AI talks and workshops for your team.
Practical, demo-driven AI talks and hands-on workshops for staff days, team offsites and industry events across New Zealand and beyond. Blake Harkness, our founder, turns the hype around artificial intelligence into something your team can actually use.
Booking a conference keynote? See Blake Harkness, AI keynote speaker for his speaker bio and past engagements.
See Blake on stage
A speaker who builds what he talks about
An engineer first, speaker second
Blake builds and ships AI systems every week as a fractional AI engineer. Every talk is grounded in real, working examples - not recycled headlines.
A next-generation voice
A young engineer at the frontier of AI, bringing the perspective of the people actually building agents and automation today.
Backed by NZ’s AI community
Founder of Young Kiwis in AI, New Zealand’s largest young AI community, with meetups in 5 cities. Blake is plugged into the conversations shaping AI in Aotearoa.
Tailored to your audience
From boardrooms to dev teams to students, talks are pitched to the room - technical depth or plain-language clarity, your call.
From mechatronics to the main stage
Blake is a mechatronic engineer turned AI engineer who fell for AI’s potential to change how people work - then made it his mission to help others get there. He runs Young Kiwis in AI, sits on AI advisory groups for the AI Forum NZ and Engineering New Zealand, and brings that real, current experience to every stage he steps on.
Recent speaking
BA Big Day In 2026
AI: What's Actually Possible
FeaturedNZ IT & AI Job Forum 2026
Graduating into a World of AI: From Student to Founder in 18 Months
Bed & Breakfast Association NZ Conference
Elevating Your Online Presence with AI
FeaturedM2 AI Summit
Using AI to Make Your Team Great
Survey and Spatial New Zealand
AI in survey and spatial workflows
Engineering New Zealand
AI for engineering workflows
Christchurch AI Meetup
Hands-on with Claude and the Model Context Protocol
Young Kiwis in AI Meetups
Growing the AI community in Aotearoa
Hear Blake on the mic
New Zealand China Council Podcast
A window into China's AI and robotics
M2 Magazine Podcast
Using AI To Make Your Team Great
The Business of Tech
China's AI and Robot Revolution
The Tech'o'Space Podcast
Powering Innovation: Engineering AI for Real-World Impact
The AI Corner
Blake Harkness Reveals How He's Transforming MainPower with AI
The Global Seat
AI, Jobs, and The Future: What Young People Need to Know
Talks your audience will act on
What it means to start your career when AI is rewriting the rules.
A talk for students and new graduates stepping into a workforce being reshaped by AI. Blake - a young engineer who did exactly this - shares how to stay valuable, which skills actually matter, and how to use AI as an unfair advantage rather than something to fear.
- How to future-proof your skills in an AI-driven job market
- Using AI as a force multiplier in your study and work
- Where the real opportunities are for the next generation
A practical, build-alongside session on modern AI tooling.
A workshop-style session for technical audiences who want to go beyond chat. Blake walks through AI agents, the Model Context Protocol, and automation patterns, with live builds and real examples teams can take straight back to work.
- How AI agents and MCP work in practice
- Automation patterns that save real hours
- A starting point teams can build on immediately
Have a theme in mind? Blake builds the talk around your event.
Every audience and event is different. Blake shapes the content, depth and examples around your conference theme, industry and goals - from a room of business owners to a technical team, students or a mixed crowd. Share your brief and he'll craft a session that lands.
- Built around your theme, industry and audience
- Pitched to the room - technical depth or plain language
- Keynote, workshop, panel or fireside - your format
Practical AI, not fluff
We had Blake speak at our 'BA Big Day In' conference on the 16th of October 2026. Blake is an amazing speaker and had a group of 120+ Business Analysts in the palm of his hand! The way he was able to show a new world where AI tools were truly integrated into your day-to-day (with well-tailored and reusable skills driving the mahi) was inspiring. A real asset to put in front of any audience!!
Blake presented at our IFAA conference and received excellent feedback from our advisers. He made AI easy to understand, with practical examples and useful ideas they could apply in their businesses. His session was a conference highlight and left members keen to learn more. We’d happily recommend Blake to other organisations looking for an engaging speaker on AI.
Blake gave us a great introduction about what is AI. The slides and explanations were clear and easy to understand. The demo using Claude was helpful as well. Highly recommend.
Just had Blake present at our conference and he was fantastic. Super informative but at a level we could all understand and very engaging. Highly recommend as a speaker for an event.
Blake’s AI presentation was among the most frequently cited as the most valuable session of the conference - consistently described as practical, relevant and immediately useful for delegates’ businesses.
Blake set the standard high for innovation - defect detection with drones, chatbots saving teams 80-90% of time on repetitive tasks, and voice assistants for Alzheimer’s patients. I’d strongly recommend him, whether collaborating on a podcast or going deep on AI and mechatronics.
Booking questions
Planning an event? Let’s talk.
Tell us about your audience and theme, and we’ll come back with how we can make your AI session the talk of the event.
Enquire about speakingLooking for consulting instead? See how we can help →
Last updated 17 October 2026 - added the BA Big Day In 2026 talk and organiser review
What people say
5.021 Google reviewsOrganised, eloquent speaker with great insight to the future of AI on work. Working with Blake for our "Graduating into AI" event on behalf of AUT CSEA, was simple and high impact.
We recently invited Blake to speak at a UC Marketing Society event about how AI is actually being used in marketing, and he was fantastic.
Blake made AI feel practical and accessible, sharing real examples from his own business, including content repurposing, organising media, competitor research and SEO. I especially appreciated his honesty about the mistakes he had made, including handing too much of the creative process over to AI and seeing how quickly that can weaken a brand.
His presentation was engaging, relatable and refreshingly free of empty AI buzzwords. The key message, that AI should amplify your skills rather than replace your thinking, really stuck with me.
Blake was also incredibly generous with his time and advice. I would highly recommend him to any business, organisation or student group wanting a realistic and genuinely useful perspective on AI and marketing.
