According to a global survey of CEOs, 61 per cent believe a recession will start by the end of 2023, and 15 per cent think one has already begun. Although they are unavoidable, recessions can happen at any time.

A difficult balancing act is taking place. C-suite executives must take advantage of opportunities in the market. On the other hand, if they maintain current levels of investment and the economy crashes, they run the risk of spending more than they make.

CIOs will be responsible for reducing expenses and increasing productivity to support their companies’ operations at all phases of the cycle. Global firms and C-suite executives would do well to adapt operations to the needs of the time, even though the pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns in the recent past may have contributed to some of the reasons.

Let’s look at some concerning statistics:

• In a global study of 750 CEOs and senior C-suite executives, 50 per cent of CEOs said they believed their company’s operating region had already gone through a recession.
• The median GDP growth forecast for Q4 2021 through Q4 2022 is 1.7 per cent, much lower than the 2.8 per cent anticipated in March, according to the Federal Reserve’s most recent quarterly economic estimates.

It’s common knowledge to cut costs before a recession hits, and there are undoubtedly some areas where doing so would have little overall influence on the company. But better judgement is to seize the chances to accelerate expenditures to increase efficiency over the long run.

For instance, CIOs may choose to invest in system migration to the cloud if they want to have the flexibility to scale up or down during a downturn. IT leaders and CIOs may need to make investments now to survive and sustain a prolonged downturn.

These endeavours aren’t always quick fixes. IT leaders should plan for a more flexible environment over time, but these are three to six months of activities. The objective is to consider how the technology organisations might adapt holistically and consistently, ensuring that the investments reduce the base and foster flexibility.

IT leaders should consider investing in the following areas to get a head start on the impending economic outlook, especially if such changes can yield long-term operational benefits or a recession.

Facilitating improved insights for costs and value

IT directors should be thoroughly aware of their cost structure and the value IT services and investments give the organisation.

Now is the moment to invest in establishing this transparency and clarity if you don’t already have it. Doing so will allow you to make wise decisions to cut costs or support new expenditures.

Also Read: How to never waste a good a crisis and survive the recession

It’s also crucial to understand how each component of the IT infrastructure serves the company. This information is tribal knowledge in most companies, making it difficult to access or use.

Avoiding new investments in IT

Global CIOs would be wise to hold off on making an IT investment or purchasing modern IT software during the recession, which would last for at least a few months or years. Instead, businesses should anticipate gaining scale and cost efficiencies by making the most of their current IT personnel, resources, and equipment. Additionally, all ongoing IT deals and IT outsourcing must be postponed for a long time.

Investment in FinOps

FinOps investments can help CIOs better control the costs of their IT assets and reduce their cloud bills. To help businesses better plan, budget, and forecast cloud consumption and spending, FinOps is a business management discipline with companion analytics tools. This offers the insight to better match your cloud budget with the business value being produced and minimise possible waste or misalignment.

Aggressively adopting agile

Let this slump encourage you to invest in agile approaches, capabilities, and processes if you haven’t already. Developing an agile toolset cannot be accomplished quickly, and now is the moment to start making that shift if your organisation intends to be resilient through a future recession.

By adopting agile, IT will be better able to align with business priorities and direction by increasing the frequency of business check-ins. It should be a prerequisite that an agile methodology is applied to assure effectiveness in a moving environment. Increasing the frequency and depth of agile methodology emphasises connecting and executing quickly evolving business challenges during difficult circumstances.

Leveraging SMAC and AI

Together, today’s five global technology trends — Social, Mobility, Analytics, Cloud, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) — are a thriving force in the industry. CIOs can encourage their staff members and IT teams to create a tech-savvy culture and environment within the company.

Investing in tech like no-code can turn out to be very useful. Such a strategy would assist the work-from-home (WFH) personnel and their work-from-office (WFO) counterparts in making the most of the current IT infrastructure, resources, and assets.

Reevaluating IT services contracts

Contracts may occasionally be automatically renewed without review or optimisation. A good moment to review the outsourcing portfolio is right now.

