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Rare Signals for Smarter Business
Clarity before you need it. Signals before they become problems. Insight that keeps you ahead.
RARE//Intel is where we break down the trends, risks, and opportunities shaping the digital landscape for New Zealand SMBs — before they hit your business.
We call it a Harbinger mindset:
seeing early, acting early, and helping real businesses avoid the silent threats that outdated technology quietly creates.
Here you’ll find -
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Early warnings about emerging cyber risks
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Practical guides to avoid costly tech mistakes
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Breakdowns of tools that matter (and ones that don’t)
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Clear explanations of the digital divide — and how to close it
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People‑first advice for building a stable, modern digital environment
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Insights that help you run a stronger, safer, more productive business
If you want to stay ahead of the curve — without the noise, confusion, or inflated hype — this is where to start.
Different thinking. Better outcomes.
That’s Rare.
All Posts
Your AI Has Access. Who Gave It Authority?
Your AI has access. Who gave it authority? MFA is only the beginning. In an AI-enabled world, every employee, supplier, integration and autonomous agent can become a pathway to sensitive data, critical systems and consequential decisions. Quality identity and access management connects security, business intelligence, AI governance and transformation oversight. RARE challenges leaders to expose hidden permissions, demand accountability; take back control before delegated acce
Rare Writer
4 days ago3 min read
RARE STRATEGY
Rs24 — RAPID DIGITAL INTELLIGENCE ONE DAY. ONE ASSESSMENT. ONE ACTIONABLE PLAN. Your organisation runs on technology. The organisation wants to grow, compete, pivot or save money. But who is examining whether that technology is working for your organisation and what impedes or enables its gApplications multiply. Costs accumulate. Infrastructure ages. Vendors change. AI accelerates. Cyber threats evolve. People become frustrated. Problems persist. The vicious cycle begins. Tra
Rare Writer
Oct 235 min read
THE CONSULTING PARADOX
The consulting industry excels at selling solutions. But who establishes whether they're actually needed? From costly transformations to vendor-driven technology and executive validation, organisations risk solving the wrong problems exceptionally well. Research exposes the gap between project delivery and genuine improvement. Quality consulting demands something different: independent judgement, disciplined inquiry, challenging assumptions and sustainable outcomes. Less sell
Rare Writer
Oct 115 min read
FINDING THE DOT - EPISODE 2
THE BASTARD GETS THE LAST LAUGH Tim Cox. Incurable cancer. An incurable addiction to meetings. And one final act of spectacular bastardry. First, a massive thank you. ❤️ To everyone who has donated, shared, supported or even considered helping our mate Tim, Kylie and their three children — you're bloody legends. But we're not finished. THE NEXT DOT — $75,000. And before Tim establishes a fundraising governance committee, appoints a chairperson, resurrects Karl Marx for his vi
Rare Writer
Oct 114 min read
![SILVER BULLET SYNDROME [SBS] 3.0](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/abf79d_91b45397693c4b18b87c54fa11f414af~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_1331,h_1000,fp_0.50_0.50,q_30,blur_30,enc_avif,quality_auto/abf79d_91b45397693c4b18b87c54fa11f414af~mv2.jpg)
![SILVER BULLET SYNDROME [SBS] 3.0](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/abf79d_91b45397693c4b18b87c54fa11f414af~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_1816,h_1364,fp_0.50_0.50,q_90,enc_avif,quality_auto/abf79d_91b45397693c4b18b87c54fa11f414af~mv2.jpg)
SILVER BULLET SYNDROME [SBS] 3.0
Thirty years of digital folly. ERP promised transformation. SaaS multiplied the madness. Now AI threatens to automate it at unprecedented speed. Silver Bullet Syndrome (SBS) is no longer just wasted technology expenditure. It drives failed programmes, organisational exhaustion, compounding costs and strategic drift. As vendors sell the next miracle and executives chase innovation, the fundamental question remains unanswered: What does the organisation actually need? And does
Rare Writer
Oct 95 min read
Finding the Bloody Dot — Why We Need Tim in the World
I met Tim through the Public Service Association. We rarely occupied the same philosophical postcode, but I quickly discovered an exceptionally decent human being — and a man with an infuriating ability to find the one microscopic flaw in otherwise magnificent work. I’d arrive at 4am trying to get ahead. The sod would appear shortly afterwards and find the next bloody dot. Tim now needs our help. The world needs people who notice, challenge and give a damn. We need Tim in it.
Rare Writer
Sep 293 min read
RARE SIGNAL | The Nation Inside the Disruption
New Zealand, 28 September 2026 New Zealand is living through a collision of change. Artificial intelligence is moving rapidly from demonstration to daily work. Cybercrime is becoming more forceful, automated and sophisticated. Public services are being asked to deliver more under increasingly constrained resources. The splurge-and-spend well is drying up. Data centres are turning computing capacity into an energy, infrastructure and sovereignty decision. Meanwhile, organisati
Rare Crypto
Sep 285 min read
GAIN CONTROL, NOT CONTRACTS
For 30+ years, enterprise technology meant buying capability: more software, licences, integration, dependency and technical debt. AI changes the economics. Organisations can increasingly build, compose, automate and generate what they once had to buy. Triple-loop strategy collapses the distance between intelligence, strategic choice and execution. It doesn't move the pieces. It turns the board over — and every piece on it. Control, not contracts.
Rare Writer
Sep 185 min read
Rare Signal | The Exponential Age Is Not Coming. It Is Here.
The exponential age is here. AI capability is getting cheaper, faster and more connected to real work—yet most organisations are still experimenting, not transforming. It was once about digital literacy; now it is AI literacy: knowing where AI can help, where it must be challenged, and how to retain human judgement, accountability and control.
