AI Consulting, Training and Builds for Christchurch Businesses
Harkness AI is based in Christchurch. That means we can sit in your office, work through what your team actually does all day, and build AI into it - rather than running the whole engagement over a video call from another island.
Trusted by Christchurch businesses
What Christchurch clients say
Every company below is headquartered in Christchurch, and every quote is from the person who engaged us.
We engaged Harkness AI to build an internal AI-driven quality assurance platform, and Alex has been excellent to work with throughout. He picked up a fairly niche operational problem quickly, turned it into a workable technical design, and delivered in steady increments rather than disappearing for weeks at a time. Communication was clear and honest, including when something turned out harder than first scoped. The platform is now in testing with our team and doing what we asked of it. Easy to recommend if you want practical AI implementation rather than theory.
Blake ran a couple of sessions for my team. He was fantastic; he made it really simple for the whole team to understand, regardless of their previous AI experience.
Blake gets it - prompt, professional, knows his stuff. He took us through the easy set ups and built custom connectors and processors for our more niche requirements. Quick, fun and already changing the way we work.
Blake is amazing, his knowledge of AI is really impressive. He helped us become more confident with AI and showed us how to use it in our business. The training sessions were great, and he's very approachable and always happy to help. He also presented at our networking event and received fantastic feedback from everyone.
Blake brought a solid technology & AI perspective to our engagement at BMC. He clearly knows his space and was easy to work with, the conversations he sparked were useful in helping us get clearer on what we actually needed from a systems / AI standpoint. Thanks again.
Blake took the time to understand our vision and explained the technical side in a way that was easy to follow, making the whole process simple and stress-free. He took a complex idea and turned it into something practical, clear and user-friendly. Great work, great communication, and a great experience from start to finish.
Recently completed a half day course with Blake building my Claude Brain. The course was insightful & practical. Running 2 companies I know this is going to help me claw back some time on a lot of the repetitive tasks. Thank you Blake, excellent value and advice.
A Christchurch build, start to finish
McKenzie & Willis have been furnishing Canterbury homes from Blenheim Road since 1906. Their IT manager came to us with a quality assurance problem that was specific enough that no off-the-shelf product covered it - the kind of thing most software vendors would tell you to change your process for.
We scoped it properly first, turned it into a workable technical design, then built it in steady increments rather than disappearing for six weeks and returning with a demo. When something turned out harder than first scoped, we said so at the time. The platform is now in testing with their team and doing what was asked of it.
That shape - understand the actual operation, design against it, ship in pieces you can see - is how most of our Christchurch work runs, whether it ends in a custom platform or a half-day of training.
Out there doing the work
Not a nationwide agency with a Christchurch phone number. Blake lives here, runs public workshops at Powerhouse on Peterborough Street, and speaks at events around the city.
What this looks like in Christchurch
Christchurch is not a generic market. Most of our local work sits in three places.
Construction, trades and engineering
The rebuild left Canterbury with a dense construction and engineering sector, and it runs on documents - tenders, health and safety paperwork, variations, site reports, compliance records. That is exactly the work AI handles well: drafting first passes, extracting data out of PDFs, and answering questions about your own policies without anyone opening a folder.
Manufacturing, wholesale and retail
Canterbury manufacturers and wholesalers tend to carry deep product knowledge in a handful of long-serving heads. AI is good at capturing that: quoting support, price book maintenance, internal knowledge bases, and customer service that answers from your actual specifications rather than guessing.
Professional and property services
Firms billing for time feel AI faster than anyone, because the admin around the billable work is where the hours leak - file notes, reporting, research, client correspondence, and getting information out of systems that were never designed to talk to each other.
Three ways Christchurch businesses start
- A workshop. Half a day with your team, in your office. Cheapest way to find out whether AI is worth anything to your business before committing to a project.
- A build. One specific problem - a manual process, a bottleneck, a system that will not talk to another system - scoped, built and handed over with instructions.
- Fractional support. A day or two a week, embedded, working through a backlog of AI opportunities and upskilling your team as it goes.
Not sure which one fits? That is what the first call is for, and you will get an honest answer even when it is “you do not need us yet”. Full detail on all three sits on the services page, and the comparison guide covers how fractional stacks up against hiring or using an agency.
Christchurch AI questions
Talk to an AI consultant for Christchurch
Every engagement starts with a free strategy call. No slides, no pitch deck - just a conversation about what your business does and where AI would genuinely help.
Last updated 6 September 2026 - rebuilt on the shared site design system and added the full local client list