Year: 2026

Meta has appointed Dhruv Vohra as Managing Director of its Global Business Group in Southeast Asia, putting a longtime regional executive in charge of one of the company’s most commercially important and behaviourally complex markets.

Based in the region, Vohra will oversee Meta’s commercial strategy across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. He will report to Benjamin Joe, Meta’s Vice President for Asia Pacific.

The appointment comes at a time when Southeast Asia’s internet economy is moving into a new phase. The region’s first big consumer internet wave was shaped by e-commerce marketplaces, ride-hailing superapps and social media-led discovery. The next one is being built around messaging, short-form video, live selling and AI-assisted advertising — areas where Meta is trying to defend and extend its role among businesses of all sizes.

Also Read: Meta, Singapore Police disrupt 3.7M scam-linked assets across Facebook and Instagram

For Meta, Southeast Asia is not simply a user-growth story. It is a test market for how commerce is evolving in mobile-first economies, where small businesses may never have built a website, but can sell through Facebook Pages, Instagram accounts, WhatsApp chats and livestreams.

“Southeast Asia is one of Meta’s fastest-growing business regions, and the work ahead is helping businesses leverage AI and messaging at the pace their customers already expect,” said Joe. “Dhruv has spent seven years close to those businesses, and he has built the teams that support millions of them. He is the right person for this next phase.”

A familiar executive returns to a changed market

Vohra joined Meta in 2019 as Director for e-commerce and digital natives, working with the platforms and online-first brands that helped reshape retail across the region. He later led small and medium business growth in Southeast Asia, before expanding that responsibility across Asia Pacific.

His return to a Southeast Asia-focused role comes after a period in which the region’s digital commerce habits have become harder to categorise. Consumers may discover a product through a creator’s video, ask questions in a chat thread, compare prices on a marketplace, wait for a double-date sale day, and complete the purchase through a wallet or bank transfer.

This behaviour has made Southeast Asia a particularly important market for Meta’s business products. The company’s advertising engine depends heavily on businesses finding customers across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. In this region, those products often sit close to the transaction itself, especially for micro, small and medium enterprises.

Vohra has also built a public profile around the region’s small business economy. He writes a LinkedIn column, Small to Scale: Inside APAC’s Innovative SMBs, and contributed to Meta’s SYNC Southeast Asia thought leadership series on digital consumers and e-commerce trends.

Also Read: Pinterest and Shopee link up to bring creator-led shopping to Indonesia

“Southeast Asia is one of the most dynamic and creative regions in the world. Trends such as business messaging and live shopping found early adopters here,” Vohra said. “No two markets here behave the same way, and the businesses growing fastest here have outgrown the borders they started in. AI has opened up even more possibilities.”

Why the role matters now

The appointment is significant because Meta’s growth in Southeast Asia now depends on more than selling ads against a large user base. Businesses are asking for clearer returns on advertising spend, better tools to manage customer conversations, and easier ways to create and target campaigns.

AI is central to that pitch. Meta, like Google and other advertising platforms, has been pushing automated tools that help businesses generate creative assets, find audiences and optimise campaigns with less manual work. For small companies with limited marketing teams, these tools could lower the barrier to running digital campaigns. For Meta, they also help keep advertisers inside its ecosystem.

Messaging is the other major lever. In much of Southeast Asia, chat is not a customer-service afterthought; it is often the storefront. Consumers ask whether an item is available, negotiate details, request delivery information and expect rapid responses. This makes business messaging a commercial infrastructure layer, not just a communications feature.

That is especially relevant in markets such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, where social commerce has grown alongside marketplace platforms. It also matters in Singapore and Malaysia, where more mature digital advertisers are looking for automation, cross-border reach and better conversion tracking.

Also Read: TikTok deepens Vietnam commerce bet with US$980M logistics project in Ho Chi Minh City

Vohra’s task will be to align Meta’s regional business strategy with these uneven market realities. Southeast Asia is often spoken about as a single bloc, but its digital economy is split across languages, payment habits, logistics networks, regulations and consumer preferences. What works for a beauty seller in Bangkok may not work for a food brand in Manila or a cross-border merchant in Ho Chi Minh City.

The competitive field

Meta’s Southeast Asia business also faces a crowded and increasingly localised competitive landscape. TikTok has become a major force in short-form video discovery and social commerce, particularly through TikTok Shop in markets such as Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. Google remains dominant in search and YouTube advertising, while e-commerce platforms, including Shopee and Lazada, have built sizeable retail media businesses, selling ad inventory close to the point of purchase.

Superapps such as Grab also compete for merchant marketing budgets, particularly in food, mobility and financial services. For small businesses, the choice is no longer simply whether to advertise on social media, but how to divide spending across platforms that each control a different part of the customer journey.

This rivalry puts pressure on Meta to prove that its platforms can drive measurable sales, not just awareness. Apple’s privacy changes in recent years also made ad attribution more difficult across the industry, forcing platforms to rely more on first-party signals, AI modelling and in-app business tools.

