Analyse Podcast

Fresh out of the studio, this marks the 11th year of the e-Conomy SEA report with Nitin Gajria, Managing Director, Southeast Asia & South Asia Frontier Markets, Google; Florian Hoppe, Partner at Bain & Company; and Cassie Wu, Director of Investments, Asia Pacific (excluding China and India), Temasek. Generative AI reached 240 million users, or 60% of the working population, in three years — a milestone the Internet took ten years to hit. Yet per capita token usage is one-tenth of the US, with the gap almost entirely in enterprises outside Singapore and Malaysia. The panel shows AI-assisted shopping journeys lifting average order value by 75%, sets four tests for durable AI companies in Southeast Asia, and argues the region's diversity is its moat as Southeast Asia enters its AI decade. "62% of users in Southeast Asia feel more positively about AI this year than they did last year ... We're stepping into the AI decade for Southeast Asia. And we're just at the ground floor of that. So it's going to be…

Fresh out of the studio, Rui Ma, founder of TechBuzz China, returns to examine China's AI ecosystem on its own terms rather than as a horse race with Silicon Valley. She maps the atlas of China's AI labs by strategy, from DeepSeek's "cost curve rebels"; to the big-tech war over office agents, and explains why cheap intelligence comes from brutal domestic competition rather than an export plan. Rui Ma unpack why robotics enjoys a homegrown market that pure AI lacks, why robot hardware and software must co-evolve, and how China prices insurance for brain-computer interfaces before the devices ship. Last but not least, she shows how Chinese municipalities now act as startup service providers, raising the floor for everyone while letting markets pick the winners. "The [Chinese] government's not looking to build a multi-trillion dollar AI behemoth. The government is like, 'What is the best outcome for my society?'The best outcome is that the best technology survives. I don't want it to go bankrupt, right, and die…

Fresh out of the studio, Jon Russell from Asia Tech Review and executive director at Ellerton & Co., returns to trace how Chinese AI crossed from technological challenger into a commercial industry and a geopolitical export model. He unpacks the first public earnings from Z.ai and MiniMax, where revenue growth above 300% still cannot explain the valuations, and why cutthroat domestic competition makes international expansion existential for Chinese labs. Bernard and Jon examine the hidden on-premises market, the sovereignty stacks forming in Europe and Asia, why the copying narrative around distillation collapses under scrutiny, and China's remaining bottleneck in lithography. Jon closes on what he calls the dome: an AI ecosystem now self-sufficient from technology through to capital. "The really impressive thing isn't just that China's building its own tech stack. It's that—it's so integrated. Companies are going public, they're raising money. It's entirely self-sufficient from the technology to the…

Fresh out of the studio, Ang Li, CEO and co-founder of Simular and previously a research scientist at Google DeepMind, joins us to explore why computer use is the last mile to AGI. Ang traces his path from studying catastrophic forgetting and continual learning at DeepMind to founding a company on a single conviction: models break in production because the data distribution never stops moving, and the only place to close that loop is the real world. He explains why the chatbot metaphor misleads enterprise buyers, why the right unit of measurement is tokens per task rather than price per token, and how the power law of practice should make an agent cheaper every time it repeats the same work. He separates capability from reliability through pass@k and pass^k, argues that deterministic work belongs in code rather than in a model, and makes the case that frontier labs exist to sell tokens while Simular exists to remove them. Last but not least, Ang shares his test for AGI — one you feel rather than see — and…

Fresh out of the studio, recorded in Singapore, Steve Clayton, Senior Vice President and Chief Communications Officer at Cisco, joins us to discuss what it takes for AI to scale inside enterprises globally. Steve argues that narrative belongs at the top of the AI pyramid, not the bottom — in an era when models generate more material than any organisation can absorb, the story a company can credibly tell becomes the scarce asset, not the technology itself. He explains why the truth lies in the field rather than at global headquarters, how regional dynamics reshape where a story lands, and walks through Cisco's advances in silicon and quantum computing networking. Showing a real customer deployment, he argues, is what earns permission to talk about security and trust at all. Last but not least, he shares what great look like for Cisco to build their story in the age of AI. "Take your phone and switch it into airplane mode and see how much you can do on your phone. Very little. You can use the calculator, but…

