--- title: No Jobs, or New Jobs? description: Technology rarely deletes work, it moves it. How Halter turned hard-to-fill farm jobs into hundreds of skilled roles, and why NZ should manage AI, not fear it. image: https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/hubfs/Jo%20Blog%208.png --- [![Icehouse Ventures](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/hs-fs/hubfs/Icehouse_Ventures_Monogram_Black-1.png?width=40&height=40&name=Icehouse_Ventures_Monogram_Black-1.png "Icehouse Ventures")](https://www.icehouseventures.co.nz) - [Founders](https://www.icehouseventures.co.nz/founders) - [Investors](https://www.icehouseventures.co.nz/investors) - [Portfolio](https://www.icehouseventures.co.nz/portfolio) - [Blog](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog) ## [No Jobs, or New Jobs?](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/no-jobs-or-new-jobs) [Jo Wickham](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/author/jo-wickham) ![Jo Blog 8](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/hs-fs/hubfs/Jo%20Blog%208.png?width=711&height=400&name=Jo%20Blog%208.png) *9th of November, 2026* In the run-up to the election, a lot of the debate has been about loss. Productivity has flatlined. AI is coming for our jobs. Technology is a zero-sum game: every task a machine picks up is a job a person loses. However, that isn't what I'm seeing. Technology rarely just deletes work. It moves it, from one kind of job to another, and often into better ones. The clearest example I know starts on a farm a lot like the one I grew up on in North Otago.   ## The hardest job on the farm is hiring My brother milks cows in North Otago. Ask him what keeps him up at night and it isn't the payout, the weather or even the bank. It's people. Finding a good farm assistant is hard. Finding a sharemilker who'll stick around is harder. Finding anyone keen to get up at 4am to bring the herd in, in a southerly, for the third week in a row, is close to a miracle. That's the bit of the "robots are taking our jobs" story that rarely makes the news. A lot of the hard, manual work in our primary sector isn't being taken from anyone. It's going unfilled. Farms are running short-staffed, and good people are burning out covering the gaps.   ## Enter the cow collar Halter makes solar-powered collars that let farmers move and fence cattle from their phone. No quad bike at dawn, no dogs, no fencing standards. The cows walk themselves to the next break, which, if you've ever tried to persuade a heifer of anything, genuinely does look like magic. On the fear-of-tech scorecard, this should be a job killer. It automates exactly the work my brother struggles to staff. However, [Halter](https://www.halterhq.com/) has become one of the more impressive job creators in the country. Halter now employs more than 500 people, nearly tripling its size three years ago, and it currently has 200+ roles open. Those aren’t all engineers in Auckland, either. Recently, they advertised for a field specialist based in Oamaru, to keep the collars and towers running ikeaon farms across the South Island, and a business development executive to cover North Otago. The jobs look a lot like the people I went to school with. Field technicians on the road three or four days a week fixing towers. Territory managers driving the back roads talking to farmers. Customer success people who know what a springer is. Engineers designing hardware that has to survive mud, rain and a cow using it as a scratching post. So the work didn't disappear. It changed shape. Fewer 4am, hard-to-fill jobs moving stock in the rain. More skilled, better-paid jobs building, selling, and supporting the technology that does it.   ## Jobs move. They don't just vanish. None of this is new. A few generations ago, a big share of New Zealanders worked on the land and cows were milked by hand. Milking machines and tractors didn’t leave the country out of work. They freed people up for jobs that didn’t exist yet, and made the farms that remained far more productive. AI will follow the same pattern, just faster. Some tasks will go, and quickly. But every wave of automation also creates demand for people to build it, install it, fix it, sell it, and make sense of what it tells us. We’re already seeing it, and not just on farms. When IKEA rolled out an AI assistant to handle routine customer questions, it ended up resolving nearly half of all enquiries. The obvious move would have been to cut the call centre. Instead, [IKEA retrained 8,500 call centre staff](https://www.forbes.com/sites/noemi-kis/2026/10/05/ikea-retrained-8500-call-center-workers-into-design-sales-after-ai-137-billion-followed/) as remote interior design advisers. That channel brought in about US$1.4 billion last year, and it’s IKEA’s fastest-growing sales channel. The AI took the “what time do you close?” calls. People took the work that actually needed a person. Not everyone is as relaxed. Dario Amodei, who runs AI company Anthropic, warns that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, and he’s worth taking seriously. But notice what he’s arguing for: being honest about the disruption, and investing in getting people from the old jobs to the new ones. That’s not a case for fear. It’s a case for managing the transition well, which is exactly what we should be demanding of whoever forms the next government. The honest debate isn’t whether technology destroys jobs. It’s how fast the new ones arrive, where they land, and whether people can get from the old jobs to the new ones.   ## This is what productivity looks like On a farm, productivity is simple: same land, same herd, fewer hours in the rain, better decisions. A farmer who isn't spending three hours a day shifting stock can spend them on pasture, animal health, or, radically, a weekend. Multiply that across a sector that earns most of our export dollars and you start to see why technology built here, for the industries we're already good at, is one of the best bets New Zealand has. Most cows get the hang of it within a day. Halter’s training programme runs for a week, and if a cow still isn’t having a bar of it, the farmer gets an alert. Every farmer knows that cow. Every herd has one: the old girl who has walked the same track for eight seasons and is not about to take instructions from a necklace. People aren’t so different. Most will pick up new tools faster than anyone expects. Some will find the change harder, and that’s not a character flaw, it’s eight seasons on the same track. The difference is that with people, we don’t get to leave anyone in the back paddock. Getting everyone through the gate is the job. Will AI change work? Absolutely, and we owe the people whose jobs change more than a shrug. That means training, decent transitions, and being honest that the shift isn't painless. But the Halter story is a useful reminder that technology doesn't just subtract. Done well, it takes the work nobody wants and creates work people do want, some of it in places like Oamaru. Whoever is in the Beehive in the coming months, I hope they treat this as a shift to manage, not a loss to fear. Back the companies creating the new jobs. Help people make the jump into them. And make it easy for the next Halter to start, grow and hire here.   \---- *Jo Wickham is a Partner at Icehouse Ventures, New Zealand's most active early-stage venture capital firm. Icehouse Ventures backs Kiwi founders wherever in the world they're building.* *Connect with Jo [here](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jo-wickham/).*   Tags: [Startups](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/topic/startups), [Talent](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/topic/talent), [Technology](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/topic/technology), [Growth](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/topic/growth), [Venture Capital](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/topic/venture-capital), [Investment](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/topic/investment) ![Jo Wickham](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/hs-fs/hubfs/_ZZZ3794.jpeg?width=100&height=100&name=_ZZZ3794.jpeg) #### Written by [Jo Wickham](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/author/jo-wickham) Partner at Icehouse Ventures - [Recent](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/no-jobs-or-new-jobs#tab-1) - [Popular](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/no-jobs-or-new-jobs#tab-2) - [Categories](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/no-jobs-or-new-jobs#tab-3) ### Lists by Topic - [Startups (57)](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/tag/startups) - [Founders (38)](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/tag/founders) - [CEO (34)](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/tag/ceo) - [Community (20)](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/tag/community) - [Technology (18)](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/tag/technology) - [Growth (17)](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/tag/growth) - [Venture Capital (11)](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/tag/venture-capital) - [Portfolio (8)](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/tag/portfolio) - [Funds (7)](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/tag/funds) - [Investment (6)](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/tag/investment) - [AIP (1)](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/tag/aip) - [Board (1)](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/tag/board) - [Talent (1)](https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/tag/talent) see all # About Icehouse Ventures is a venture capital firm with a mission to be transformative investors in transformative Kiwi companies. Over the last 20 years, they have scaled to become New Zealand’s most active venture investor, investing more than $800m into 390+ companies. We were among the earliest investors Halter, Sharesies, Tracksuit, Partly, Hnry, Crimson Education, Dawn Aerospace, and more.  # Links - [Raise](https://www.icehouseventures.co.nz/founders) - [Invest](https://www.icehouseventures.co.nz/investors) - [Portfolio](https://www.icehouseventures.co.nz/portfolio) # Contact [hello@icehouseventures.co.nz](mailto:hello@icehouseventures.co.nz) 125 Saint Georges Bay Road, Parnell Auckland, 1052 Copyright 2026 | Icehouse Ventures ```json { "@context" : "https://schema.org", "@type" : "BlogPosting", "author" : { "@type" : "Person", "name" : "Jo Wickham", "url" : "https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/author/jo-wickham" }, "dateModified" : "2026-11-09T04:16:02.867Z", "datePublished" : "2026-11-09T04:12:50.000Z", "headline" : "No Jobs, or New Jobs?", "image" : [ "https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/hubfs/Jo%20Blog%208.png" ], "mainEntityOfPage" : { "@id" : "https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/blog/no-jobs-or-new-jobs", "@type" : "WebPage" }, "publisher" : { "@type" : "Organization", "logo" : { "@type" : "ImageObject", "url" : "https://resources.icehouseventures.co.nz/hubfs/Icehouse_Ventures_Monogram_Black-1.png" }, "name" : "Icehouse Ventures" } } ```