Our Discovery: AI & Search Summit sold out as the industry came together to discuss brand discovery in an evolving media landscape of AI-generated answers and instant-response search. We heard keynotes from Amazon Ads, Google, OpenAI and Kantar, insights from our expert hot takes speaker panel plus an interactive workshop led by our Emerging Technology Council team. Here's the event wrap, containing post-event resources, highlights and photos.
Thank you to our keynote speakers and our hot takes speaker panel for their insights, and for the follow-up resources below, which are current at the date of publication 18 August 2026. For those of you that prefer audio, there's a 'deep dive' Gemini Notebook AI podcast 🎧 Plus, you may be able to spot yourself or your friends in the event photo gallery 📷 A big thank you to our event sponsors Amazon Ads and Taboola.
Post Event Speaker Resources
Nikki Rogers, Head of Performance, Google NZ: Resources
Top tips for gen AI features on Google Search
Google SEO guide for marketers
Aneeket Dayal, Strategy & Insights Lead, Amazon Ads: Abridged Keynote
Mitch Pilar, GTM Ads Solutions, OpenAI: Full Keynote
Jason Schoeman, Head of Solutions & Enterprise and Victoria Fedotova, Group Client Director Kantar: Abridged Keynote
Rowan Schaaf, Co-Founder Pattern
Rowan's hot take on the speaker panel was that agentic influence is going to be about utility. The brands that win will be the ones that prioritise the tools agents need to act, and with WebMCP on the horizon, now is the time to start planning.
Here's what you need to know about WebMCP. Pattern has also built a prototype brand-audit tool, which compares how brands appear inside multiple AI platforms.
Richard Conway, CEO The Optimisers
Ahead of this Summit The Optimisers ran 'The NZ AI Answers Project' Survey to uncover what AI tells New Zealanders currently, and it found that the top answer doesn’t reflect real market share and it changes depending on which AI engine you ask. You can download the full report below.
For those who missed this event, you can listen to some of the highlights in the IAB NZ Insights Podcast thanks to the power of Gemini NotebookLM and AI. Please note that this is an automatically generated AI podcast based on content from events and outputs and not the direct perspectives of the presenters or IAB New Zealand.
A big thank you to our industry expert speakers.