How Does AI Actually Go to Work Inside a Company? (Online)

• Thursday 16 July 2026 · 7:00 PM NZT (3:00 PM Beijing Time)
• Online (Microsoft Teams) — https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/3a56a02f-e8a7-4e54-8585-11faf9d36512@81198091-f840-42a8-b132-9cdaf2b12073
• 45-minute talk + 15–30 minute open Q&A

Everyone is talking about AI. Far fewer can tell you what it looks like when AI actually lands inside a real business — and starts doing the work.

CITANZ is hosting an online session with Yifan Gan, Co-Founder of Rolling AI. A former strategy consultant at BCG, Yifan moved into enterprise AI in 2022 — leading one of the earliest teams focused on helping companies actually adopt and deploy it, not just talk about it. Rolling AI has since served 100+ enterprise clients, with engagements ranging from single-digit to tens of millions of RMB.

Their approach is simple to say and hard to do: treat AI as a new employee. Put it on the frontline — in stores, sales, and customer service — and train it on the tacit "street smarts" experienced staff carry, until it can genuinely hold down the job. (In the industry, the people who do this embedding work are increasingly called Forward Deployed Engineers — but the real story is in the how, not the acronym.)

In this session Yifan will walk through what it actually takes to get AI working inside a company: real cases, the organisational traps that stall adoption, and how to tell when a business has gone from "company + AI" to genuinely "AI + company." He'll also share his own "AI mindset" — how AI has concretely changed the way he works, thinks, and lives — and what all of this means for technologists in a smaller, slower-moving market like New Zealand.

• Who it's for: technologists and leaders driving AI adoption inside their organisations, and anyone curious about real-world enterprise AI.

Bring your questions — we'll take a selection live in the Q&A.