Blog

For years, the question of where data lives ended a lot of New Zealand AI conversations before they started. After AWS Cloud and AI Day Auckland 2026, it doesn't anymore. We look at Halter's Clank agent and Parrot Analytics' results in production, why accountability is now a design requirement, what the AWS New Zealand region changes, and how Kiro, Bedrock, AgentCore, Amazon Quick and AWS Context fit around a governed Snowflake or Databricks core rather than competing with it.

Reflections from Snowflake World Tour Auckland: AI maturity across the room, Lourence Kruger's geospatial session, and why AIM still needs good architecture.

Snowflake's new AIM platform promises to defuse the renewal clock, code entanglement and cutover anxiety that plague every Teradata migration. Having just completed one of these large migrations for a major New Zealand telco, the Data Domain team puts Snowflake AIM's deterministic-first approach, its two modernisation paths and its six-stage guided lifecycle to the practitioner's test.

Most organisations now have the AI capability, a frontier model, an enterprise agreement, a stack of prototypes, but McKinsey puts real value realisation at just 6%. Applied Intelligence is the Data Domain practice built to close that gap: process mapping before model selection, MCP as a governed translation layer between agents and systems of record, a staged rollout from read-only to bounded autonomy, and the evals discipline that proves an agent is actually right. This piece sets out how we build AI that survives contact with production, sector by sector, from financial services to retail.

Data Domain has achieved Snowflake Premier Partner Tier, marking a milestone alongside our three-year anniversary. Premier status recognises deep technical expertise, certified delivery capability, and proven customer success, including work with one of Australasia's largest banks and one of NZ's largest regional councils. For clients, it means the same trusted team, now backed by deeper Snowflake expertise, priority roadmap access, and closer collaboration with Snowflake.

The age of Enterprise AI is here, and it's separating organisations that built strong data foundations from those that didn't. Reflections from Snowflake Summit '26 reveal a familiar pattern: the same governance gaps and adoption pitfalls of Shadow IT and Shadow BI have arrived again, now as Shadow AI, but moving faster and at greater scale. AI rewards organisations that respected the data journey. Foundations, guardrails, and domain expertise, not velocity, separate true AI transformation from a sprawl of siloed agents.

Discover how Microsoft Fabric is evolving into an enterprise intelligence platform by combining Fabric IQ’s semantic reasoning, OneLake’s unified data foundation, and Digital Twin Builder’s operational context modeling. This integration moves organisations beyond traditional analytics toward systems that understand business meaning, relationships, and real-time context. The result is a shift from dashboards and pipelines to platforms capable of reasoning, inference, and intelligence delivered into everyday tools.

Data Domain participated as an Event Sponsor at the Snowflake World Tour in Auckland - marking a milestone in our two‑year journey, spotlighting our Snowflake partnership, data and analytics capabilities, and dedication to data governance and a drive for delivering well governed, secured, quality data environments.

When Generate Investment Management needed to modernise its reporting and unlock the potential of AI, Data Domain delivered. By building a cloud-native data and AI platform, Generate transformed manual reporting into automated insights, tripled team productivity, and doubled data quality. With change management, upskilling, and ongoing support embedded from the start, Generate is now equipped for future growth and innovation, backed by a trusted long-term partnership with Data Domain.