Those providers who can deliver demonstrated, quantifiable financial value can and should continue to be rewarded by their clients and customers. This is key to successful growth in a recessionary environment. That being said, purchasers must be certain that their value-added partners are financially stable and aren’t in danger of cutting down on their investments in their goods and services to the point where performance and quality could suffer.

To find potential for cost reduction, IT leaders might collaborate with partners.

Rather than ending a service entirely, it may be advantageous for both parties to restructure it to cut expenses. They might find ways to move more work to lower-cost regions and streamline their delivery processes.

Given the increasing labour expenses faced by IT service providers, asking for significant price reductions could not be successful. Clients have various choices for easing contract constraints to minimise costs, and they can agree to help the supplier more, take on greater risk, and decrease the supplier’s obligations.

Also Read: Why Southeast Asia’s locally owned adtech and martech industry will survive the recession

Shutting down obsolete systems

Give your hardware and software asset base some thought. There could be opportunities to minimise these costs, especially if some of these assets are close to retirement or are suitable candidates for retirement. Additionally, chances for rationalisation or consolidation can exist.

System redundancy is an intelligent place to minimise costs. It can be difficult to terminate an application, but CIOs that are risk-takers would shut down a system and see whether anyone complains.

However, CIOs should confirm that the discharge is justified financially. You will suffer a financial loss if you decommission an item that is still losing value. Intelligent cost management requires a team sport approach, working with finance and those who can conduct the analysis and offer decision support.

Scaling successful pilots

Pilots are always more expensive than adoption at scale, but experimentation and assessment are crucial. Accelerate those deployments, so you can escape pilot purgatory and clear the decks of the stuff that isn’t producing value.

Whatever cuts CIOs are considering, it’s essential to consider both the potential short- and long-term benefits. When doing this, you need to be wise and picky, and thoughtlessly cutting costs will cost you dearly.

Focusing more on volume adjustments than cost cutting

IT executives can seek quantity reductions by rationalising the units they use or lower their unit prices by requesting a discount from vendors. For instance, they might reduce the number of software licences they purchase.

From experience, cutting costs is not very successful. Vendors may take advantage of the chance to rescind agreements they didn’t like, including lowering SLAs in exchange for lower prices.

Final thoughts

We talked about how CIOs may keep IT spending in check during the economic downturn, and they should take preventive action rather than waiting until the recession actually starts.

As a result, all CIOs must maintain IT strategy alignment with their general business equivalent and assist the company in achieving its efficiency and cost-cutting objectives throughout the current economic downturn.

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Metaverse is a multi-trillion dollar industry and homegrown startup, BuzzAR, is leading the charge and waving the Singaporean flag high on the global stage. Since its debut at London Tech Week, the company has landed five large-scale multi-year contracts with government agencies, connectivity partners, and venues globally to make the metaverse accessible to all.

How this founder found a unique niche in the trillion-dollar industry

After producing Meta Oculus’ top Cooking Game VR, The Cooking Game VR, the dynamic duo, Bell Beh and Ken Lim, are onto the next big thing. Since 2018, BuzzAR has been building metaverse solutions in real life (IRL) and has been uniquely positioned for luxury brands — with its clientele including the regional Fortune 500 companies and government agencies.

Leveraging on its skills to produce top VR games on Oculus and more, the duo is set to dive into this trillion-dollar industry, especially with all the opportunities sprouting post COVID. While some of their peers are figuring out ways to cope with the pandemic, the duo’s business has had an 8x revenue in FY 2021, transforming top-notch hotel resorts and integrated resorts and brands, enabling brick and mortars to stand out using various metaverse experiences. 

Despite the experience of building the top-selling VR game on Meta, the duo sees unique opportunities in the B2B space.

Game veterans turn metaverse experience in real life (IRL) into its niche

In 2018, childhood friends turned co-founders, Ken Lim and Bell Beh, came together to launch BuzzAR. Based in Singapore, BuzzAR is a location-based AR solution for retail and commerce. As a serial entrepreneur, Ken led 2 other companies to great successes since his days at university where he eventually dropped out in Germany to start his first business. Since then, he helped various businesses generate 8 figure revenues. Now, the mind and soul behind BuzzAR, Ken is building BuzzAR with Bell, a corporate lawyer turned entrepreneur to utilise its gaming expertise for different businesses. 