Fresh out of the studio at the Dataiku Summit Singapore 2026, Nur Hafiza Mutalif, Assistant Head of International Affairs at the Singapore Red Cross, joins us to explore why the humanitarian sector distrusts AI, and what her team built once they worked through that scepticism. Coming to this from international law rather than data science, Nur Hafiza explains why the sector's caution is a feature rather than a lag: humanitarian work rests on doing no harm and on neutrality, and any solution must clear that bar before it clears a business case. Dataiku cleared that bar. Its pro bono experts taught the team how the models worked and let them set the boundaries — which is what earned their confidence. Hafiza walks through the disaster surveillance pipeline that freed four people from daily collation, and the Thailand leptospirosis model forecasting outbreaks from case and climate data. She argues AI should never be justified on efficiency, that data efficiency itself carries risk, and that acting on a forecast…

Fresh out of the studio, Sophie Dionnet, Senior Vice President of Product and Business Solutions at Dataiku, joins us at the Dataiku Summit in Singapore to discuss what turns enterprise AI investment into measurable value. She lays out the three ingredients Dataiku builds around — the right people, orchestration across technologies, and supporting controls — and makes the case that governance is a scaling mechanism rather than a brake. She points to Roche, where a patent lawyer encoded his own professional expertise into a working system of agents, discusses Dataiku's answer to agent sprawl with agent management launching in October, and closes on strong momentum across banking and the public sector in Asia Pacific. "A lot of the changes that organizations need to do today actually don't require the latest model. That's not really the problem. It's about doing the hard thing, the change, the things that we talked about. It's easier to be excited by the new toy than by trying to use it. And so yes, I think…

Fresh out of the studio, Dr. Rafael Frankel, Head of Public Policy for Asia Pacific at Meta, joins us to unpack how Meta is stepping up on the fight against scam syndicates in Southeast Asia along with a coalition of partners. He explains why today's syndicates operate with state-like capabilities and forced labor at scale and how AI has become both the scammers' sword and Meta's shield, powering the removal of hundred million scam accounts in 2025. Frankel walks through the disruption-sprint model that took down the million accounts in a single week alongside the FBI, Microsoft and Starlink, and argues that beating scams demands a coalition matched to the criminal supply chain. Closing out, he reminds us that crime is never zero — but through sustained, collective pressure, it can be cut by orders of magnitude. "I think that people underestimate the criminals that are the drivers of the scams. Mostly what we're talking about at this point is extremely well-financed, highly sophisticated transnational…

Fresh out of the studio, Jing Yang, Asia Bureau Chief at The Information, joins us to explore how China is building frontier AI under chip constraints, state capital, and open source ambition. Jing breaks down her scoop on DeepSeek's $7.4 billion round at a $50 billion valuation, unpacking a deal structure in which the founder wrote two-fifths of the check and outside investors got no voting rights. She explains why Chinese AI valuations trail US labs, why seven to eight language model players refuse to consolidate, and why DeepSeek chose Huawei chips before Huawei knew about it. Last but not least, Jing shares the indicators she is watching from now to 2027. "This is one of the things that really surprised me when I was working on this story: DeepSeek had spent a lot of time last year retrofitting their models and software with Huawei chips. I think a lot of people assumed it's because the government ordered DeepSeek to work with Huawei to embrace the domestic ecosystem, but it's actually the opposite. It…

Fresh out of the studio, Aneesh Raman, Chief Economic Opportunity Officer at LinkedIn and co-author of Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI, joins us to dismantle the flattened narrative that AI is simply taking jobs. His counter-thesis: work is changing, not ending — and we never truly left the industrial age, only traded the factory floor for the office floor. Aneesh walks through his three-bucket framework for auditing your week, the move from the career ladder to the career wall, and why the org chart is giving way to the work chart. He closes by reframing the current AI moment as a battle of belief, urging leaders and workers to move from anxiety to agency and bet on themselves. "We are in a battle of belief right now more than anything else. So stories matter a lot to humans. It's not just the tools we create, it's the stories we tell that have allowed us to become everything we've become. But whether it leads to better or worse... depends on the story we tell now. If we tell ourselves a…

Fresh out of the studio, Benedict Evans, independent technology analyst and author of AI Eats the World, returns to explore whether the AI model layer is becoming commodity infrastructure. Benedict argues there is no winner-takes-all effect in models yet, drawing parallels to telecoms, cloud, chips and the fiber bubble to ask where durable value actually accrues when everyone runs similar infrastructure on similar tokens. He unpacks why the chatbot remains a poor interface, introduces the "blank screen" and "jagged frontier" problems that keep software companies alive, and explains why large language models inherently give you "the average." Closing the conversation, Benedict reflects on the indicators that would show AI has truly eaten the world — and why the answer is better products, not better models."When you automate away work, you can always see the jobs that are going away because they're right there. And you don't know what the new jobs are going to be. Human needs are infinite. How many people are…