In Southeast Asia, that challenge is sharpened by the region’s reliance on mobile commerce and informal selling. Many businesses still operate across multiple channels without sophisticated customer data systems. Meta’s opportunity is to make advertising and messaging simple enough for these businesses, while powerful enough for larger brands and regional merchants.

A regional leadership test

Vohra’s appointment is therefore less about a routine leadership reshuffle and more about Meta’s next commercial chapter in Southeast Asia. The company is operating in a region where consumer behaviour often moves faster than formal retail infrastructure, and where business adoption can jump quickly when a tool proves useful.

The six markets under his remit together represent a large and diverse digital economy, with hundreds of millions of internet users and a deep base of entrepreneurs selling online. They are also markets where trust, affordability and responsiveness matter as much as technology.

Also Read: Grab’s US$1.49B Atome deal signals a deeper race for SEA’s credit economy

If Meta can turn AI and messaging into practical tools for these businesses, it could strengthen its position at the centre of Southeast Asia’s commerce stack. If it falls short, rivals with tighter links to entertainment, search, marketplaces or payments will keep pulling merchant budgets in their direction.

For Vohra, the job is to navigate both sides of that equation: helping businesses grow inside a region that rarely follows a single playbook, while keeping Meta relevant as the way Southeast Asia shops, sells and advertises continues to change.

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Every comparison site promises to find you a better deal. Jonathan Honig thinks it’s time MoneyHero found one for itself.

On 29 September, the investor, who says he owns about 9 per cent of MoneyHero’s Class A shares, published an open letter asking the board to hire an independent adviser and explore a sale.

Honig’s list of complaints is long and hard to dispute. There is still no permanent CEO six months after Rohith Murthy’s exit. Revenue slid from US$80.7 million in FY2023 to US$73.4 million in FY2025, against a promised US$100 million. And the share price of US$0.675 is down more than 88 per cent since the October 2023 debut.

Also Read: MoneyHero’s winning quarter has a US$6.7M problem

But open letters are theatre, and theatre depends on who’s in the audience. At MoneyHero, only one seat really counts, and it belongs to Richard Li.

The market has already priced the business at almost nothing

Start with the arithmetic, because it explains everything else. MoneyHero has about 44.08 million shares outstanding. At US$0.675, that puts its market value at roughly US$30 million. At the end of June, the company held US$28.2 million in cash.

Put differently, investors are valuing SingSaver, Seedly, Moneymax, 10.1 million registered members and a web of bank and insurer partnerships at roughly the price of a decent Singapore condominium. That is not a valuation. It is a verdict.

The second quarter explains why. Revenue fell 13 per cent year on year to US$15.8 million. Cash rewards paid to users jumped 77 per cent to US$5.1 million, which means MoneyHero is increasingly renting its demand rather than earning it. Monthly unique users fell 30 per cent, partly because the company began filtering out bot traffic in April without restating earlier periods. The first-half net loss widened to US$7.95 million.

Honig’s letter changes the tempo. It forces the board off the fence before his 5 October deadline. Silence will read as complacency, and a rushed CEO appointment will read as panic. Either way, the one asset an aggregator cannot afford to lose is now in play: the confidence of the banks and insurers who decide where their acquisition budgets go. Partners rarely rush to sign multi-year deals with a company that might have a new owner by Chinese New Year.

What does Honig actually want?

Look at how he built his position. In October 2025, his filings showed 1,117,401 Class A shares held individually and 496,604 held by a trust controlled by his wife. By April 2026, that had grown to 2,941,000 Class A shares, or 9.631 per cent of the class. He nearly doubled his stake while the stock fell.

That is not a man looking for the exit. It is a man betting there is a floor, and the floor is the cash. If the operating business is worth anything above zero, a sale at his proposed US$1.50 a share, roughly US$66 million for the company, would more than double his money. At today’s price, his entire stake is worth about US$2 million.

Also Read: Wealth management emerges bright spot in Southeast Asia financial services M&A

So his endgame could take three forms. The first is a sale at a premium, the outcome he is openly demanding. The second is more modest: a buyback, tender offer or capital return, anything that closes the gap between the share price and the bank balance. The third is a seat at the table, or at least a board that answers his calls.

There is one wrinkle. Honig has reported his stake on Schedule 13G, the short form for passive investors. In April, he certified that the shares were not held for the purpose of changing or influencing control of the issuer. A public demand for a sale is not what most people mean by passive. Watch whether he switches to a Schedule 13D, the disclosure for shareholders seeking influence. If he does, he is settling in for a longer fight.

The 81 per cent problem

Here is where the drama meets its limits. As of September 2025, Li’s sponsor entity beneficially owned 38.3 per cent of MoneyHero’s equity and 81.1 per cent of its voting power, since each Class B share carries 10 votes against one for a Class A share.

Honig’s 9 per cent of the Class A shares therefore carries a sliver of the vote. He can embarrass the board, but he cannot outvote it. His letter is effectively addressed to one man: the tycoon who controls Pacific Century, which has indirect majority ownership of the FWD group, and who chairs PCCW.

