Making AI a reason for Being

Being AI has been making headlines.

In early April this year, it became the first AI company to list on the NZX through a reverse listing into Ascension Capital. Reverse takeovers occur when a private firm takes over an inactive public firm.

It then made headlines for a second time as the first company to receive a ‘trade with caution’ notice from NZRegCo following a surge in share price. The ups and downs have attracted some critical commentary around the business.

It has been a rough few weeks, says Being AI cofounder and director David McDonald, but his experience with AI in business means the attention wasn’t unexpected.

Before Being AI, McDonald spent several years with Centrality before founding the AI metaverse company Altered State Machine, which was acquired by Futureverse in 2023.

“I hate the term tall poppy syndrome, but when you pop up in New Zealand, people give you a little bit of a ribbing, and that’s fine; we’re here to do a job,” he says.

That job is to help other companies make sense of the AI space. To do that, Being AI has three branches: AI consulting, AI ventures for investments and Being Labs, its AI tech incubator.

“We wrote down clearly in our listing document what our mission was, how we’re going to use AI, and we’ve started doing that straight away,” says McDonald.

‍

McDonald sits down with Caffeine to discuss how AI is the venture's “reason for being.” 

‍

How is AI being used in your business?

It’s the fundamental cornerstone of what we do.

It’s one of the major things we research in our labs department, the focus of our consulting arm is to go and help people transform their businesses using AI, and, with our ventures, it’s the reason we target certain businesses because they can benefit from AI.

‍

How are you fostering AI literacy within your organisation?

Everybody needs to be literate to work here but it’s an industry that’s growing and evolving daily, so ongoing AI literacy – keeping up to date with what is happening – is important. 

We have special roles designed to increase our literacy within the company. We call them emerging technology researchers. Their role is to understand what’s happening in the AI and emerging technology space and report back to the company and, where relevant, to the different investments we work with. 

‍

What has been your biggest challenge with AI?

Helping the market understand the impact AI will have on them. 

The core of what we do, particularly with the consulting business, is getting the understanding out there that AI will impact your industry, these are the ways it will do it, and you probably will need some help. 

In New Zealand, we will see a lot more international companies come in and eat up Kiwi businesses because they have embraced the technology and we haven’t. People gravitate towards the things that give them better features. 

‍

How do you manage privacy concerns?

It’s not a new problem with technology. Privacy has always been a concern. We saw it with the internet, and AI has the potential to amplify it further. We have to consider those concerns. 

A significant portion of the brain power and development space is going towards solving these issues, but it’s got to evolve to the technology. 

‍

So, you stay up-to-date with the privacy laws and work in line with them? 

Our policy is to be very considerate of privacy. If you look at my previous company and things like the general music model that came out of Futureverse, that was done in conjunction with the music industry. Every piece of training data that went into that model was licensed from the creators. 

Companies doing this research and building these products have to have a deliberate concern about the way they’re doing it. While it’s tempting to forget privacy with the way things are moving, and just try to get a product in-market first, that path is fraught with danger once you start going down it.

‍

Does government AI legislation help or hinder your efforts?

At the moment, it hasn’t done either. We want to, and are having, conversations with ministers and people in industry positions to consider these things. We want to make sure there’s good and open dialogue between experts and the public around this. We want to be out in public forums and start up these debates. 

Good, effective governance is important, but you don’t want it to overreach and hinder development, leaving our country behind. It’s a difficult balance to maintain. 

‍

Is there anywhere you think it’s been done well? 

It’s early days, but I’m not jumping for joy over anything I’ve seen yet. 

‍

What AI trends are you watching? 

Gaming and entertainment technology has always got a special place in my heart. My last company was gaming/entertainment focused, and I love the stuff coming out in that space.

Some of the agent-based stuff is really good; having recursive reasoning and long-term memory is going to be more powerful than a lot of people realise. 

‍

How does the NZX listing support you?

We want to transform New Zealand business and the NZX gives us the legitimacy and transparency New Zealand businesses want to deal with. 

I’ve owned private businesses before, and we’ve done some pretty big things. Altered State Machine had the largest seed round in New Zealand history, had partnerships with FIFA, Reebok, Authentic Brands Group, Muhammad Ali Enterprises, Warner, and a whole bunch of really exciting stuff. Still, it didn’t get a lot of traction in New Zealand.

Futureverse was valued at over $1 billion in its 2023 capital raise, which, again, was not of much interest to New Zealanders. Those companies’ primary market was the US, so it wasn’t too big a deal. 

But, as soon as you have a publicly listed company in New Zealand, you start to get the attention of New Zealand companies, and that’s what’s important to us.

Access to those markets is good for funding, it makes doing acquisition deals much easier, and there are just a whole lot of perks for the business in doing it. It puts us ahead of the competition because we can point to the continuous disclosure and transparency that are the NZX requirements and the high watermark they set for a company to be listed. It says we’re not just a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of organisation – we’re here to do real work.