Fresh out of the studio, Eyck Freymann, Hoover fellow at Stanford and author of Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China, joins us to explore why the Taiwan question will be decided by economics and coercion, not by invasion. Eyck unpacks the Thucydides Trap as a warning, not a prophecy, traces how Xi Jinping's Belt and Road statecraft shapes his approach to Taiwan, and contrasts a kinetic invasion with the "quarantine" scenario he fears most. He reframes 2027 as a capability milestone, recasts TSMC as a "silicon magnet" binding America to Taiwan, and flags Taiwan's 2028 election as the real flashpoint. Last but not least, Eyck argues the real task is to deter the crisis, not the war. "For Beijing, I hope they will say: the United States actually does have a strategy to use every element of its national power to preserve peace and stability without provoking us, and we should not assume the United States is incapable of an effective response. In Taiwan, I think the lesson is: the United States…

Fresh out of the studio, James Liang — Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Trip.com Group, economist, and author of Innovationism: A New Philosophy for the Age of AI — joins us to explore what becomes of human meaning when AI does the work. James argues that innovation and heritage are "the same coin": innovation measured by how much heritage it leaves behind. He unpacks why the individual, not the nation or firm, is the binding constraint on innovation, why aging societies stop producing startups, and how his Nature 2024 hybrid-work study reframes family-friendly policy as economically rational. Closing the conversation, James explains why he is bullish on China mid-term but bearish long-term — and why population, not chips, is the real race. "To innovate and to innovate successfully is measured by how much heritage you generate. But you know what's a good innovation? What's innovation can have a lasting impact? In my definition, the good news is it's going to last." - James Liang Episode Highlights:…

Fresh out of the studio, Eric Ries — author of the new book Incorruptible, founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, co-founder of Answer.AI, and author of The Lean Startup — joins Bernard Leong to discuss his blueprint for building mission-controlled companies that resist financial gravity. Eric explains why trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in business and why success, far from being a shield, makes companies a target worth capturing. He walks through the governance fortresses that have kept Costco, Novo Nordisk, and Patagonia true to mission for decades, and argues that today's so-called best practices have destroyed billions in shareholder value. The conversation turns to AI: which parts of the Lean Startup it accelerates, which parts it cannot, and why validated learning still lives only between the ears. Eric closes with a radical redefinition of profit as the maximization of human flourishing, and a challenge to Asia-Pacific leaders to leapfrog the governance failures the West is about to…

Fresh out of the studio, Geoffrey Cain, author of Steve Jobs in Exile and Samsung Rising, returns to the Analyse Podcast to argue that the twelve years between Jobs's 1985 ouster and his 1997 return to Apple were not a footnote but the forge. Drawing on private archives at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, unbroadcast footage from inside NeXT, and interviews with the people who lived it, Cain reframes the wilderness decade as the cause, not the gap, in Jobs's transformation. We trace the NeXT collapse and the failed IBM licensing deal, the parallel crucible of Pixar where Catmull and Lasseter barred Jobs from creative meetings, and the deep Japanese and Zen influences — Akio Morita, Sony, the beginner's mind — that Isaacson and Schlender underplayed. We close on Apple at fifty, John Ternus's ascent, and what Jobs would have done with AI. "The successes that we see in the world for every iPhone there is, for every SpaceX rocket there are perhaps dozens or maybe even hundreds of failures behind that we don't see.…

Fresh out of the studio, Bernard Leong sits down with Kiren Kumar, Deputy Chief Executive of the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) Singapore, for a conversation on how Singapore is building trusted AI at national scale. Kiren traces IMDA's arc from the 2018 Model AI Governance Framework to the Agentic AI framework launched at Davos this year, the four AI missions — advanced manufacturing, finance, connectivity, and healthcare — anchoring the next strategic bound, and the programs moving enterprises from pilots to production. He argues the real blocker is leadership rather than policy, that trust is Singapore's enduring competitive moat, and that the country must shift from 10% productivity gains to 10X transformation. The conversation closes with a preview of ATx Summit 2026 and what great looks like for Singapore's AI economy by the early 2030s."What would be amazing to see in Singapore is, number one, we have our large companies truly transforming themselves and becoming way bigger than they are…