“Perception is reality. Any company that is serious about their brand will continue to shape their perception, regardless of whether there will be a recession in 2023 or not. I learned in my two earlier businesses, with the first one founded in my university’s dorm room, that the marketers who maintain or grow their budgets during recessions are more successful than those that cut budgets. That said, some budgets will shift to “Experiential Marketing” as it is more personalised, triggers consumer-permissioned data, and creates “WOW” moments. This is what BuzzAR is building: we elevate the businesses’ perception by building the Next Gen immersive advertising and marketing platform,” said Ken Lim, CTO and Co-Founder at BuzzAR.

To achieve the vision, BuzzAR has developed some of its enablers, such as augmented and virtual reality technologies, games, and avatar engines, leveraging on generative AI, enabling customers to get the full metaverse experience.

After the successful debut of its face-to-avatar “Pop-Up Metaverse” in real life (IRL) at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in London, the company emboldens the public to gain easy access to the metaverse by setting up various Pop-Up Metaverse locations in Singapore for enthusiasts to explore in person. Thousands of companies can easily hop on the platform to advertise to consumers who are ready to embark on their Metaverse journey.

With the success of its early projects, the company plans to make “Marketing in the Metaverse” accessible to all businesses, turning traffic into money for businesses.

Brand relationships are being redefined

The metaverse has the potential to reach mass adoption, but companies do not know how. 

The pair was thrilled to see how the Pop Up Metaverse — which augments faces and places — help businesses at scale to “enter the metaverse” using the 1-hour setup. To businesses, solving the friction to introduce a complicated product, significantly increase their overall productivity and enhance their guest experience. The experience was delightful and exultant as users could enter the augmented world seamlessly. 

Gaining fulfillment from serving customers, bringing innovative ideas into life, and building a happy and inclusive community, Bell Beh reinforced her resolve to walk out on a six-figure job and a stable career in corporate law to nurture more ambitious dreams with technologies. 

BuzzAR’s future plans to further expand its metaverse world

Following a series of lucrative fundraising rounds, raising $3.8m in seed funding from F50 Elevate to grow and scale its business, BuzzAR escalated to global prominence with its debut at London Tech Week where thousands turned up, including Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister, Heng Swee Keat, queuing up to play with their Pop Up Metaverse.

Most notably, adults and children laughed out loud from the pure joy of the surreal metaverse experience. 

Riding on this momentum, BuzzAR brought the product back to Asia to introduce it at the She Loves Tech event at Resort World Sentosa, Temasek’s Constellar The Tech Show, a Mediacorp private event, and more. With explosive demands from around the world, BuzzAR plans to further expand its business globally, especially in the Middle East region, where the Metaverse is the key strategy to transform the economy and diversify tourism products. 

“BuzzAR is disrupting and complementing the traditional out of home (OOH) media where, in the past 10 years, there was almost no big innovation. BuzzAR envisions a world where the OOH media is interactive, 3D, and immersive. Therefore, the company is inspired to roll out the Next Gen Immersive Advertising and Marketing, allowing any company to leverage the Pop Up Metaverse to advertise and run their marketing,” shared Bell Beh.

The company which had built Generative AI, and rolled out the StyleGAN application, HappyToon, is now onto incorporating ChatGPT, and Dalle-2 applications to its Pop Up Metaverse portal making immersive advertising not only immersive, but it is smart enough to handle all general enquiries while maximising the user experience.

After one visit, BuzzAR, is set to scale its businesses in Singapore and in the lucrative Saudi Arabia market, whose tourism industry is betting $1 Trillion. Being a graduate of the Singapore Tourism Board (STB), Cohort 3, BuzzAR has set great augmented reality (AR) use cases highlighted by STB to the tourism stakeholders. Being data-driven and disruptive and winning the trust of even the government agencies in the Middle East region, BuzzAR is betting big on its Next Gen immersive experience!

To explore more about this Metaverse Marketing experience, BuzzAR has launched Bae, the ChatGPT powered Bae can answer all your questions on WhatsApp!

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This article is produced by the e27 team, in partnership with BuzzAR.

