A step-by-step look at automating research and development in New Zealand with AI — implemented by dgm on osFoundry.
dgm is an independent osFoundry integration partner — not affiliated with the company that makes osFoundry, and dgm has not yet completed any client integrations. This article describes services dgm offers, not past results.
Automating research and development with AI works best on clearly repetitive work, built to meet the Privacy Act 2020 from the start.
A step-by-step approach
- Map the repetitive, rules-light tasks that consume the most time
- Pick one with a measurable baseline
- Build it grounded in your own verified data, with human review of consequential outputs
- Measure against the baseline, then expand
The New Zealand context
R&D can qualify for the R&D Tax Incentive (15%, administered by MBIE and Inland Revenue) where it resolves genuine scientific or technological uncertainty.
What osFoundry is
osFoundry is a model-agnostic AI orchestration platform: you bring your own model keys (BYOK), pricing is usage-based with no per-seat fees, and it is local-first and self-hostable. Data can be pinned to a chosen managed region (US, EU or Japan) or run entirely in your own cloud account or on your own machines.
Data and where it lives
osFoundry’s managed cloud can pin data to its US, EU or Japan regions — there is no managed New Zealand region (the nearest managed options are Australia or Japan). If you need data to stay in New Zealand, the practical options are real today: AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand), region ap-southeast-6 in Auckland, has been generally available since 1 September 2025, and Microsoft Azure New Zealand North (newzealandnorth, Auckland) is generally available — so you can self-host osFoundry in your own in-country cloud account (BYO cloud), or run it local-first on your own infrastructure. Google Cloud has no New Zealand region (the nearest is Sydney, australia-southeast1). There are also NZ-owned sovereign providers — Catalyst Cloud, Datacom and CCL/Revera — that keep data under New Zealand ownership and law. One caveat worth stating plainly: the US CLOUD Act (2018) lets US authorities compel data held by US-headquartered providers regardless of where it is physically stored, so an Auckland AWS or Azure region improves physical location and helps with the Privacy Act 2020 but does not by itself remove the jurisdictional exposure of a US-parent provider. Physical residency is not the same as jurisdictional sovereignty — verify the right region and provider for your own risk profile.
How dgm can help
dgm is an independent integration partner that helps New Zealand organisations put osFoundry to work — from choosing a worthwhile first use case through to the hands-on build and connecting it to the systems you already run. dgm can help research and development teams automate the right work on osFoundry, with the Privacy Act in mind. dgm is not affiliated with the company that makes osFoundry, and it has not yet completed any client integrations, so what is described here is the service dgm offers, not past results. If you want help scoping a realistic first project, dgm can work through it with you.