Fresh out of the studio, Alex Topaloski, CEO and Co-founder of Pulse ID joined us in a conversation on his company's customer engagement infrastructure powering Visa's cardholder offers across Asia Pacific. Drawing on Pulse ID's recent white paper, The Age of Knowing, Alex unpacks the three forces reshaping bank loyalty: interchange, partnerships, and intelligence. He explains why banks have solved the data problem but still struggle with engagement, walks through agentic AI architectures and the minimum effective nudge principle, and lays out why Asia-Pacific diversity demands distinct playbooks for Australia, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Closing out, Alex argues the next 12 months belong to banks that prioritize the last mile — where ROI on a decade of data investment finally lands and lays out what great would look life for Pulse ID moving forward. "So we are making that transition from being a system-of-record platform for engagement, loyalty, and rewards to being a system-of-action platform that drives…

"Many of these AI advancements, where the U.S. is more on the innovative theoretical side of creating new models... China's really ahead on commercializing them, and that's their advantage. I think saying that China and the U.S. are equivalent in AI is probably an overstatement. I think the AI center of innovation continues to be in Silicon Valley. This could change—the gap is closing. I do think the U.S. is still ahead, but I think China is catching up." Fresh out of the studio, Bernard Leong reconnects with Rebecca Fannin, founder of Silicon Dragon Ventures and author of Tech Titans of China, six years on from their first conversation about the original landmark book. Rebecca traces China's transformation from copier to innovator, the decoupling of US-China venture capital and the reroute of capital flows toward the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and an AI race where China commercialises while the US theorises. The conversation moves through Chinese EV dominance, humanoid robotics, and semiconductor…

"The word I always come back to when I think of the future of trust and safety is governance. We are no longer just making moderation decisions. We're no longer just banning people or deleting posts or removing accounts. We are ultimately responsible for overseeing the health of the platforms and communities that we've created. Especially in an age of AI, I think there's a huge role for the field of trust and safety in overseeing the decisions that AI makes. In a world where we automate more of our decisions, that doesn't mean that we don't have jobs anymore. It means that our jobs change. And our jobs change to being auditors and overseers of automated decisions. And then when we find problems, we're the people who are now responsible for engineering solutions to them." - Yoel Roth Fresh out of the studio, Yoel Roth, Senior Vice President and Head of Trust and Safety at Match Group, joins Bernard Leong to trace how trust and safety has evolved from a behind-the-scenes function into a board-level discipline.…

Fresh out of the studio, Peter Noszek, co-founder of SuperAI and TOKEN2049 join us on a conversation that maps the widening gap between Silicon Valley's creative intensity and Asia's underutilised compute infrastructure — including 900 megawatts of GPU capacity in Johor, Malaysia sitting at low utilisation because the routing layer between US demand and Asian supply simply doesn't exist yet. Peter introduces Pax Silica, his thesis that Singapore can serve as the neutral ground where fragmented AI communities from East and West converge through curated rooms, cultural bridging, and unreasonable hospitality. They explore why the Bay Area still doesn't understand Asia, the 12-to-18-month window before GPU backlogs clear, Singapore's unique "one to a hundred" positioning for enterprise distribution, and why AI agents — from Coinbase x402 transactions to Meta's agent-to-agent one-on-ones — are already reshaping how coordination happens at scale. "I'm of like a hundred percent conviction that the majority of times…

Fresh out of the studio with John Morgan, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Splunk Security at Cisco. The conversation unpacks the AI inflection point reshaping security operations — from the explosion of machine data (set to more than double in three years) to the rise of the agentic SOC, where AI agents handle detection, investigation, and response while humans focus on high-stakes decisions. John breaks down why attackers armed with AI now exploit zero-days in hours instead of weeks, why security must start with observability (including the challenge of "shadow AI"), and how CISOs are evolving from technical gatekeepers into board-level business enablers. His parting message: the entire world is learning AI together — get to it with his perspective on what great looks like for Splunk Security moving forward. "The volume is increasing quite a bit. We expect in the next three years it’s gonna double. Attackers do not have a governance of regulatory and compliance restrictions on them. They just…

Fresh out of the studio, Borko Kovacevic, Co-founder of Poddster and Podyx, joins us to explore how he is building the world's largest podcast studio network and the operating system behind it. He shares his career journey from nearly 17 years at Microsoft across Central Europe and Asia Pacific, to making the entrepreneurial leap and launching Poddster's first flagship studio in Dubai, followed by Singapore. Borko explains how Poddster scaled by treating operations like software — standardizing over the operational framework to run studios from UAE and Singapore to now globally across the world while building a flywheel connecting corporate brands with authentic content creators. He unpacks how Podyx, the software spinoff, hit 24 markets with zero churn on day one. Closing the conversation, Borko shares why frequency and consistency in content creation — not polish — is the single most underestimated edge in the AI era, and what great looks like for Poddster and Podyx as a global studio network and platform.…