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Singapore-based AI-powered food fingerprint platform ProfilePrint and Swiss farm-to-roaster coffee company Sucafina have announced a co-investment in Brazilian image recognition company Csmart.

Founded by Francisco Massucci Silveira, Csmart designs AI-powered image recognition technologies for coffee grading that aim to improve the coffee industry for producers, professionals, and roasters alike. It claims its technology can rapidly scan a sample of green coffee beans and accurately identify defect counts within minutes.

Also Read: Wake up and smell the coffee: Check your coffee beans’ quality using ProfilePrint’s AI tool

This technology could help QC professionals by reducing repetitive tasks, improving and accelerating communication between QC teams, and reducing the carbon emissions from shipping countless green coffee samples to buyers and sellers worldwide.

Currently, Csmart’s software can identify the total defect counts and confirm the screen size of a sample of green coffee. The upcoming iteration will be able to quantify each defect by type and take image scans of each identified bean.

Csmart’s technology cuts down on the time and resource inefficiencies caused by sending green samples back and forth across the globe. With this, green coffee can be scanned by the seller, and an objective report is delivered to the buyer for their review. This can speed up the time it takes to approve a sample and reduce the carbon footprint of coffee sales.

This new image recognition green grading technology will be complementary to ProfilePrint, which incorporates data from multiple sources to enable users to ascertain the suitability of ingredients without traditional sensory evaluation rapidly.

Alan Lai, Founder and CEO of ProfilePrint, said: “Csmart’s image recognition technology provides additional key data points for our global ProfilePrint solution, bringing us closer to our goal of a device-agnostic data platform. It also increases the range and accuracy of our prediction capability, empowering buyers and sellers across the supply chain to increase productivity and significantly reduce carbon footprint.”

A food ingredient search engine, ProfilePrint predicts the quality and profile of a food sample “within seconds”. With 5g of the sample, the analyser acquires the unique fingerprint without destroying the samples. Sellers and buyers can objectively ascertain the agreed quality of a food ingredient in an online transaction.

Also Read: ProfilePrint adds food supplies giant Cargill to its cap table

ProfilePrint’s solution has been deployed in over 26 cities across five continents (North America, Latin America, Africa, Europe and Asia).

In August last year, the Singaporean startup onboarded US-based global food supplier giant Cargill as a strategic investor. It earlier raised several rounds of investments, including a Series A round in February 2022 from Louis Dreyfus Company (Netherlands), Olam Food Ingredients (an operating group of Olam International Limited, Singapore), Sucafina (Switzerland), an unnamed agrifood conglomerate (Indonesia), Greenwillow Capital Management (Singapore), and Real Tech Global Fund (Japan). In 2021, it closed a pre-series A from Glocalink Singapore, Leave-a-Nest, and Seeds Capital.

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In today’s climate of uncertainty clouded with competition, compounded with the high cost of living, it is without a doubt that people are experiencing increasing levels of stress and anxiety.

According to Mercer’s latest 2022 Global Talent Trends Study, an overwhelming 85 per cent of Singapore-based employees admitted that they feel at risk of burnout this year, with one in five already reporting feeling de-energised at work.

Another worrying study by Employment Hero states that 62 per cent of Singaporean workers are already experiencing burnout. With these depressing statistics, is it really surprising that Singaporeans are the world’s unhappiest workers?

It goes without saying that employers and organisations have a crucial role in supporting employees’ needs. Yet, in another survey by Mercer, 56 per cent of employees in Singapore reported that they did not receive strong support from their employers, and Singapore fared below global benchmarks in lending support to employees.

To combat this workforce development, Mercer said that 36 per cent of Singapore HR leaders are planning to introduce strategies addressing burnout this year, such as mental health insurance coverage, offering virtual mental health counselling and providing training on how to identify and support those facing mental health challenges.

However, there is still a significant gap in the market, which urges direct action through innovative preventive care.

Having experienced the corporate world shrouded with stress and anxiety, I was determined to establish an employee network that could support their mental health, focusing on taking preventive action rather than recovery efforts.

This spurred me to set up Evexia Collective, Singapore’s first truly proactive and preventative analytical mental fitness app for employees. Backed by psychiatrist Dr Elisabetta Burchi and NHS’s Dr Caitie Imray, Evexia Collective promotes mental fitness through the proactive use of mental fitness tools and real-time aggregate analytics.

