The SME Stream

Jason Paris announces his departure from One NZ, as the government opts for auctions not rollovers of spectrum licenses. 

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National says it's targeting growing parts of the world with its latest trade policy.

It is promising to attempt seven new deals in five years if re-elected - following the success with India.  

These are Brazil, Switzerland, Argentina, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Uruguay and the European Free Trade Association. 

National's Trade Spokesperson Todd McClay told Mike Hosking that it takes advantage of recent logistical changes. 

He says Chinese airlines are using New Zealand as a stopping point to South America - making trade with the continent easier. 

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As business owners, you know how hard it is keeping up with your business, let alone the news. Join Wilhelmina O'Keeffe each week as she gives you a rundown of the biggest stories that could impact your business, so you can make informed decisions with expert advice. 

This week, more talk of green shoots, so when exactly will they become a garden? Petrol prices come down, but will they reach levels seen before the conflict? Plus all eyes are on next week’s OCR announcement, will it stay or will it move? 

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The Opportunity Party has outlined their new vision for the economy ahead of the election.

The party's looking to invest more into technology and AI, strengthen the Commerce Commission to stand up to the supermarkets and gentailers and boost small Kiwi businesses.

The party also wants to forgive student loan interest in order to draw local talent back into New Zealand.

Leader Qiulae Wong outlined the party's plans further.

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Seeing that exporter confidence growth in real time - Andrew Balgarnie Chief Strategy Officer of Trade Window.

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Inflation expectations fall in June ANZ Business Confidence survey.

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Centrix's Keith McLaughlin reveals what's behind the latest Centrix stats.

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Humanoid robots taking on factory jobs seemed like a sci-fi concept, but more businesses have made that concept a reality.

These robots are powered by AI to make decisions, and Tesla's San Francisco production line is utilising more of them.  

Sam Dickie from Fisher Funds explained further.

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Westpac’s done a deal to put that info on its app. Others advocating for central register of properties at risk. 2degrees Business wrap Garth Bray. 

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Australian startup Heidi Health has become one of the most visible examples of AI actually shifting the dial on healthcare productivity – and New Zealand is at the forefront of that story. 

In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to Heidi co‑founder Yu Liu about the company’s journey from student training tool to AI “care partner” for clinicians, and its audacious goal of doubling global healthcare capacity.

Heidi didn’t start life in the emergency department. Yu and his co‑founders first built Oscar, a chatbot that helped medical students practise exam skills – essentially simulated patients for training bedside manner and clinical questioning. 

Oscar was useful, but the startup team struggled to find students willing to pay for it. In 2019, Liu and his co-founders, Dr Tom Kelly and Waleed Mussa, pivoted to tackling one of the biggest bottlenecks in healthcare – the hours clinicians lose every day to documentation and administration.

Widespread use in emergency departments

That created Heidi Scribe, an ambient AI scribe that sits in on consultations, listening to the conversation and producing high‑quality clinical notes tuned to each hospital’s templates and workflows. Clinicians were quick to adopt it. Liu describes doctors using Heidi in every consult and calling the founders directly when it went down, because they no longer wanted to go back to typing everything themselves.

In New Zealand, that enthusiasm has translated into national‑scale deployment. Health New Zealand is rolling Heidi out across all emergency departments, with clinicians in places like Hawke’s Bay cutting documentation time per patient from roughly 17 minutes to around four minutes. 

Heidi, which has now raised around US$100 million across several VC-backed fundraising rounds, blends frontier large language models with specialised, region‑local models trained on clinical language and medication names, hosted in‑region to satisfy data sovereignty requirements. That’s how it pushes accuracy toward the near‑99 per cent threshold clinicians need to trust AI‑generated notes, says Liu. Heidi wants to transform assistive AI into something closer to infrastructure.

From scribe to evidence-gatherer

Heidi doesn’t retain recordings of conversations, and while many doctors create transcriptions on their smartphones or laptops, the Heidi Remote is also available – a mobile recorder doctors and nurses can carry around clinics and hospitals for easy recording that doesn’t rely on an internet connection.

The company is already moving beyond transcription. Heidi Evidence surfaces relevant clinical research and guidelines at the point of care, while Heidi is expanding into pre‑chart summaries, referrals and spoken commands that trigger real actions in electronic health record systems. The aim, says Liu, is to let doctors focus on diagnosis and human connection, and let AI handle everything else.

In the episode, we dig into Heidi’s founding story, its rapid uptake in New Zealand’s public health system, and the governance and privacy questions that come with putting AI in the consult room. 

Tune in to the full conversation with Heidi Health co-founder Yu Liu on The Business of Tech, available wherever you get your podcasts.

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