That makes the real question strategic rather than procedural. Does Li still want a sub-scale comparison platform fighting a cash-reward arms race in Singapore and Hong Kong? Or does it now make more sense in someone else’s hands? Honig also notes that no director or executive has bought shares on the open market. That silence speaks louder than any investor-day slide.

What if the board buckles?

Caving is not automatically good news for minority shareholders. There are three ways a pressured sale can go wrong.

The first is a take-under. A strategic review launched from weakness attracts bargain hunters who price off the cash, not the franchise. If no credible bidder emerges, the stock can fall further than where it started.

The second is a break-up. MoneyHero already sold its Malaysian CompareHero business to Jirnexu in 2024. Selling SingSaver or Seedly piecemeal to rivals would concentrate Southeast Asia’s comparison market into fewer hands. Consumers who rely on these sites for supposedly independent advice on credit cards and insurance would then have fewer places to check whether they are being sold the best product or merely the best-paying one.

The third is the quiet one. The buyer with the most certainty is the controller itself. Minority protections exist, but negotiating leverage is thin when the other side holds four-fifths of the votes.

Also Read: 48 PE investors, US$3.96B deployed, and not a single IPO exit in five years. Something is broken.

Then there are the people. MoneyHero cut 80 jobs in 2024. Another stretch of limbo is exactly when good engineers and partnership managers update their LinkedIn profiles.

Precedents: The Bridgetown family album

Southeast Asia has seen this film before, with an almost identical cast. PropertyGuru listed in 2022 via a merger with Peter Thiel and Li’s Bridgetown 2 SPAC, in a deal valuing the combined company at US$1.78 billion. Two years later, EQT agreed to pay US$6.70 per share, a 52 per cent premium to the last unaffected price, and TPG and KKR, holding a combined 56 per cent, signed voting agreements backing the deal.

The lesson cuts both ways. A premium is possible when controlling holders want out and the asset is a category leader. But PropertyGuru dominated property listings with real pricing power. MoneyHero is paying users to show up.

Singapore also has a small but persistent activist tradition. Swiss fund Quarz Capital has spent a decade writing open letters to local boards. At Sunningdale Tech, it accused the company of shareholder value destruction and pushed for a higher dividend payout, and the board replied that it preferred to focus on fundamentals. That is the standard Asian boardroom response, and it often buys time rather than results.

Globally, Toshiba is the cautionary tale. It spent years resisting activist funds before agreeing in 2023 to a buyout led by Japan Industrial Partners, then delisted after more than seven decades on the Tokyo exchange. Resistance did not change the destination. It only lengthened the journey while value leaked away.

The board’s real choice

Public markets do not grade on backers. Thiel and Li’s names got MoneyHero onto Nasdaq. They cannot keep it there on reputation alone.

The board should do what MoneyHero asks its own users to do: compare the options honestly. One option is a credible permanent CEO with a plan to stop buying traffic with cash. The other is a transparent review that gives minority shareholders a real voice. What it cannot do is keep everything interim.

For a company whose business is helping people make better financial decisions, the least it can do is make one of its own.

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Talking about artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of Small, Medium Enterprises (SMEs) is no longer a discussion about the future, but about the present. According to IMDA’s latest data, SMEs’ AI adoption rate has more than tripled in just one year: 14.5 per cent of SMEs have adopted AI as compared to 62.5 per cent of non-SMEs. In an environment where efficiency, speed and adaptability define business survival, AI is consolidating itself as a strategic ally for companies that need to do more with less and make better-informed decisions in less time.

SMEs need to leverage the advantage AI brings more than ever. Just as critically, Singapore depends on them to. SMEs are the backbone of the local economy, accounting for over 99 per cent of all enterprises in Singapore. Employing about 70 per cent of the local workforce while also driving nearly half of the Republic’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Singapore’s AI ambitions cannot be realised without addressing this crucial group of businesses.

After all, SMEs operate in high-pressure environments: fewer resources, reduced teams, and the constant need to adapt to volatile markets. In this scenario, technology plays a key enabling role. Unlike large organisations, SMEs have a natural advantage: their agility to adopt new tools without lengthy purchasing processes or rigid structures. Today, that flexibility plays in its favor in the face of an AI that is no longer exclusive to large corporations and has become increasingly accessible.

One of the most relevant developments that SMEs should pay attention to then is the evolution of the PC as an intelligent productivity centre. AI no longer lives solely in the cloud; It can now run directly on the device. This allows you to automate repetitive tasks, optimise workflows, and analyse real-time information to make faster, more informed decisions. Local processing offers concrete benefits: increased speed, operational continuity, even offline, and better data control, a critical aspect for companies that handle sensitive information.

Also Read: Why AI could unbundle the beauty industry

But AI can only unleash its full potential if it has the right technological foundation. Hardware is no longer a secondary element and becomes the foundation on which daily productivity is built. Running AI models, automating processes, or analysing information in real time requires teams that are prepared for those types of workloads. Otherwise, the promise of efficiency is quickly diluted.

