Beyond the Chat Window: Building a Real AI Workspace
EventIn person
Ellen Melville Centre, Auckland, New Zealand
This session looks at what it takes to move beyond a single chat window and build a genuine AI workspace – a considered set of tools, habits, and workflows that support the way you actually work and live.
We'll map the landscape by category rather than by brand, so you can understand what each type of tool is for, where the boundaries between them sit, and how they fit together into something coherent.
The focus is practical and aimed at professionals, builders, operators, and anyone who has accumulated a scattering of AI subscriptions without a sense of how they connect – team leads and those setting direction for others will also find plenty to take away.
We'll explore-
The categories that make up an AI workspace – conversational assistants, coding and agentic tools, automation and orchestration, knowledge capture, research and search, generation of images, audio and video, and where each genuinely earns its place.
Choosing between frontier models, specialised tools, and local options – the trade-offs in capability, cost, privacy, and control.
Connecting your tools to your context – files, notes, calendars, email, and codebases, and what changes when AI can actually see your work.
Techniques that separate casual use from serious use – prompting patterns, structured context, reusable instructions, and knowing when to hand off a task versus do it yourself.
Automation and agents – identifying which recurring work is worth automating, and recognising the tasks where supervision still matters more than speed.
Extending the workspace into life beyond work – planning, learning, health, finances, household logistics, and creative projects.
The cost of complexity – tool sprawl, subscription creep, fragile workflows, and how to keep a stack small enough to actually maintain.
Privacy, data boundaries, and trust – deciding what you're willing to put where, and building sensible defaults.
Assembling your own stack – starting points for different kinds of work, and