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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seeing early, acting early, and helping real businesses avoid the silent threats that outdated technology quietly creates.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
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
7 days ago5 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
Are You Digitally Transforming — or Just Flying Blind with Better Software?
Most organisations do not fail because they lack technology. They fail because they cannot clearly see what their technology, systems, vendors, people, risks and strategy are really actually doing. That is no longer a dramatic claim. It is visible in the numbers. Gartner has reported that only 48% of digital initiatives meet or exceed their business outcome targets. BCG has reported that 70% of digital transformations fall short of their objectives. In AI, the gap is even sha
Rare Writer
Jun 245 min read
How Far for Stage 2? Persistent Agentic Systems and the Real Meaning of AI
The wrong question is still being asked. Most public and organisational discussion about artificial intelligence remains trapped in a theatrical argument about whether machines are “conscious,” whether they “think,” when they will be or whether they are merely “stochastic parrots.” That debate, beyond the hype, may be philosophically interesting, but it is strategically distracting. The more urgent question for business, society, education, government, and the future of work
Rare Writer
Jun 238 min read
Unlock CyberSecurity Value from your Microsoft Licensing Investment
A DTSL TECHNOLOGY LEADERSHIP BRIEFING As most know, we [at Rare] operate only with or through a small number of long-standing, highly trusted, and deliberately selective partner relationships. DTSL is one, among those partners. They are hosting the event below, which we will be attending. For business leaders, those reliant on a secure-ship sailing, I would strongly suggest it is worth making time for. Chris Hoffman, DTSL's CTO and CISO, is a top-tier operator. Given the them
Rare Writer
Jun 141 min read
The Digital & Identity Control Crisis: When Organisational Dysfunction Becomes Digitally Executable
The real risk is not just breach. It is organisational dysfunction becoming digitally executable. Weak governance becomes excessive access. Poor culture becomes hidden exceptions. Supplier dependency becomes uncontrolled exposure. Leadership assumptions become audit, practice gaps and an environment ripe for exploitation. Internal politics becomes suppressed evidence. AI adoption becomes unmanaged data leakage and identity exploitation. SaaS convenience becomes invisible exfi
Rare Writer
Jun 212 min read
Rare Innovation is proud to back a historic moment for Golden Bay Football Club
Rare Innovation is proud to back a historic moment for Golden Bay Football Club
Rare Writer
Apr 84 min read
Battle for the Bay 2026 - Community, Courage, and the Beautiful Game Coming Together
Battle for the Bay 2026 brings football, community, and purpose together in Golden Bay. More than a tournament, it is a celebration of connection, warmth, and the beautiful game - helping raise awareness, strengthen belonging, and support the vital work of Hope Is My Home Boy. A brilliant community event with heart, energy, and real impact.
Rare Writer
Mar 74 min read
Supporting Battle for the Bay - 2026
Supporting Mental Health Awareness, Suicide Prevention and the Beautiful Game
Rare Writer
Feb 122 min read
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