Fresh out of the studio, Ken Exner, Chief Product Officer at Elastic, joins us to explore how Elastic evolved from the world's most popular open-source search engine into the context layer powering modern AI applications and agent systems. He shares his career journey from database programming to over 16 years at Amazon building AWS resilience practices, and now leading product strategy where search, observability, and security converge into a unified AI platform. Ken explains why context engineering is the defining discipline of the AI age, where developers become managers of agents, and how Elastic's 15-year enterprise head start positions it as the foundational retrieval layer between enterprise data and LLMs. "I like to think of the future of software development is—developers will be managers of agents. They're no longer going to be ICs [Individual Contributors], they’re going to be managers. Every developer is going to be a manager of agents and they’re going to be doing context engineering. They’re…

"Motivation is a triangle. It requires: Behavior: What am I going to do? Benefit: Why am I going to do it? Belief. If you don’t have those three areas of your life in concert, all the advice in the world is going to go in one ear and out the other. Beliefs are tools, not truths. The majority of our problems today—cultural, geopolitical, personal—come from the fact that we think our faith is fact, and we confuse facts for what are beliefs. Everything worth having in life is on the other side of discomfort. So if you can learn to manage discomfort through the power of belief, what couldn't you accomplish? Everything." - Nir Eyal Fresh out of the studio, Nir Eyal, best-selling author of "Hooked," "Indistractable," and the forthcoming "Beyond Belief," joined us in a conversation to explore how deeply held beliefs quietly shape our attention, decisions, and success. Nir shared his personal origin story of childhood obesity that revealed how we escape uncomfortable feelings through habitual behaviors, and…

Fresh out of the studio, Patrick Kelly, Vice President for Asia Pacific at Arize AI, joins us to explore the critical world of AI observability, evaluation, and infrastructure and how Arize AI will start their go to market across the region. Beginning with his transition from Databricks to Arize AI, Patrick explained how the company's mission centers on making AI work for people by helping teams observe, evaluate, and continuously improve their AI agents in production. Emphasizing that evaluations are the most important requirement for AI systems in 2025-2026, he revealed a striking insight: approximately 50% of AI agents fail silently in production because organizations don't know what's happening. Through compelling case studies from Booking.com, Flipkart, and AT&T, Patrick explained how Arize AI enables real-time observability and online evaluations, achieving results like 40% accuracy improvements and 84% cost reductions. Patrick concluded by sharing his vision for success across Asia Pacific's diverse…

By popular demand, Michael Smith Jr., co-host of The Generalist podcast, and Daniel Cerventus Lim, semi-retired entrepreneur and community builder in Malaysia, return for another candid deep-dive into Southeast Asia and India tech landscape. Fresh off India's record-breaking IPO wave that's drawing regional companies like Pine Labs to redomicile, they dissect what this exit boom means for a Southeast Asian ecosystem still struggling with venture returns. Michael delivers his characteristically unflinching take on why "the year of [insert country]" never materializes beyond Singapore and Indonesia, while making the provocative case that most VCs fundamentally misunderstand B2B distribution strategy—specifically how hyperscaler marketplaces like AWS and Microsoft provide the GTM playbook that separates successful exits from perennial fundraising. Daniel shares emerging insights from the SME acquisition space, revealing the stark reality that traditional businesses are "seeing black" while venture-backed…

Fresh out of the studio, Jay Parikh, Executive Vice President of Core AI at Microsoft, joins us to explore how Microsoft is fundamentally transforming software development by placing AI at the center of every stage of the development lifecycle. He shares his career journey from scaling the internet at Akamai Technologies during the dot-com boom, to leading infrastructure at Facebook through the mobile revolution, and now driving Microsoft's AI-first transformation where the definition of "developer" itself is rapidly evolving. Jay explains that Microsoft's Core AI team, is moving beyond traditional tiered architecture to a new paradigm where large language models can think, reason, plan, and interact with tools—shifting developer time from typing code to specification and verification while enabling parallel project execution through specialized AI agents. He highlights how organizations like Singapore Airlines cut project timelines from 11 weeks to 5 weeks using GitHub Copilot and challenges both…

