Lian Passmore.
Keynote speaker.

My CV reads like a scribble. Sleep coach, systems trainer, health and safety practitioner, wellbeing strategist, now an AI builder. For years I thought all that jumping around meant I was unfocused, that I'd never settle into the one thing. Then AI arrived, and I realised the jumping around was the whole point. Every detour was the training. All those roles and certifications and obsessions weren't a lack of focus, they were a toolkit I was quietly assembling, and AI is the thing that finally let me use all of it at once. I did it while raising five kids, three of them at the same time, which is the part that tells you the method holds even when life is at its most relentless.

This is the talk for anyone who's ever worried their path is too messy to mean anything. It isn't. In a world where anyone can build anything, the people who can connect unrelated dots are exactly the ones who'll thrive. Your squiggly history isn't the thing to apologise for in the interview. Right now it's your advantage.

Most AI adoption doesn't fail because the tools are wrong. It fails because the question is wrong. Owners get told to "use AI" before anyone's asked the only question that matters, which is what are you actually trying to do, and where is this business going. This is a practical, honest talk that takes the panic out of the room. No jargon, no hype, no strategy deck that ends up in a drawer.

I'll show owners why they're not behind, they're just fragmented, a tool here and a subscription there with nothing connected to the business underneath. Then how to start from the business instead, so whatever they choose actually serves where they're heading, and so they keep what makes the business theirs. Including the most underrated option of all, which is deciding not to adopt something yet.

Every organisation has values. Most of them live on a wall, or in a footer, or on the careers page. Almost none of them live where it actually counts, in the logic of how the technology thinks and responds. This talk is about the gap between saying you have values and building them in.

I'll show what it looks like to put a value in the system prompt, the database, and the experience all at once, because if it's only in one of those, it isn't really there. I'll use the Tikanga-Led Framework I co-authored, and Bea, the relational AI I built for whānau with eleven hard constraints written into the code, to show ethics as architecture rather than ethics as a press release. It isn't a comfortable talk. I'm honest about what this costs and where it's hard. But it's the conversation any organisation building or buying AI needs to have before the decisions get baked in.

I walk into the rooms where AI is being designed and built, and I rarely see a Samoan and New Zealand European woman from a small Northland town. That absence isn't a side note. It shapes what gets built, who it gets built for, and who quietly gets left out. The future is being designed right now, mostly by a narrow group of people, largely for people like them.

This talk is about who's missing from the room, what that costs all of us, and why the people with the most to gain from this technology are exactly the ones it's currently built to skip. It doesn't end on grievance. It ends on an invitation. The room can change. And the people who've spent their whole lives in the in-between, translating between worlds, are exactly the ones who should be building.