Benji Crooks, Marketing Director at Public Sector Network, spoke with Dave Wild, Futurist Speaker / Facilitator / Leadership at Futurework, about what it takes to lead in an AI-enabled environment - not just use the tools. Dave will be facilitating PSN’s in-person training AI Leadership in NZ- Equipping Leaders and Teams for AI at Work as part of PSN Training on Monday, 21 July 2026.
Benji Crooks: First of all, can you introduce yourself and the course you’ll be teaching?
Dave Wild: Hey, I’m Dave Wild. I’m a futurist, and I’ll be leading the course AI Leadership- Equipping Leaders and Teams for AI at Work.
The focus is to equip leaders and teams for AI at work. And I want to pause on that phrase “AI leadership”. The course is deliberately AI leadership , it’s not AI prompting, and it’s not AI technology. It’s how you lead in the AI space: using AI yourself, and guiding other people forward.
Benji Crooks: With AI leadership becoming a must-have for New Zealand public sector leaders right now, how do they move beyond experimentation and pilots?
Dave Wild: One of the biggest blockers is the mental model people bring to it. If you ask people what AI stands for, they’ll say “Artificial Intelligence”. Then if you ask what “artificial” means, you’ll hear things like “fake” or “not real”.
So leaders are being told the future depends on “fake” technology — and it’s no surprise people hesitate, or that early adopters wonder why no one is following.
What we’ve found is the course works for people who haven’t really stepped into the tech, and also for people who are deep in it — including digital leaders and heads of AI — because the leadership side is about how you bring people on the journey.
A foundational skill is reframing what “AI” means at different layers:
At the technology level: Artificial Intelligence
With teams: Assisted Intelligence — a tool to help people do better work, not replace them
At a leadership level: Adaptive Intelligence — shifting how you think, and how you help others think, to navigate what’s coming
Benji Crooks: You mentioned five levels you take people through — does that give non-technical leaders confidence to introduce AI into working life?
Dave Wild: Absolutely.
To build confidence, we start by using AI immediately — showing how accessible it is. But we also give the underpinning theory so people know what’s happening and what the risks are.
We step through five levels that take people through the shift:
Foundations
Innovation
Strategy
Integration
Leadership
Too many leaders are trying to govern a technology they’ve never used. You need to innovate before you strategise.
Then integration is where many organisations get stuck: pilots and experiments look good, but how do you get productivity payoff? How do you integrate into existing systems?
We also talk about the “engineering role” — the idea that you can get 90% of the impact for 10% of the effort by doing simple things (like using ChatGPT well). But if you’re delivering a public service, it needs to be far sounder than a quick chat interface.
Benji Crooks: Government is good at governance and understanding risk — how can leaders keep momentum introducing AI when there’s so much control around it?
Dave Wild: I love this question, because it shows deep awareness of the dynamics: risk management, people you need to bring forward, career anxiety, and the pace of change.
One foundational thing we teach is four words: fast change happens slowly.
People think ChatGPT going viral in late 2022 means the world changed overnight. But ChatGPT was an interface layer. OpenAI was founded in 2016 — it took years to get here, and it built on earlier breakthroughs.
I liken it to the steam engine. The steam engine changed society, but not overnight — the tracks had to be laid, cities had to reorient, organisations had to build the systems around it.
With AI, we’re at the point where the “steam engine” is visible and people are laying tracks. For public sector leaders, it’s a multi-year journey of guiding it forward while building capability along the way.
Benji Crooks: What’s one thing you want participants to take away after completing this course?
Dave Wild: AI leadership is no longer about “prompt engineering” — it’s context engineering. You get better output by shaping the framing: the constraints, the audience, the goal, and the tone.
But more importantly, the real value is how you use AI to unlock better thinking with your people — not just take an answer and run with it.
When you use AI as a tool in a conversation, you can quickly generate options, provoke discussion, and then bring it back to human judgment and what matters in your organisation. That’s what adaptive intelligence looks like in practice: combining the AI and the people to move forward with more clarity and confidence.
Hear Dave Wild at AI Leadership in NZ- Equipping Leaders and Teams for AI at Work as part of PSN Training on Monday, 21 July 2026. Dave will take participants through practical foundations, innovation, strategy, integration, and leadership to help embed AI safely and effectively in everyday work.
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