"Public markets are behaving more like private markets. Private markets want to behave more like public markets. So actually, they're just one market.What's not the same is the level of research, information, data disclosure. Correct. That's the only difference. It's this information gap that, to us, is the single biggest opportunity now.We think over the course of the next five to 10 years, there'll be more trading venues, more liquidity providers, more market makers, more investor types—all of that. And I think what Smartkarma has always done is be the information flow for part of capital markets.In fact, that sort of 74 billion number, I think, is quite conservative. I've seen other estimates that are close to 120 billion. So it depends on what you see as sort of growth and what you see beyond. But regardless, I think it’s very large numbers, and the ratio of exit to invested capital is extremely low. A 50 billion hole is a pretty big hole." - Raghav Kapoor, CEO of Smartkarma Raghav Kapoor, CEO &…

Fresh out of the studio, Karen Hao, investigative journalist and author of "Empire of AI" joined us in a conversation to unravel how companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI have become modern empires reshaping society, labor, and democracy itself. Karen traces her journey from mechanical engineering at MIT to becoming one of the tech industry's most critical voices, sharing how Silicon Valley's innovation ecosystem has distorted toward self-interest rather than the public good. She unpacks the four characteristics that make AI companies mirror colonial empires: resource extraction through data scraping, labor exploitation of annotation workers, knowledge monopolies where most AI researchers are industry-funded, and quasi-religious quests to build an "AI God." Throughout the conversation, Karen reveals OpenAI's governance dysfunction stemming from its contradictory non-profit-for-profit structure and shares the inspiring story of Chilean water activists who successfully blocked Google's data center from…

Simon Milner, Vice President of Public Policy for Asia Pacific at Meta, joins us to explore how Meta's deliberate commitment to open source AI is reshaping innovation across the world's most diverse and dynamic region. He shares his journey from the BBC to nearly 14 years at Meta, where he built policy teams from the ground up to lead Meta's Asia Pacific strategy. Simon unpacks Meta's open source philosophy behind the Llama models, explaining how openness accelerates innovation through community scrutiny, provides governments greater control over sensitive data, and enables local developers to fine-tune models for languages like Korean, Vietnamese, and Bahasa Indonesia. He highlights compelling use cases across the region in Japan and Korea. Looking ahead, Simon reveals why the future of AI is not on our phones but in wearables like AI-enabled glasses that create always-on assistants seeing what we see and hearing what we hear, enabling us to be more present in the world while Meta supercharges its family of…

Fresh out of Oracle AI World 2025, Chris Chelliah, Senior Vice President of Technology and Customer Strategy for Japan and Asia Pacific at Oracle, joins us to unpack how Oracle is positioning itself as the definitive enterprise AI platform across the region. He shares his career journey from a computer science geek working on distributed databases to leading technology strategy across a market representing two-thirds of the world's population. Chris explains Oracle's comprehensive four-tier AI stack—infrastructure, data platform, applications, and agentic orchestration—emphasizing how this unique full-stack ownership enables enterprises to consume AI out of the box and extend seamlessly without ripping and replacing existing systems. He highlights compelling use cases from financial fraud detection and healthcare automation to precision agriculture and energy grid optimization. Closing the conversation, Chris shares his vision for what great Oracle will look like in Asia Pacific, continuing its 50-year…

Fresh out of the studio, we commemorated the 10th anniversary of the e-Conomy SEA [Southeast Asia] Report with Sapna Chadha from Google, Florian Hoppe from Bain & Company, and Cassie Wu from Temasek, celebrating a decade of tracking Southeast Asia's digital transformation. The panel reflected on the region's remarkable achievement of reaching $300 billion in GMV—exceeding the original $200 billion goal by 1.5x—alongside revenue growth of 11x over the past decade. The panellists examined pivotal themes including Southeast Asia's position as the world's most AI-curious region with three times more interest than elsewhere, the explosive rise of video commerce and the maturation of digital financial services. The conversation explored the expansion from SEA-6 to 10 ASEAN countries, the ecosystem's resilience through multiple crisis cycles, and the shift from growth-at-all-costs to sustainable profitability. The episode concludes with each panellist sharing their vision for 2030, emphasizing building trust in AI…

Fresh out of the studio, Arnaud Frade, Managing Partner at Mesh Advisory and author of the upcoming book The Sentient Startup, joins us to explore how AI is fundamentally transforming entrepreneurship through the radical concept of AI as a true co-founder rather than merely a tool. He distinguishes between startups that are merely "AI-onboard" versus true sentient startups where AI operates as part of how the business is run, and introducing the concept of Machine Resources (MR) as a new organizational function alongside Human Resources to manage evolving AI models and maintain knowledge integrity. He emphasizes the co-intelligence model over the sterile human-versus-machine debate, highlighting how the 95% AI project failure rate stems from organizational issues rather than technology problems—a reality perfectly captured by the Banani framework (Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, Incomprehensible) that explains why companies struggle with AI readiness. Closing the conversation, Arnaud shares what great looks…