At this point, the renewal of the PC must be understood as a strategic decision, it is one lever that, if used effectively, will narrow the AI adoption gap. With AI-capable PCs, SMEs stand to gain from having key barriers like cost, data privacy, and the need for specialised IT staff, reduced. Processors designed for enterprise environments, with built-in AI capabilities, enable SMEs to tackle AI workloads without sacrificing performance or power efficiency, while incorporating security features designed to protect business information. These characteristics are especially relevant in organisations where each team fulfils multiple functions and there is no room for interruptions.

The underlying question is no longer whether it is advisable to invest in technology, but how to do it with a business vision. Buying a PC should not only respond to operational urgency, but to clear criteria: AI capabilities, security, performance and scalability. Each of these factors has a direct impact on the competitiveness and sustainability of the business.

AI is already helping SMEs to speed up processes and improve decision-making from the most everyday place: the PC work. Betting on AI-ready hardware not only generates immediate benefits but also prepares companies to grow with greater agility in an environment where adapting quickly makes a difference.

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AI has made it much easier for decision-makers to work with information. A company announcement can be summarised in seconds, a long annual report can be condensed, and a chatbot can help compare competitors or explain an unfamiliar industry. These are useful improvements, but they still solve only part of the information problem.

Most AI tools remain dependent on the user knowing what to ask. If you already know which company, event or issue deserves attention, AI can help you investigate it quickly. The harder problem is often earlier in the process: knowing that something important has changed at all.

This matters because many business developments do not become significant through a single announcement. A company may appoint a new executive, acquire land, increase capital expenditure and enter a new market over the course of several months. Each event may look routine when viewed separately. The pattern only becomes clear when those developments are connected over time.

Traditional search does not solve this particularly well. Search is excellent when the user already has a question in mind, while AI chat is increasingly good at helping users explore that question. But both are generally reactive. They become useful after the user has already decided what to investigate.

For investors, business owners and corporate decision-makers, there is growing value in systems that work one step earlier: continuously organising information and surfacing meaningful changes before the user thinks to search for them. Instead of starting with a blank search box, the system could tell the user that a company has made several related moves, that competitors are changing pricing or capacity, or that a regulatory development may affect a group of companies being monitored.

This is one of the ideas behind platforms such as Scope and Signals. The aim is not to compete with general-purpose AI chat by producing another chatbot. It is to build the information layer around it: collecting relevant corporate and market developments, structuring them over time and making changes easier to detect. Once an important development has been identified, AI can then become much more useful for interpreting the implications, comparing it with historical information and helping the user investigate further.

Also Read: Global expansion is no longer about reducing information costs, it’s about reducing trust costs

The distinction is important because better AI models alone do not guarantee better decisions. An AI model can only reason from the information and context available to it. If it is given one announcement, it can explain that announcement. If it can see a structured history of a company, its competitors, previous transactions and related industry developments, it has a much stronger basis for analysis.

This suggests that the next stage of business information platforms may not be defined simply by faster search or better summaries. Their value may increasingly come from maintaining context and detecting change. The useful system is not only the one that answers a question quickly, but the one that helps the user notice what deserves a question in the first place.

That becomes more important as the volume of information continues to grow. Decision-makers are unlikely to suffer from a lack of documents, news or data. The constraint is attention. Nobody can continuously monitor every filing, announcement, competitor and policy development that might eventually become relevant.

AI can make analysis much faster, but continuous monitoring and structured context solve a different problem. The combination of the two is potentially more useful: first identify what has changed, then use AI to understand why it matters.

In that sense, the next generation of business intelligence may be less about searching more efficiently and more about helping decision-makers know what changed before they think to search for it.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of e27.

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The cryptocurrency sector is moving higher in a coordinated fashion. Bitcoin rose 1.70 per cent to US$85,002.11 over the past 24 hours. The total crypto market climbed 1.16 per cent to US$2.89T. This advance rests on two powerful forces. Institutional optimism and policy progress are working together. The result is a rally that looks more grounded than a purely speculative surge. Digital assets are responding to concrete developments that could reshape how traditional finance interacts with this space.

The primary catalyst arrived on October 1. Citigroup analyst Alex Saunders raised the bank’s base-case Bitcoin forecast to US$113,000 from US$82,000. Saunders cited renewed ETF inflows and positive sentiment. At the same time, the SEC proposed a tailored custody framework for investment advisers. This framework would allow self-custody under certain conditions.

The proposal addresses a key operational hurdle that has limited professional product offerings. These two events signal growing Wall Street validation and clearer oversight pathways. They directly boost large-player buying interest. Traders read these developments as evidence that barriers to broader professional participation are slowly coming down.

Market structure data supports the view that this advance is orderly rather than frenzied. Derivatives open interest increased 6.28 per cent. Liquidations fell sharply by 61.8 per cent. That combination points to a controlled move without a leverage flush. Bitcoin dominance held at 58.96 per cent. This stability suggests core assets led the rally rather than speculative altcoins.

