ATP is presented by:
ATP reaches over 700,000 business professionals monthly, sponsor ATP to be seen and heard across APAC. 2027 slots open soon, reply for details.
Welcome back to The Asia Tech Podcast. Today we discussed Southeast Asia’s data center boom, Alibaba’s massive AI bet, AI-powered shopping and payments, restaurant tech, cross-border shipping, smart city sensors, and what it really takes to trust an AI agent with your business.
• 21:56 Ayaan Mohamud - Regional Vice President, Marketing, APJ, Impact.com
• 42:49 Abhijeet Ramesh - Head of Innovation, Growth Products and Partnerships, Visa Asia Pacific, Visa
• 1:06:27 James Loveridge - Head of Projects and Development, Burnt Ends Hospitality Group
• 1:21:52 Beniamino Francesco Pellin - Founder & CEO, Shipd2d
• 1:42:10 Dr Rustom Kanga - Co-Founder & CEO, iOmniscient Pty Ltd & WildFaces Technology
• 2:04:37 Parsa Aghdasi - Founder & CEO, ABR Labs
• 2:22:26 Samuel Roach - co-Founder, Ninjafy
Here is an overview of the topics we discussed today:
Singapore just handed out another 200 megawatts of data center capacity, split four ways between Digital Realty, Equinix, Keppel, and ST Telemedia. Every winner has to source over half their power from renewables. Vietnam is playing too, granting a 50-year lease for a $508 million facility near Ho Chi Minh City. Building the data center is the easy part — getting enough grid power can take up to two years.
Alibaba just proposed raising $10.2 billion, with every dollar earmarked for AI infrastructure — potentially the biggest stock sale ever by a Hong Kong-listed company. It’s already spent nearly half of a $53 billion AI pledge, and quarterly capex is up 75%. Free cash flow just went negative, but AI cloud revenue jumped 45% last quarter alone. So why keep spending? The growth keeps proving the bet right.
One in four shoppers in Southeast Asia already use AI to help find products, and Ayaan says a fifth of the region could make a fully AI-driven purchase by 2027. Most people say they’d trust AI to grab groceries, but not book flights. She explains why brands are losing their grip on search ads — AI answer engines now pull from reviews and creators, not company websites. Her advice: chase trust, not ad spend.
Visa built a directory that tells merchants whether a shopping “agent” is approved to spend with your card, and tells agents which stores are ready for them. Abhijeet compares it to handing a new employee $100 with strict rules attached. Some merchants are blocking all bot traffic, while others are opening the doors wide. His prediction: a new field called “AEO,” agent engagement optimization, is about to replace SEO.
Burnt Ends now feeds live invoice data into a dashboard, so James can catch cost problems mid-week instead of waiting for month-end numbers. AI also handles rostering, forecasting, and compliance paperwork across seven agencies for his new brewery. But he draws a hard line: no AI at the table. After a guest’s third or fourth visit, staff get a note on their favorite drink and seat — the warm welcome stays human.
Beniamino’s platform can quote shipping pasta from Italy to Thailand in seconds, and start customs paperwork in days instead of months. But he doesn’t trust AI to set prices — early tests showed it made numbers up. So he built a guardrail: AI can only pull from 100,000 of his own shipping documents, and a human steps in below 95% confidence. The payoff: his team now handles up to four times as many shipments a day.
iOmniscient’s system doesn’t just watch and listen, it smells — the same “electronic nose” tech now helps a medical device catch cancer early through a person’s breath. Rustom’s company built agentic AI for Singapore’s Smart City back in 2013, long before the term became a buzzword, and it runs Sydney’s driverless metro today. His warning: even at 99.9% accuracy, that missing 0.1% is too big a risk for autonomous weapons.
Parsa says AI agents act randomly, so trust matters more than raw skill. His fix: a human checks every agent’s work before it goes out, the same way a new trader earns position limits before real autonomy. He points to a real 1990s rogue trader who hid a billion dollars in fake trades as proof of what happens without guardrails. His prediction: the real edge will go to whoever can safely manage a whole “fleet” of agents.
Samuel’s company runs 15 AI agents internally, including one named Sterling who handles finance across email, Slack, and Stripe. New agents start locked down, unable to take destructive actions, and slowly earn more freedom — just like a new hire. He bills by “agent hours,” not tokens, tying spend to real results instead of guesswork. His boldest claim: 2026 will be the year every business is up for grabs.
That’s a lot of ground for one episode — data centers, agentic commerce, restaurants, shipping, sensors that can smell, and what it really takes to trust an AI agent with your business. Watch the full conversation here:
Twilio is the secure and scalable platform to build amazing customer engagement without the complexity, with the AI-driven workflows you need to connect.
Visit Twilio.com to start building today
Boomi, the data activation company for AI, powers the agentic enterprise by bringing data to life across the business. Trusted by over 30,000 customers and supported by a network of 800+ partners, Boomi helps organizations of all sizes achieve agility, efficiency, and innovation at scale.
Visit www.boomi.com to learn more
Download Boomi’s latest market research: AI Ambition Meets Data Reality: APAC Technology Priorities and Challenges 2026
HCLTech is supercharging progress with AI that moves beyond ambition and delivers real business impact. A recognized AI leader, trusted by global enterprises to turn technology into transformation. HCLTech: Supercharging Progress
Visit https://www.hcltech.com/ai to learn more
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.