Fresh out of the studio, Ralph Haupter, President & CRO, Small Medium Enterprises and Channels at Microsoft, joins us to explore how Microsoft is empowering 400 million small and medium businesses globally across 56 counties through a partner-first strategy that combines platform standardization with deep specialization. He shares his career journey spanning over 20 years at Microsoft, from running Europe to leading Greater China, building Asia's geographical operations in Singapore, and eventually taking on global SME strategy. Ralph explains that Microsoft's unique advantage lies in being a platform company at its finest, offering a complete technology stack from productivity to infrastructure, security, and applications—all with core AI integration—while relying on a specialized partner ecosystem to deliver local expertise and support. He highlights how partners are creating entirely new business models on agentic AI while emphasizing the four critical partnership moments from transaction to ongoing…

Fresh out of the studio and we hit our 500th episode milestone, guest host Yana Fry from Yana TV turns the tables on Bernard Leong, CEO of Dorje AI and host of Analyse Asia, in a special ask-me-anything format. We start with Bernard's journey from finding his first guest to navigating 11 years of podcasting, revealing his 12-word life philosophy: "Learn from everyone, follow no one, observe the patterns, work like hell." Following on, Bernard shares how his theoretical physics background provides the tools on everything from digital transformation to building Dorje AI's vision of reimagining ERP systems. The conversation dives deep into Bernard's pragmatic idealist worldview, product management philosophy and focus on the future. Bernard announces a major rebrand: Analyse Asia is dropping "Asia" to become the Analyse Podcast as it expands to a global audience, marking a new chapter in the show's evolution."For Dorje AI, what great looks like is being able to solve the ERP problem for businesses. It could…

Fresh out of the studio, Ling Hai, President of Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East, and Africa at MasterCard, joins us to explore how payment networks are evolving to embrace stable coins, AI agents, and the future of digital commerce across diverse global markets. He shares his career journey from management consulting to retail banking and eventually to MasterCard. Ling Hai shares that MasterCard is a global technology company that creates interoperability and universal acceptance, with technology services like cybersecurity, data insights, and consulting increasingly contributing to revenue beyond traditional payment processing. He highlights compelling innovations from Asia Pacific leading the way, including Singapore's nationwide open loop transit system and MasterCard's approach to stable coins as settlement vehicles alongside traditional currencies, while emphasizing how the company bridges the DeFi universe with the physical merchant world through on-ramp and off-ramp solutions for crypto adoption in…

Fresh out of the studio, Yuying Deng, Co-founder and CEO of Esevel, shares her transformative journey from corporate lawyer to healthcare operator to tech entrepreneur with our guest host Yana Fry from Yana TV. Yuying discusses how the pandemic's sudden shift to remote work in April 2020 revealed critical gaps in IT infrastructure for distributed teams, inspiring her to launch Esevel—a platform now serving companies across 88 countries. Yuying challenges the traditional HQ-centric worldview, advocating that "HQ should be a mindset, not a location," and shares how Esevel deliberately builds leadership opportunities for talented professionals regardless of whether they're based in Manila, Singapore, or São Paulo. Last but not least, Yuying shares what great would look like for Esevel's future: becoming the indispensable tool companies think of first when scaling global teams, while proving that talent and performance matter more than location. "Many companies that say they do distributed and remote work…

"In the context of where Confluent can play a critical part, it's also the interoperable integration with all the respective AI ecosystems. If you think about what AI is doing, it's working across microservices, working across data lakehouses, databases - could be a different endpoint service. Bringing all that together in a secure and consistent manner, constantly serving that information, is where I think it plays the most pivotal role." - Kamal Brar Fresh out of the studio, Kamal Brar, Senior Vice President of Worldwide ISV and Asia Pacific/Middle East at Confluent, joins us to explore how data streaming platforms are becoming the critical foundation for enterprise AI across the regions. He shares his career journey from Oracle to Confluent, reflecting on his passion for open source technologies and how the LAMP stack era shaped his understanding of real-time data challenges. Kamal explains Confluent's evolution from the category creator of Kafka to a comprehensive data streaming platform combining Kafka,…

Jan Dawson from Jackdaw Research, host of Beyond Devices and Tech Narratives podcast joined us in a two part conversation discussing the tech narratives of the technology giants in Asia & the Korean chaebol: the Samsung Group. In the second of the two part conversation, we discussed the Samsung Group, and how the business is The post Episode 198: Samsung Electronics in 2017 with Jan Dawson appeared first on Analyse Asia.