Social sentiment for Bitcoin remained mildly bullish with a net score of 5.26. Broader social sentiment registered a net score of 5.85. The Fear & Greed Index reading of 68 places the sector in Greed territory. The top-trending narrative is the US Strategic Crypto Reserve, which gained 1.41 per cent over the same period. These metrics paint a picture of steady capital inflow. They do not show forced selling pressure or excessive speculation.

Also Read: Uptober or downtober: Will Bitcoin’s 19% seasonal average survive US$100 oil?

The correlation between this asset class and traditional risk assets deserves attention. Crypto shows an 80 per cent correlation with the Russell 2000 ETF (IWM). This relationship suggests that digital assets increasingly trade in tandem with broader risk sentiment. They no longer behave as an isolated asset class.

The implication is significant. Crypto participants must now weigh macroeconomic factors alongside sector-specific developments. The upcoming US jobs report on October 2 looms as an immediate trigger. That report could influence rate expectations and risk appetite across both traditional and digital markets.

From a technical perspective, Bitcoin faces a substantial sell wall between US$85,000 and US$86,500 on Binance. Traders noted this wall on September 24. The 365-day moving average near US$80,000 provides major support. If Bitcoin holds above US$83,000, it could challenge the key resistance zone between US$85,000 and US$86,500. A drop below US$82,000 risks a pullback toward the US$80,000 support. The path of least resistance remains upward.

Progress hinges on absorbing the overhead supply. Whether spot volume expands on a decisive break above US$85,000 will confirm genuine buying interest over passive resistance. The key question for the immediate future is whether Bitcoin can close above US$85,500 within the next 48 hours. Such a finish would signal a convincing breakout from its recent range.

For the broader crypto sector, the technical picture is equally instructive. The market cap is testing the 23.6 per cent Fibonacci retracement level at US$2.85T. Near-term resistance sits at the recent swing high of US$2.94T. A hold above US$2.85T suggests traders are pricing in the bullish catalyst. A failure here could see a retest of the 50 per cent level at US$2.76T.

If the SEC’s proposal maintains positive momentum, a test of the US$2.94T ceiling is likely. A drop below US$2.85T could signal a return to consolidation. The US$2.85T to US$2.94T range represents the immediate battleground. A close above it could signal a continuation toward US$3.03T.

Also Read: The sovereign shift: Why nation states are trading gold for Bitcoin

Spot Bitcoin ETF AUM now stands at US$111.13B. That figure rose from US$110.97B yesterday. This modest but consistent increase aligns with the inflow trend cited by Citigroup. Sustained weekly ETF flow data will be crucial to confirm whether professional capital continues to enter the space at a meaningful pace.

The 60-day public comment period on the SEC’s custody proposal will also bear watching. Formal responses from major financial institutions could shape the final oversight landscape. Any softening of large-player backing or negative policy surprises could quickly alter the current trajectory.

My point of view is that this rally rests on more durable foundations than previous speculative surges. The combination of a major bank’s endorsement and proactive policy clarity provides a firm foundation for Bitcoin’s latest leg higher. The trading environment is not simply responding to hype. It is responding to concrete shifts in the institutional and policy landscape.

The alignment between Bitcoin’s strength and the broader market’s uptick suggests a healthy dynamic in which core assets lead rather than lag. This sector remains vulnerable to macroeconomic shocks, particularly from the upcoming jobs report. The 80 per cent correlation with the Russell 2000 ETF suggests that any risk-off sentiment in traditional markets could quickly spill over into crypto.

The near-term outlook is cautiously optimistic. A tangible reduction in policy uncertainty anchors the uptick. That reduction could unlock new professional capital. Positive sentiment and Bitcoin’s leadership provide a supportive backdrop. The key question for the week is whether the sector can convert this policy goodwill into a sustained breakout above US$2.94T.

For Bitcoin specifically, the challenge is whether it can absorb the sell wall at US$85,000 to US$86,500 and establish a new range. If these technical barriers fall, the path toward US$113,000 as forecast by Citigroup becomes more plausible. If they hold, the market may need to consolidate further before attempting another leg higher. The next 48 hours will be critical in determining which scenario unfolds.

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For years, companies have treated Google rankings as the front door to online discovery. A new study from Manila-based digital marketing agency Spiralytics suggests that door is no longer the only one that matters.

As consumers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Perplexity for product recommendations, comparisons and buying advice, brands face a new visibility test: whether artificial intelligence systems mention them at all.

In the Philippines, the early results look encouraging on the surface. Spiralytics found that Philippine brands appeared in 83.2 per cent of the AI answers where they were deemed relevant, compared with 40 per cent for a comparison group of US brands.

Also Read: The Philippines does not need to build AI to have an AI advantage

But the more important finding may be who is doing the talking. According to the study, 95 per cent of the sources cited by AI engines when discussing Philippine products and services came from third parties rather than the brands’ own websites. In practice, that means news articles, online directories, industry roundups and other external references are helping decide how companies appear in AI-generated recommendations.

