operator · kove.nz
About
I'm Balu.
I build AI automation tools for NZ businesses. I work alone, I build the actual software, and I make sure your team can use it without me.
I build AI automation tools for NZ businesses. I work alone, I build the actual software, and I make sure your team can use it without me.
I spent years watching businesses spend thousands on software that sits unused. Tools bought because they were on a shortlist, then left unused because no one was responsible for making them work.
Nobody was responsible for making it land. Nobody sat next to people in week two, when the friction shows up.
So I started building the tools myself, and staying until they were used.
A cove is a sheltered inlet: deep water, close in, out of the weather. Kove is that word with the spelling I wanted for the mark.
It is not decoration. Most of what I build is meant to sit out of sight and hold, so the quoting, the invoicing and the chasing people up keep happening whether or not anyone feels like doing them. Deep Cove in Fiordland is the specific one I had in mind, and it is what the design system behind this site is named after.
Kove is a one-person Power Platform and AI consultancy based in Christchurch, working with firms across New Zealand. It is me, Balu Premkumar, and the work on this site is mine.
A multi-source pipeline that scrapes 14 NZ directories, enriches each lead with Claude, verifies emails and auto-drafts cold outreach. Replaced a full day of weekly research.
The control room I built to run AI agent squads: parallel agents in one project, each in its own isolated copy of the code. The tooling behind the six-week rebuild.
One hotkey drives the machine. Dictate into any app in under half a second, and hear anything read back in a clone of your own voice. A speech profile learns my corrections as I go.
The code, the logic, the docs are visible to you the whole way through. If you can't run it on day 90, I haven't done my job.
Source code in your GitHub. Credentials in your accounts. Hosting on your bill. No lock-in, ever.
I don't count a project done until adoption is real: training, docs, and being on hand when friction shows up.
Read how the crew, the skills and the quality gates behind this actually work →
The enterprise work on this site was built in my day job. I build Power Platform apps, Copilot agents and AI systems full-time for a large NZ health organisation, and everything I show from that work is anonymised: no organisation named, no applications named, no screenshots, and nothing that would identify a system or a team. Kove is the same work, for other businesses. If you want the full picture, LinkedIn has it.
I run two or three builds at a time, no more.
If you've got a workflow eating your team's time, I'd like to hear about it. The first call is free and there's no pitch.