Jan Dawson from Jackdaw Research & host of Beyond Devices and Tech Narratives podcast joined us in a two part conversation discussing the tech narratives of the technology giants in Asia & the Korean chaebol: the Samsung Group. In the first of the two part conversation, he discussed the motivation behind creating the Tech Narratives The post Episode 197: Tech Narratives with BAT & Softbank in Asia with Jan Dawson appeared first on Analyse Asia.

Ben Bajarin from Creative Strategies & Techpinions joined us in a two part conversation on post Google I/O & Apple WWDC 2017 and its impact to Asia. In the second part of our conversation, we discussed the major announcements from Apple WWDC 2017 and how their focus on Homepod, AR Kit and hardware will influence The post Episode 196: Apple WWDC 2017 and its impact on Asia with Ben Bajarin appeared first on Analyse Asia.

Ben Bajarin from Creative Strategies & Techpinions joined us in a two part conversation on post Google I/O & Apple WWDC 2017 and its impact to Asia. In the first part, we discussed the major announcements arising from Google I/O 2017 with the focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented / virtual reality (AR/VR), the The post Episode 195: Google I/O and its impact to Asia with Ben Bajarin appeared first on Analyse Asia.

John Riggins from BTC Media joined us in a conversation on the latest happenings of bitcoin and blockchain in China. We discussed the chronology in how bitcoin became mainstream in the Chinese technology ecosystem. John also shared the major players in China who are leveraging on bitcoin mining and exchanges, the applications of blockchain technology The post Episode 194: Bitcoin and Blockchain in China with John Riggins appeared first on Analyse Asia.

Navkendar Singh from IDC India joined us on a discussion about the up and rising telco, Reliance Jio in India. We discussed the mission, vision, business structure of the company and its relation to the Reliance Group conglomerate in India, and how they have managed to grow their network within a short span of time The post Episode 193: Reliance Jio in India with Navkendar Singh appeared first on Analyse Asia.

Paul Papadimitriou, host of Layovers podcast & founder of Intelligencr, joined us in a conversation to discuss the crisis of Asian airlines and the rise of China aviation. We discussed why the top Asian airlines such as Cathay Pacific & Singapore Airlines are facing challenges with their models disrupted by new upstart airlines, and the The post Episode 192: Asian Airlines in Crisis & Rise of China Aviation with Paul Papadimitriou appeared first on Analyse Asia.

Holly Harrington, general manager from Taiwan Startup Stadium joined us on a conversation about the Taiwan startup stadium & ecosystem. We discussed the mission and role of Taiwan Startup Stadium with entrepreneurial ecosystem in Taiwan, the up and coming startups & the nascent investor ecosystem in Taiwan. Last but not least, she discussed the interesting The post Episode 191: The Taiwan Startup Stadium & Ecosystem with Holly Harrington appeared first on Analyse Asia.

Serkan Toto, CEO of Kantan Games Japan, joined us in a conversation to discuss Nintendo’s progress and the smartphone gaming space within Japan in 2017. We began with a conversation on Nintendo’s recent forays with mobile gaming, the surprise success of the Nintendo Switch console and how Niantic’s Pokemon game has spurred their growth in The post Episode 190: Nintendo & Smartphone Gaming in Japan 2017 with Serkan Toto appeared first on Analyse Asia.

Steve Glaveski, founder of Collective Campus & host of the FutureSquared podcast joined us in a conversation to discuss corporate innovation in Asia Pacific. We discussed the concept of corporate innovation and how companies from Asia Pacific are thinking about disruption as a whole. Last but not least, we discussed the backstory behind Steve’s award The post Episode 189: Corporate Innovation in Asia Pacific with Steve Glaveski appeared first on Analyse Asia.

Jay Kim, host of the Jay Kim show & author of “Hack Your Fitness”, joined us to discuss the chronology of the rise of the Hong Kong startup ecosystem. He discussed the chronology of the Hong Kong startup ecosystem and how it has transformed into a vibrant scene with a few enthusiasts and the entry The post Episode 188: The Hong Kong Startup Ecosystem with Jay Kim appeared first on Analyse Asia.

Matthew Brennan from China Channel joined us in a fascinating conversation on Toutiao, one of the new emerging mobile apps focused on AI and their applications in news and information. We discussed the chronology, product & services and business models behind Toutiao’s rise among the 2nd wave of technology giants (Toutiao, Meituan-Dianping & Didi) in The post Episode 187: Toutiao with Matthew Brennan appeared first on Analyse Asia.