Rare Writer
Sep 145 min read
AI Unlocked- Agents of Chaos Are Almost Here — and the Real Risk Is the Control Plane
AI agents will not create chaos because they “go rogue.” The real risk is organisations connecting capable agents to too many systems, with too much authority, too little visibility and weak recovery controls. One poisoned input, compromised identity or trusted workflow can cascade across finance, cloud, data and operations at machine speed. The strategic question is no longer whether to adopt agents, but whether every agent’s limits, actions and failures can be governed.
Rare Writer
Aug 205 min read
Experience-as-a-Service-When Selling Technology Becomes the Problem
There is a cruel irony developing inside modern organisations. Just as technology becomes exponentially more powerful, cheaper and easier to construct, many organisations are becoming more fragmented, more subscribed, more dependent and less capable of changing themselves. They are being sold transformation while accumulating complexity and contracts. Sold productivity while multiplying platforms. Sold intelligence while fragmenting their data. Sold AI while preserving the wo
Rare Crypto
Aug 156 min read
Shadow AI- The Workforce Has Built the AI Strategy. Leadership pays for the unlicensed strategic drift
Shadow AI isn't simply the next evolution of Shadow IT—it's the emergence of an unofficial intelligence layer inside organisations. As employees quietly adopt AI to stay relevant, many leaders still lack a coherent AI strategy. The result is accelerated strategic drift: individuals become more productive while organisations become less aligned. The greatest risk isn't AI replacing people—it's businesses unknowingly surrendering control of how decisions are made.
Rare Writer
Aug 144 min read
Introducing Rare Ai-Signals - This week’s New Zealand CIO Innovation Awards deserve genuine celebration. Not because awards alone prove strategic maturity, but because the winning work reveals stuff..
From here on, Rare is publishing a weekly Rare-AI Signal to drive a more valuable AI conversation- one centred not on novelty, policy, hype or tool adoption, but on outcomes, operating methods and enterprise renewal. Each edition will identify the signals that matter—where AI is creating real capability, where organisations are rebuilding the foundations for change, and where strategic drift remains unresolved. For the very first in this series, New Zealand CIO Innovation Awa
Rare Crypto
Aug 64 min read
Finance Risk Intelligence- From Periodic Reporting to Continuous Control
Risk is now continuous; most control systems are not. Finance Risk Intelligence screens every transaction, explains genuine anomalies and directs human judgement where it matters. The strategic divide is no longer between organisations with dashboards and those without—it is between those still reporting yesterday’s exposure and those redesigning how they detect, decide, act and learn before risk becomes loss.
Rare Writer
Aug 55 min read
The Rise of Systemised Stupidity: How Social-media Algorithms Trained Us to Stop Thinking—and AI Could Help Us Start Again
AI adoption is accelerating, but judgement is not. Social platforms trained billions to outsource attention; now organisations risk outsourcing understanding itself. Faster reports, summaries and workflows are not transformation if assumptions, incentives and outcomes remain broken. The real prize is triple-loop AI: using analytical power to challenge the system, redesign it around human outcomes and build a deeper civilisation—not faster churn.
Rare Writer
Aug 26 min read
Your Business May Already Be Dead- The Board is Waiting for the Numbers
Many businesses that appear successful may be strategically dead—their boards waiting for lagging numbers to confirm it. AI will not rescue weak strategy; it will accelerate it. In the exponential age, survival depends on systems thinking, reinvention and the power to reshape the board before others realise the game has changed. Value a business not on what it earns today, but on the cost of dismantling and rebuilding it. Otherwise, you may be buying a beautifully presented d
Rare Writer
Aug 16 min read
New Zealand’s Innovation Illusion- Stuck at Stage 1 AI While Its Innovation Engine Dies
New Zealand’s innovation ranking slipped from 21st to 26th since 2017—but the headline masks a collapse. Education, ICT use, patents, knowledge impact and productivity have fallen sharply as leading nations move into agentic AI and autonomous digital work. NZ remains stuck at Stage 1: importing frontier tools without building frontier capability. Without triple-loop strategy and AI-worker empowerment, it risks becoming a technologically dependent tenant in somebody else’s int
Rare Writer
Jul 297 min read
AI Will Not Save a Weak Strategy - Rare Black Strategy and the Architecture of the Exponential Age
The winners of the exponential age will not be those who buy AI or deploy the most digital grandmasters. They will understand that strategy is not choosing the best move on the board—it is seeing who designed the board, how its rules shape behaviour and how the entire game can be re-architected before the clock starts. Everyone else may possess brilliant AI yet use it to play flawless chess on an obsolete board, advancing towards a checkmate somebody else designed before thei
Rare Writer
Jul 207 min read
ChatGPT Work and GPT‑5.6- The Rare Weapon-Grade Strategy Engine Has Arrived
ChatGPT Work becomes a synthetic intelligence team operating across the organisation’s authorised environment—connecting evidence, systems and workflows while leaders retain control. Combined with Rare Data and Intelligence environments and i‑Glue, it helps organisations decouple or retire legacy systems and climb from transactions to drivers, patterns, forecasts and interventions—advancing from reactive operation to preventative, predictive, counter-anticipatory and emergent
Rare Writer
Jul 186 min read
From Delivery Engine to Ai Synthetic Operating Model - Why Triple-Loop Emergent Strategy Is Now Survival Work
AI adoption is no longer the test. The real question is whether organisations can redesign themselves fast enough to survive it. This Rare article argues that delivery engines, SaaS dependency and digital theatre are giving way to synthetic operating models, enterprise design, capability ownership and triple-loop emergent strategy. Without that shift, AI will not transform old structures — it will automate their drift
Rare Writer
Jul 28 min read
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