Analysis: NZ's supply chains are highly exposed. Ilan Oshri asks whether new AI agents might make them more resilient.
If 2026 has taught New Zealand businesses anything, it's that the next supply chain shock is never far away.
Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz sent oil prices above US$100 a barrel, added weeks to shipping routes and saw carriers slap surcharges of hundreds of US dollars per container on cargo bound for New Zealand.
DHL's latest Export Barometer found 87% of New Zealand exporters faced higher shipping costs over the past year, while only 7% escaped supply chain disruption altogether.
From the COVID-19 pandemic, to the Ever Given's temporary blockage of the Suez Canal in 2021, to the latest crisis in the Red Sea, recent years have brought other repeated reminders of this vulnerability.
New Zealand's economy, with exports of around $80 billion a year, lives or dies on its supply chains. And each time there is an issue, attention lands on ships, ports and fuel reserves.
What gets far less attention is the function inside every enterprise that actually manages this exposure day to day: procurement.
Procurement decides which suppliers a firm depends on, on what terms, with what alternatives, and how quickly it can re-source when a route closes or a supplier fails.
In a small, distant, trade-dependent economy, procurement is not back-office administration. It is the corporate immune system.
Yet in most New Zealand organisations it remains under-resourced, manually operated, and largely untouched by the AI wave now transforming other business functions.
From chatbots to agents that act
The technology now arriving in procurement is different from the chatbots and drafting assistants most managers have already met.
New agentic AI systems can carry out entire multi-step tasks - deciding, acting and adjusting course along the way - with a human supervising the work rather than driving it.
In procurement, that means agents that discover and vet suppliers, prepare and assess tenders, analyse contracts and spending, track supplier performance and continuously scan for risk.
Internationally, this has moved well past the experimental stage. In Boston Consulting Group's 2026 Tech Procurement Study, which I contributed to, we surveyed more than 200 procurement professionals and interviewed industry leaders and technology providers. Most enterprises surveyed are already piloting or deploying agentic AI in procurement.
Overseas, the question is no longer whether to adopt agentic AI, but how to redesign the procurement organisation to get the most from it.
How AI can help firms absorb shocks
For New Zealand firms, distance means longer lead times and fewer alternatives when things go wrong. The faster a business can identify a problem and find, vet and contract another supplier, the better placed it is to respond.
Manually, that cycle takes weeks. A risk-monitoring agent can scan shipping data, news feeds and supplier registers around the clock, compressing detection to hours. A supplier-discovery agent can assemble and pre-screen alternatives in days.
AI can also give small
