The New Zealand Welcome: Three Cities, a Room Full of Builders, and the Future We're Building Together

A bit over a decade ago, I flew into New Zealand with my family and a business that was quietly falling apart back home. We celebrated my daughter Bella’s first birthday at Lake Taupo. What nobody knew was, our house was on the market to keep the building company alive. I was lost, overwhelmed, and a long way from having any of it figured out.

This month I flew back into New Zealand for a very different reason. Three days, three cities, and a room full of builders in each one who wanted to talk about where our industry is going. The same country that once caught me at my lowest just welcomed me back to talk about the future. I have been sitting with that all week, and I wanted to write it down properly.

What we came to do

We ran the Future Builder AI and Productivity roadshow across Auckland on Monday, Hamilton on Tuesday, and Wellington on Thursday. The days were built with three companies I rate enormously:

• Wunderbuild, the construction management platform, with Hashi Kaar running the live product demo.
• Vision 2 Estimating, with Tom Lawson showing where 3D and AI estimating is heading.
• WunderOps, with Adam Antony on how you actually implement this stuff inside a real building company.

My Future Builder co-founder Kyle Zanetto took the room through what genuinely changes inside a building business when these tools land. And holding the whole thing together as our host was Dan Saunders, a Christchurch builder and the first Kiwi to join Future Builder. Dan opened every day, and one line of his set the tone for the whole trip: “Building companies, whether you’re in Christchurch or Cairns, carry the same exact weight.” His story deserves its own post, and it is coming.

My job was the part I love most: sitting down with builders and setting up their first proper AI workflow, live, in the room.

The crew, and why I keep doing this

None of these days happen on my own. Hashi, Tom, Adam and Kyle have now toured right around Australia with me running these one-day workshops for builders, and this week we did New Zealand together too. Somewhere across all those miles they stopped being only colleagues and partners and became genuinely good mates.

That is the part I look forward to most. The workshops matter, but so do the dinners, the stories told over them, the laughs, and the late nights solving problems that have nothing to do with the agenda. We turn up to teach, and we end up learning just as much ourselves, making the kind of memories you only get on the road. I am thankful to have found such a good bunch of blokes to build this with.

It also keeps us honest. Kyle still runs Zanetto Builders in Tasmania, Adam still runs VEO Building, and I still run Davies Construction, so everything we teach is stuff we are actually doing on real jobs, with real margins on the line. A Wellington builder put their finger on why that matters, telling us the most valuable part of the day was “real cases from real people and businesses.”

And Dan has slotted into that circle like he was always part of it. I will be back in New Zealand, that much I know, and I have no doubt I will be spending a lot more time with Dan in the years ahead.

The welcome is the story

I have run a lot of events. What struck me in New Zealand was not the questions about tools. It was the attitude behind them.

The Kiwi builders who turned up were humble, sharp, and genuinely hungry to get better. Nobody was there to look clever or to tell me why it would not work for them. They were there to learn. They asked the right questions, they backed themselves to have a go, and they were generous with each other in the room. That is rare, and it is exactly the soil that big change grows in.

You could feel it in the feedback afterwards. One Wellington builder wrote something that stopped me:

“I’ve attended many AI presentations and this is the first I’ve come away from with answers to how can this support my business. Everyone had an inspirational story.”

Another said simply:

“Appreciated it wasn’t too heavy on pushing the products, and kept to the promise of delivering value.”

That second one matters to me more than any five star rating. We did not go to New Zealand to sell. We went to be useful. Across the responses we collected, nearly everyone rated the day worth their time a four or five out of five, and the speakers full marks for knowing their subject. But the line I keep coming back to is a quieter one, from a builder still figuring out where to begin:

“Great day of learning, now just figuring out where to start.”

That is the honest reality of this moment, and it is a good place to be standing.

Why I am excited for them

Here is what I really want to say to the New Zealand building community. You are ready.

The builders I met are not behind. They are curious, practical, and they run real businesses with real craft in them. That combination is the whole game right now. The tools have arrived. What most people are missing is not intelligence or budget, it is someone to show them the first few steps and give them permission to start. Once that clicks, and I watched it click in person more than once, the growth is genuinely fast.

I am excited to see what this group does over the next year. Some of them will save tens of thousands in the first few months just by tidying up their systems and pointing AI at them. Some will win work they would have lost on price. A few will quietly become the most efficient builders in their region, and their competitors will not know why.

What comes next

Two threads from these three days deserve their own space, so I have written them up separately.

The first is Dan Saunders’ story: the weight every builder carries, why he believes we rise faster by sharing than by guarding secrets, and how the first Kiwi builder to join us ended up welcoming rooms full of his own countrymen. If you have ever felt like you were carrying it alone, read that one.

The second is the bigger picture: where I actually think AI takes construction over the next ten years, from the collapse of the pre-construction timeline to the cost of building itself coming down. That one is for anyone trying to see around the corner.

To every builder, partner and organiser who made us feel so welcome across Auckland, Hamilton and Wellington: thank you. You reminded me why I do this. New Zealand caught me on the way down once. This time you sent me home fired up.

If you were in the room and you are figuring out where to start, that is exactly what Future Builder and our Alfie platform at alfie.co are built for. Come and start with us.

Cheers Luke