The China-US AI Cold War Comes to Asia

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Welcome back to The Asia Tech Podcast. Today we discussed the widening AI split between China and the US, China’s dominance in humanoid robots, AI-powered restaurant operations, agentic AI adoption in the enterprise, trustworthy healthcare staffing, intelligent fleet technology, AI observability, and AI-generated content for small businesses.

• 21:38 Simon Tsang Siu Man - CPO, Eats365

• 43:43 CK Tan - APJ Innovation Officer, ServiceNow

• 1:06:06 Tiffany Khoo - Founder & CEO, WeAssist

• 1:26:27 Carmen Calisto - Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, Cartrack

• 1:46:37 Christine Low - Head of Observability, APJC, Splunk

• 2:18:22 Jerry Xia - Founder & CEO, Lingbi.chat (Quill)

Here is an overview of the topics we discussed today:

Is the world really splitting into two incompatible AI systems? Not quite yet, but China’s new five-year plan is pushing hard toward self-reliance in chips and models. At the same time, Unitree’s humanoid robots just went public in China at a valuation north of $50 billion, with retail demand outstripping supply by thousands of times. What does it mean when one country ships 97% of the world’s humanoid robots?

Simon runs product at Eats365, a cloud-based system that unifies front of house, kitchens, and back office. But what happens when a restaurant opens its data to outside developers instead of locking it down? Delivery apps like Foodpanda and Uber Eats now account for nearly a third of some restaurants’ revenue. How is that reshaping the way owners forecast demand?

CK works on innovation for ServiceNow across Asia Pacific and Japan. Singapore’s AI spending has more than doubled in a year, yet CK says only about 10% of organizations report truly transformed, multi-step autonomous workflows. Why is the gap between spending and real transformation still so wide, and what has to happen for that number to climb?

Tiffany’s platform, WeAssist, matches hospitals with clinicians, but she says trust can’t come from a background check alone. Every completed shift feeds a reliability score built from attitude and clinical performance signals. What happens to a nurse who never gets rebooked and never finds out why? Tiffany explains how giving feedback to both sides of the marketplace is changing that.

Carmen leads sales and marketing at Cartrack, which started out solving vehicle theft in South Africa and now runs telematics for fleets everywhere. She says most companies fail at automation because they digitize an old workflow instead of redesigning it. How does Cartrack get businesses from paper-based operations to AI-assisted ones without breaking what already works?

Christine leads observability for Splunk across Asia Pacific, Japan, and China. She says today’s IT teams face threats from monolithic systems, microservices, and now autonomous AI agents all at once, and morale is taking a hit. What does it actually take to separate the noise from the signals that matter when everything is moving that fast?

Jerry built Lingbi.chat, also known as Quill, after training a “mini Jerry” on his own writing to see if AI could replicate his style. It worked so well that founders, insurance agents, and consultants now use it to turn their expertise into social content in minutes instead of hours. Can an AI agent really capture what makes someone’s voice their own?

Want the full conversations, including everything we didn’t have room for here? Watch the full episode:

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