When the Great AI Roadshow came to New Plymouth, Green Meadows Beef Managing Director Nick Carey joined N16 on stage to tell the story of the work the two businesses have done together. Not a consultant presenting a client, but both of them walking a room of local businesses through what they found, what they built, and what they would do differently.
The Challenge
Green Meadows Beef is a Taranaki meat processing and distribution business that had grown quickly. The trouble with fast growth is that the systems rarely keep up. The company was still running on the habits and tools of a smaller business than it had become. Production plans changed through the day. Critical operational knowledge lived in a few people's heads. Orders, stock and reporting leaned heavily on spreadsheets and manual re-keying.
The Approach
N16 started with the AI Navigator, our structured, business-first discovery process. Before talking about technology, we mapped how work actually flowed through the business: detailed questionnaires, more than six hours of interviews across the floor and the leadership team, and a close look at the day-to-day reality behind the numbers.
That work surfaced nine themes and eighteen distinct opportunities. The harder and more valuable step was getting from eighteen opportunities down to four solutions the business could realistically take on. AI is very good at finding the patterns. Deciding which four to back, and in what order, is a human call. That judgement is where the consulting sits.
What We Built
The four solutions were ordinary manufacturing and productivity moves. What changed was how AI helped us build and run them.
A management operating system now gives the leadership team a simple, single way to run the day. End-of-shift forms on phones feed a live production dashboard, meeting notes turn into tracked actions automatically, and a plain-English summary lands in the team's inbox every Monday. It runs on off-the-shelf tools for a few tens of dollars a month.
A daily cut sheet that used to take one to two hours of careful manual work, every single day, was replaced with a tool that does the same job in a click. It was built in days rather than weeks, and it improves as new edge cases appear.
The core platform told a similar story. Different parts of the team kept raising the same kinds of problems: stock data that was not accurate or trusted, people keying in workaround quantities, and parallel spreadsheets filling the gaps.
Because the AI Navigator had already mapped how the business worked in detail, we could write a requirements document straight from that discovery, without starting a separate, drawn-out requirements exercise. That document did two jobs. It let the team compare the existing platform against the alternatives on the functionality that actually mattered to Green Meadows Beef. And it meant they walked into vendor demos knowing exactly which questions to ask, rather than being led through a generic sales script. The ERP migration now under way was chosen on that evidence. The migration itself is not an AI project, but the discovery that made it a confident decision was.
The fourth solution, a knowledge management system, is the next phase of the work. It is designed to get hard-won operational knowledge out of people's heads and onto the floor: procedures filmed and drafted into clear SOPs with AI, then available three ways. A printed manual on the floor, a QR code on the machine that plays a short video, and a search the team can simply ask.
Why It Matters
None of this started with AI. It started with the problems. The solutions were the kind of operational improvements that have worked in manufacturing for decades. What is different now is that AI makes them faster to build, cheaper to run, and genuinely within reach for a business the size of Green Meadows Beef.
Start with the problem. Then work out how, or even if, AI can help.
What makes Kieran's programme awesome is the deep dive into systems and processes (or sometimes the lack of them!) through detailed questionnaires and 6+ hours of interviews before talking automation or AI. As he so eloquently said on day 1: “You can't automate chaos.”
Nick Carey, Managing Director, Green Meadows Beef