ourselves up in a way where we’ll be a lot tighter. So that’s happening early next year.

Jo Hilson:
So another infrastructure program of work happening, which is exciting. And the location that we’re moving into again is just stunning. So being able to take advantage of our surroundings to heighten a great brand and culture is just an extra bonus. So really looking forward to that. And you’ve got the teams working hard on the changes there. So, you know, looking at the size of the campus that we’re moving into compared to what I am now, I’m just like, oh, my goodness, this is. I’ll send out one of my support team and I won’t see them for a day, but, you know, I’m looking forward to that. And that brings, you know, greater opportunity for the digital teams to understand the business even more, which will be an absolute bonus.

Jo Hilson:
So the big focus, though, is just finishing what we’ve got. Like every other CTO out there is obviously looking at AI and generative AI and figuring out where that can make good value, where it apply good value. And I sit here and I say the schools should have it everywhere, but here I am being cautious. The irony, right? But again, that’s more of just going on that journey, but keeping the priorities and everyone’s really busy. We’re moving into peak season with the southern hemisphere, with the summer months coming towards us, and we just want to focus on keeping those customers happy and satisfied and finishing off all the improvements in the background.

Paul Spain:
And one topic that’s been in the media in recent days is around team members being encouraged or mandated to get back into the office. Is that something where you’ve had a transition from COVID where there weren’t too many choices, to where you are now?

Jo Hilson:
Isn’t this the conversation everyone loves? So we have transitioned to three days in the office for group support. So bearing in mind our frontline crew of five days, it’s seven days. You’re a customer facing role. So it’s more around those group support areas. So we’ve transitioned back to three days, and we listen to what our crew are saying and what works for them, and obviously tracking and understanding that there’s definitely an element that I would personally say is better, having seen the teams back in the office. But at the same time, the performance hasn’t changed that much either. They’re still performing, whether it’s in the office or at home. So understanding where the biggest value is, is it about the culture? Is it about performance? Is it about.

Jo Hilson:
Well, this is the way it should be, is really important. And so for us, you know, we’re rethinking, well, what does that look like going forward, as a lot of companies are? Whether it will be mandated to five days, unlikely, but definitely keeping an eye on what’s right for the company. And when we make decisions, we need to make decisions as a whole and not a department so, you know, that’s really important. So it’s definitely work in progress. For my teams in the digital space, the ones that are based in Auckland, I see a lot of really good work going on when they’re in the office, but I also see great work going on when they’ve got the opportunity to work those hours. And in digital, for us being global, there’s no nine to five. You’re globally working the hours that you need to for the right hours, of course. So there isn’t a right answer, in my view.

Jo Hilson:
I think it’s down to every unique situation. And for me, I think a nice balance between the both is working well.

Paul Spain:
Just curious, because it is very timely with what’s happening at a government level. And look, I think regardless of where an individual organisation ends up landing, probably most organisations are more flexible than they ever would have been before COVID And, you know, we’ve learned some valuable, valuable lessons and probably a bit more flexible around differing situations and, yeah, it’s, you know, I think probably in most ways positive. I think, yeah, sometimes there’s maybe more of a willingness for those that are a bit under the weather to work while they’re under the weather. Whereas in the past those lines were maybe more clearly drawn. I’m not. Well, I’m not working today. And actually, at times your recovery is better when you just go to bed and rest and don’t try and work from home. But I guess the human story, we learn different things and then we unlearn them and then we learn them again.

Jo Hilson:
That we do.

Paul Spain:
Excellent. Anything else you wanted to add before we finish up?

Jo Hilson:
No, no, it’s been great to be here and, you know, keep up with the news, especially when you’re all over the tech and everything else. I’ve learned a thing or two myself today. Thank you. No, it’s been great. Thank you.

Paul Spain:
Oh, good stuff. And of course, Siri jumping in to join the discussion. I should have learnt that lesson. I sort of have, but then I forget, which is, yeah, if you’ve got Siri on your Apple Watch and you’re part of some sort of interview or media thing, that you should turn that thing off from, or at least have it so it’s not going to interrupt you.

Jo Hilson:
Although now your watch is telling you to stand up, so there’s always something.

Paul Spain:
All right, well, thanks, Jo. Great to catch up. Those that are interested in having a bit of a look in, whether it’s they’re interested in a role at tourism holdings or knowing a little bit about, you know, where to hire a camper, van and so on. What’s the main URL that they should go to if they’re curious to have a look?

Jo Hilson:
Thlonline.com.

Paul Spain:
There we go. Nice and easy. Fantastic. Well, thanks, everyone, for listening in. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the New Zealand Tech Podcast. Of course, a big thank you to our show partners Gorilla Technology. That’s my firm, One NZ, HP, Spark and 2degrees. So great to have everyone listening.

Paul Spain:
Have you been listening via audio this week to the audio podcast? Do look out for us on sort of your social and streaming platforms so you can get access to our videos as well. Okay, that’s us for this week. We’ll catch you again next week. Thanks, everyone. See ya.