For Southeast Asian businesses that have spent years optimising websites for search engines, the study points to a shift in how online trust is being assembled. It is no longer enough to publish a clean product page or rank for a keyword. AI systems appear to be piecing together brand identity from a wider set of signals, including whether credible external sources can confirm what the company does.

A new scoreboard for online visibility

Spiralytics conducted the study between 4 June and 3 August 2026. It generated 1,146 real buyer questions for 26 brands, screened the questions for relevance, and evaluated responses across ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Perplexity. In total, the agency reviewed and stored 1,911 AI answers.

The study frames AI visibility as a second scoreboard alongside traditional search engine optimisation (SEO), the practice of improving a website so that it ranks higher on search engines such as Google. AI visibility is slightly different. It asks whether a brand is named, recommended or correctly understood when a consumer turns to an AI assistant for advice.

That distinction matters because Southeast Asia’s internet economy is highly fragmented. Consumers often move between search, social media, marketplaces, chat apps and review sites before making a purchase. In markets such as the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam, where mobile-first behaviour is the norm, conversational AI could become another layer in that discovery journey rather than a replacement for search.

The risk for brands is that AI answers can feel authoritative even when they are incomplete. If a company is missing from a relevant recommendation, misidentified, or described through outdated third-party material, the consumer may never visit its website to verify the details.

Third parties hold the pen

One of the study’s sharper findings is that Philippine brands are visible, but not necessarily in control of their visibility. While they appeared frequently in AI answers, their own websites were rarely the cited foundation for those responses.

This should concern marketing and communications teams. Corporate websites remain useful for explaining products, pricing, leadership and services. But if AI engines are leaning heavily on external sources, then earned media, directories, analyst-style lists and independent explainers become more influential in shaping how a company is represented.

“Surprisingly, backlink authority did not predict AI visibility anywhere in our data,” said Gabe Tagala, Head of SEO at Spiralytics. “It does not mean SEO is obsolete. Links still matter where rankings live. But AI keeps a different score: whether the engine can tell which company you are, and if reputable third parties can vouch for you.”

That point is especially relevant in Southeast Asia, where many companies operate through holding structures, subsidiaries, regional brands and local-language identities. A business may be well known offline or on social platforms, but still poorly defined in the open web sources that AI models use to generate answers.

Gemini led on Philippine queries

The study also found meaningful differences between AI engines. For Philippine queries, Google Gemini had the highest brand mention rate at 62.6 per cent, followed by Perplexity at 57.4 per cent and ChatGPT at 45.2 per cent.

Spiralytics described the engines as behaving like “different editors”. That is a useful way to think about the problem. Each tool may weigh sources, freshness, citations and confidence differently. A brand that appears in one engine’s answer may be absent in another.

Also Read: Google bets on schools, telcos and local languages to scale Gemini in Southeast Asia

The study found that absence can also persist. Philippine brands were missing from the three engines’ responses for one in six commercial questions where they should have appeared. In repeat testing on one brand across 11 identical runs, 90 per cent of unanswered questions stayed unanswered each time. Spiralytics said this suggests omission may continue until a brand’s identity signals or third-party coverage change.

For companies, this creates a new monitoring challenge. Tracking search rankings alone will not show whether AI systems are recommending a competitor instead, or whether they are failing to mention the brand in a category where it has a legitimate claim.

The local naming problem

The research also highlights a familiar problem in emerging markets: names do not always travel cleanly across databases and AI systems. Spiralytics found that engines sometimes confused Philippine entities with overseas namesakes, declined to identify a company clearly, or folded subsidiaries into parent conglomerates.

This is not a minor technical issue. In sectors such as fintech, healthcare, education and logistics, a mistaken identity can damage trust or divert demand. For regional companies expanding across Southeast Asia, the challenge compounds as brands adapt to different languages, regulators and market conventions.

The comparison with the US market is revealing. In the US sample, competitor websites accounted for 60.7 per cent of AI citations. In Philippine answers, competitor websites accounted for 36 per cent. That leaves more room for editorial and directory sources to shape AI responses in the Philippines, at least for now.

Jimmy Cassells, co-founder and CEO of Spiralytics, argued that this gap may close quickly. “This window won’t stay open,” he said. “Brands who will move now and treat SERP and AI visibility as a connected strategy are the ones that will still be recommended a year from now.”

Also Read: The AI marketing backlash story doesn’t actually fit Southeast Asia

The broader lesson for founders and operators is simple. AI discovery is becoming part of brand building. Companies need clear websites, but they also need consistent third-party validation and unambiguous public information about who they are, what they sell and where they operate.

For Southeast Asian startups, this is both a threat and an opening. Larger incumbents may have bigger marketing budgets, but younger companies can still earn visibility if they are clearly described across credible public sources. In an AI-mediated internet, the brands that are easiest to understand may become the easiest to recommend.

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Walk into any pitch meeting, attend any LP conference, or read any VC blog, and you’ll be handed the same well-worn gospel: build diverse teams, move fast, be transparent, hire for culture, flatten hierarchies, and always be learning. This is the catechism of the modern venture capitalist, wisdom dispensed freely, with conviction, to the founders who come hat-in-hand seeking capital.