Also Read: How Noodle Factory addresses educator burnout with its AI-powered teaching assistants

It is reported that more than half the workers surveyed (56 per cent) lack access to mental health counselling services, and just 22 per cent of women had access to mental health counselling services through their employers, compared to 30 per cent of men. With our focus on preventive measures, we share an aggregate view of how employers can better support their employees.

According to research by LifeWorks, employees who are suffering from mental health or other well-being issues are unable to concentrate on their work for more than a third of the total scheduled work time, a symptom known as “presenteeism.” Evexia Collective plays a crucial role here by understanding and monitoring the user’s emotions while giving crucial insights regarding their well-being.

It is important that employees are able to manage stress while staying motivated and productive, both personally and professionally. To achieve that, companies should create an inclusive work environment that nurtures happy and healthy employees through the three core pillars: energy, calm and focus, which Evexia Collective advocates for.

Using a series of Standardised Mental Health Questionnaires used by medical practitioners all over the world, such as the Patient Health Questionnaire 9 (PHQ9), Evexia Collective aims to assess, inform and improve mental fitness amongst Singaporean employees. In pilot tests, users of Evexia Collective improved their mood scores by 11 per cent, stress management scores by 50 per cent and energy levels by 14 per cent on average over two weeks.

A survey conducted in the Asia-Pacific region in 2021 discovered that high workloads and long hours were among the top workplace mental health strains. Companies must invest in their employees’ health and wellness now more than ever.

Through employee-first initiatives and corporate mindset shifts, employers that are able to find that balance and align their policies to the wants and needs of their employees will not only boost the motivation and engagement of their existing workers but also will attract and retain the best talent in increasingly competitive talent markets.

By using tools to support employee mental health, such as Evexia Collective’s application, companies can cultivate a positive work environment for their employees to thrive while enjoying increased productivity and decreased health care and disability costs.

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Malaysia’s state-owned Penjana Kapital has signed a Memorandum of Cooperation with Indonesian VC firms Indies Capital Partners and AC Ventures.

The memorandum establishes a framework for the three firms to explore co-investment opportunities in Malaysia-Indonesia growth companies through existing and soon-to-launch funds.

Also Read: ‘Indonesia will soon see a proper credit boom for businesses, consumers’: AC Ventures

The partnership will also facilitate cross-border investments and technology transfer in key sectors such as data centres, education, hospitality, mobility, and waste management involving Indonesian and Malaysian startups.

Additionally, the deal will help Penjana Kapital find new and impactful investment opportunities from emerging sectors in Indonesia’s fast-growing economy. Further, with the help of Penjana, Indies Capital and AC Ventures will help Indonesian and Malaysian companies pursue scalable business opportunities, exchange key knowledge, and share technology for industry development and trade networking.

Both countries have shown immense commitment to fostering sustainable economic development and promoting the growth of the green economy. According to data from the Malaysia External Trade Development Corporation, the total trade value between Malaysia and Indonesia rose 43.5 per cent to RM95.1 billion (~US$21.6 billion) in 2021 compared to 2020.

Total Malaysian exports to Indonesia were up 32.5 per cent to RM39.22 billion (~US$6.9 billion), while total imports saw a 52.3 per cent improvement to RM55.88 billion (~US$12.7 billion) in the same period.

Pandu Sjahrir, Founding Partner at AC Ventures and Managing Partner at Indies Capital, said, “Through cross-border cooperation and investment, our firms have the opportunity to tap into new markets, access new sources of capital and expertise, and drive innovation and growth in both markets. We can also deepen economic ties between Indonesia and Malaysia and promote a more interconnected and prosperous ASEAN region.”

Also Read: AC Ventures hits final close of Fund III at US$205M to back early-stage Indonesian startups

Malaysian Prime Minister Dato’ Seri Anwar Ibrahim and Minister of International Trade and Industry Senator Tengku Datuk Seri Utama Zafrul Tengku Abdul Aziz witnessed the signing ceremony during the Prime Minister’s two-day working visit to Jakarta.

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