From Future Leaders Programme to leader with a futuristic job
As a BOPET Future Leaders Programme attendee many moons ago, Morgan Clearkin had no chance of foreseeing where his career would lead him. Quite simply: his job didn’t exist.
In short, Morgan is head of AI at KPMG New Zealand.
In long form, late last year Morgan was offered the opportunity to step into the KPMG IT Leadership team as the Head of AI. He considers that invitation as both recognition of his efforts in the space to date, and as a signal of the investment KPMG will be putting into that technology in the future.
He heads a team of eight working on the development of niche AI solutions for KPMG, driving continuous learning across the business and continuing to improve KPMG’s AI capability to better position it in market and leverage this technology to drive value for clients.
“Taking on the Head of AI role was a huge opportunity for me to step into the realm of AI leadership and drive the firm, so I wholeheartedly took it on and spent much of late-2025 hiring a team to drive the transition from AI Foundations to Agentic AI in 2026.
“It’s a challenging role where I am stepping away from the technical matter expertise role I had always taken through my career and instead into a leadership role where I am no longer the technical expert in the room which is a real change,” he says.
Morgan, a former Mt Maunganui College student, is in his early thirties, married with two children and Hamilton based.
Morgan’s university years
His studies at Waikato University began in 2011 where he initially pursued a Bachelor of Management Studies. He’d originally thought his studies would have him majoring in International Management and French.
“But I got seduced by the broad scope of Supply Chain Management (turns out I love knowing how everything in a business ties together) which became my major. Funnily enough, through my choice of papers I wound up accidentally with a double major in both Supply Chain Management and International Management (thanks French papers) with First Class Honours.”
Morgan tells how he got involved with various student groups and took up some interesting jobs such as a summer English Teacher at a school in China during their winter of -20 degrees, and Waikato Hospital Operating Theatre Store person. It turns out Waikato Hospital had more in store for him.
Those early career days
Morgan tells how ending his studies and beginning his career was not a clear-cut transition from study to work. This was because his final year at university was as much entering the workforce as study because he was given the opportunity to work within a project team at Waikato Hospital transforming their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and related processes.
“This gave me the opportunity to get stuck into all of the things that interested me from my supply chain major, to work on process improvements and to see a lot of the ‘under the hood’ aspects of keeping a hospital operating smoothly. Probably most importantly to my later career, I spent much of my work time getting to know and experiment with how these systems are configured,” Morgan shares.
Floppy disks and cereal box computer games.
Growing up Morgan spent a fair amount of time in and around computers, whether it was installing and playing computer games or figuring out settings on his mother’s very first black and white Siemens phone, to getting his own Nokia brick in his early teens.
“As a signal for my career trajectory, I count myself fortunate to be of the generation that grew up with floppy disks, cereal box computer games and the early internet. It gave me the appreciation for technology that I don’t always see by those older or younger than me”.
He says that actively using technology through these shifts meant he built a passive understanding for how some things work and how to alter things within those systems without breaking the whole thing – this was fundamental, he says, for everything that came in his early career, through to today.
Career moves
Beyond Waikato Hospital, Morgan’s work stints included time with Marley in Auckland, then More4Apps, Canary Enterprises, and Urban Homes (the latter three all in Hamilton) before joining KPMG where he came on board as a Business Analyst working within the Transformation Office.
His career journey has seen plenty of resistance to change and reluctance to adopt new ways of work or technologies. One place of employment shocked him, at the time, with its archaic supply chain practice. Another disappointed him with its low shareholder appetite for investment into the improvements he proposed.
His resume reads of experience doing the bulk of purchasing for several manufacturing plants; building complex excel spreadsheets using Visual Basis for Applications (VBA) macros to support procurement processes; working within complex ERP systems; improving supply chain processes; taking ownership over the IT elements of businesses; and helping businesses adopt new ways of work or technologies… to name but some responsibilities.
The KPMG move
Three years ago, Morgan identified the need to step back from being a large cog in a small machine to instead being a much smaller cog surrounded by people with similar skills to himself – those who could help him grow and build a more stable foundation.
“I needed those who could help me develop the right skills, frameworks and practices that I was lacking in my other roles where I was instead attacking problems from best intentions, rather than best practice,” Morgan says.
Business analyst-type roles would be ideal, he identified. It would offer a place from which he could be a middleman between the people with technical knowledge and those who needed things, and he’d be able to build his communications and change management skills. His wife, Megan, found him just what he was looking for at her workplace – KPMG.
At KPMG (as Business Analyst within the Transformation Office) Morgan worked on a variety of projects spanning resource management, data governance and other technology-related topics and “cottoned on” to the benefits of ChatGPT for work when it first came onto the scene in 2023.
He was a strong proponent of Large Language Models (LLM) technology – a type of artificial intelligence (AI) designed to understand, interpret, and generate human-like text at a massive scale.
He took every opportunity to work in that space when it arrived, and in 2024 was nominated to take on a role as AI Specialist to drive the roll out of a more formal AI function, governance process and Microsoft Copilot.
“It was such a new space for the firm that I got to dive deep into the technical elements of this new technology, teach and train a wide audience within KPMG and play the role of Business Analyst/Technical Subject Matter Expert for senior executives within the firm who were the key decision makers for this initiative.
“I wound up leading several large initiatives to roll out AI solutions and campaigns across 2024 and 2025 with a lot of success and found myself as the go-to person for most people starting to use the technology. For a firm of over 1500 people at the time, this was no small feat”.
Then late last year came promotion to his current position.
“I am enjoying supporting my team and acting in a support and coaching role, made easier by the highly capable team I have around me,” Morgan is happy to report.
When not at work
Spare time is spent with family as much as possible, getting the kids out and about hiking, biking and camping - generally being outdoors.