The AI tools used in government and the public sector in New Zealand, organised by task, and how they connect through 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.
Teams in government and the public sector use a mix of AI tools. The useful way to think about them is by the job they do, and how they connect to the systems you already run.
AI tools by task in government and the public sector
| Task | What AI tools do |
|---|---|
| Knowledge & search | Make your own documents and records searchable in natural language |
| Drafting & summarising | Produce first drafts of correspondence, reports and content for review |
| Customer & enquiry handling | Triage, route and draft responses to incoming requests |
| Data analysis | Summarise and find patterns in your own operational data |
Connecting tools with an orchestration layer
Rather than buying a separate AI tool for every job, many New Zealand organisations use a model-agnostic orchestration layer like osFoundry to choose models (including open-weight models via BYOK), control data, and connect to existing systems. The context to keep in view is the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) and Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ), plus the Privacy Act 2020 wherever personal information is involved.
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 organisations in government and the public sector select the right AI tools and connect them on osFoundry. 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.