But look at how venture capital firms actually run themselves, and something curious emerges. The gap between the advice VCs give and the organisations they operate is not a rounding error. It is structural, persistent, and, frankly, a little embarrassing for an industry that prides itself on pattern recognition.

The team building contradiction

Nothing is more sacred in VC doctrine than the team. “We invest in people, not ideas.” “Team is everything at the early stage.” Every investor says some variation of this. The data backs it up too, diverse founding teams with more than one gender or ethnicity have been shown to generate returns up to 30 per cent higher in multiples on invested capital compared to homogenous ones. Ethnically diverse founders also enjoy an average exit multiple roughly 30 per cent higher than solely white founding teams.

VCs know this. They cite it often. But here is where the cognitive dissonance begins.

Black investors make up just four per cent of venture capitalists in the United States, with only three per cent holding key decision-making roles. Black women comprise a mere one per cent of the US venture community, this in a country where Black Americans represent about 14 per cent of the population.

Only three per cent of VC partners in the US are Hispanic or Latinx, and just 14 per cent of partners are women.

And it isn’t just a US phenomenon. In the UK, 78 per cent of senior VC roles are held by men. In 2023, startups with all-women founding teams raised just three per cent of European investment dollars.

In 2024, all-female founder teams received less than 1 per cent of capital in Europe.

So while VCs tell founders that diverse teams build better companies, and the research agrees, the firms making those calls are themselves overwhelmingly homogeneous. There is a striking contradiction here: venture capital thrives on new ideas, yet many VC teams lack the very diversity they know drives innovation.

There’s even a term for it now: the “mirrortocracy.” This pattern tends to fund entrepreneurs who resemble the investors themselves, which often means white men from prestigious universities. This similarity bias restricts the variety of innovations entering the market, as ideas outside the familiar comfort zone of investors get overlooked or undervalued.

Harvard Business School professor Paul Gompers, one of the world’s leading researchers on VC dynamics, has studied this extensively. His research found that VC firms which increased the proportion of female partner hires by 10 per cent saw, on average, a 1.5 per cent increase in fund returns annually and 9.7 per cent more profitable exits. The financial incentive to diversify internally is unambiguous. And yet, little has changed.

‘Move fast’: Unless you’re the one moving

Another staple of VC advice is operational agility. Founders are told to ship fast, iterate quickly, and ruthlessly cut what isn’t working. The VC mindset, as Harvard Business Review described it, is characterised by “the individual over the group, disagreement over consensus, exceptions over dogma, and agility over bureaucracy.”

Inspiring stuff. Now consider what’s actually happening inside large VC firms.

Also Read: Growth at gunpoint: Why VCs share the blame for startup fraud

Reasons for the wave of senior partner departures from large firms include a perception that decision-making at many large firms is slow, and that funds are focused on increasing the pools of money they manage rather than working with promising founders. One investor quoted by the outlet described a cohort of top VCs who are “now deciding that they don’t want to be asset managers… they don’t want to deal with the bureaucracy or corporate structures.”

This isn’t a fringe view. What began as a trickle of departures from heavyweight VC funds about a year ago accelerated into a stream throughout 2024 and into 2025, with senior partners quitting what were long considered lifetime positions. The irony is rich: the same firms whose partners lecture founders about avoiding bureaucracy have become so bureaucratic that their own talent is fleeing.

At large VC firms, decision-making power is concentrated at the top. Junior investors often spend years sourcing deals and supporting due diligence without ever leading an investment, with real influence over which startups get funded remaining with senior partners. That is not the flat, empowered, move-fast culture they preach to founders.

The transparency problem

VCs consistently advise founders to be transparent with their boards, investors, and even the public. Radical candour, open-book management, honest retrospectives, these are standard talking points in any VC-founder conversation.

Yet the VC industry has long been defined by its opacity. VC firms are notoriously secretive. Research examining court rulings that forced some large public limited partners to disclose return information found that, in response, the most successful VC firms dropped those public LPs and replaced them with private and foreign LPs not subject to disclosure requirements.

Historically, many firms have held their cards close to their vests, and lots of VC websites remain sparse. The advice they give to founders, be open, share your numbers, build trust through transparency, is advice many are unwilling to apply to their own operations or fund performance.

California has had to step in legislatively. In 2023, California enacted Senate Bill 54 to promote transparency in venture capital funding by requiring firms with a California nexus to report demographic data on the founding teams of their portfolio companies. In other words, the state had to mandate the kind of accountability that VCs freely recommend to their portfolio companies.

‘Hire for culture’: But what culture, exactly?

Culture fit is a phrase VCs adore deploying in founder conversations. Build a strong culture early. Hire people who embody your values. Get the team chemistry right. All valid advice.

But the culture within many VC partnerships is one that outsiders rarely get to scrutinise. VC firms went on a premature hiring spree during the boom years and found themselves bloated with too many investors, in some cases resulting in underqualified investors guiding founders. The very excess and poor hiring discipline that VCs warn founders against played out at the firms themselves.

Also Read: When startups fail, should VCs go to jail?

Harvard Business School’s Gompers recommends that firms looking to build diversity must first become aware of their own biases. “Most people aren’t bad people, but we have these internal biases to think that people who look like us are smart and capable,” he says. Creating a diverse company has to start from day one. “Some firms say, ‘I’m worried about survival, I’ll worry about diversity later.’ But it’s really hard to start from a frat boy startup culture and move to one that is open and inclusive.”

That observation, made about startups, applies with equal force to the VC firms themselves.

Why does this gap persist?

Several structural forces entrench the inconsistency.

Accountability asymmetry. Founders are accountable to their VCs on a quarterly basis, burn rates, headcount, KPIs, board approvals. VC firms are accountable to their LPs on a much looser cadence, and the internal workings of a partnership are almost never scrutinised with the same rigour that founders face. Almost all VC firms do not have diverse or inclusive teams internally, so their ability to directly help their portfolio companies with these challenges is undermined.

The LP concentration problem. The top 30 funds secured 75 per cent of the year’s total VC fundraising in 2024, with just nine funds raising 46 per cent. Andreessen Horowitz alone captured roughly 10 per cent of the entire year’s capital. When capital concentrates so heavily in a small number of incumbents, the competitive pressure to reform internal practices is minimal. Established firms don’t need to change to attract LP capital.

Pattern matching rewarded, not penalised. Warm introductions to VCs are the most likely route to getting funded, and some VCs specifically state they only take meetings through warm introductions. This self-reinforcing network means the same demographics cycle through, and nobody at the top of the system has a strong incentive to interrupt it.

Also Read: The VCs writing off Indonesia are making a US$300B mistake

What should change

The good news is that this gap is increasingly acknowledged, and some firms are beginning to act.

Project Include has argued that VC firms should take the lead in tech diversity and inclusion, holding their portfolio companies accountable by adding comprehensive diversity metrics to their quarterly reporting, and implementing the same recommendations in their own firms. Taking the lead to make their teams diverse and inclusive would give them the credibility and experience to be better advisers to tech startups.

The NVCA-Deloitte Human Capital Survey has called for transparent baseline measurement across the industry. “Transparency is a powerful force for change, and we now have a clear benchmark by which we can measure progress,” the NVCA’s Bobby Franklin noted.

The market may also correct some of this naturally. Newer “next gen” VC firms that eliminate bureaucratic layers often report higher portfolio company satisfaction with responsiveness compared to traditional fund relationships. As founders become more sophisticated about the kind of investor they want on their cap table, the demand for VCs who actually practise what they preach will grow.

The bottom line

There is nothing inherently wrong with venture capitalists giving founders advice about team building, culture, speed, and transparency. Much of that advice is genuinely good. The problem is the credibility gap that opens up when the advice-giver doesn’t take their own medicine.

Founders are expected to operate under intense scrutiny and perform against explicit metrics. They face board pressure, investor expectations, and public accountability. VC firms, structurally insulated from similar scrutiny, have had the luxury of preaching without practising.

That luxury is eroding. Between LP pressure, regulatory mandates, departing senior talent, and founders who are increasingly savvy about evaluating their investors, the pressure to close the advice gap is building.

The best founders now do reference checks on their VCs. Perhaps it’s time for the industry to start doing the same on itself.

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Jonathan Honig, who owns about 9% of MoneyHero’s Class A shares, wants the Nasdaq-listed comparison platform sold. His open letter asks the board to hire an independent adviser and explore a sale before a 5 October deadline.

Honig’s complaints are hard to dismiss: no permanent CEO six months after Rohith Murthy’s exit, revenue down from US$80.7 million in FY2023 to US$73.4 million in FY2025, and a share price more than 88% below its 2023 debut. At US$0.675 a share, the market values SingSaver, Seedly, Moneymax and 10.1 million members at roughly US$30 million, barely above the company’s US$28.2 million cash pile. Honig nearly doubled his stake as the stock fell, betting the cash sets a floor. His proposed US$1.50 a share would more than double his money.

The arithmetic of control tells a different story. Richard Li’s sponsor entity holds 38.3% of the equity and 81.1% of the votes through super-voting Class B shares. Honig can embarrass the board, but he cannot outvote it. A pressured sale also carries risks: a take-under priced off cash, a break-up that thins Southeast Asia’s comparison market, or a buyout by the controller itself. PropertyGuru’s 52% premium shows exits are possible, but MoneyHero lacks its pricing power.

REGIONAL

PSA, Granite Asia launch US$50M fund for supply-chain tech: The G&P Strategic Innovation Fund will co-invest alongside Granite Asia’s existing funds, backing port, logistics and supply-chain startups that can move beyond pilots. PSA, which handled over 105 million TEUs in 2025, offers deployment sites across 45 countries.

Amazon pays US$75M for Selangor land to build a data centre: Amazon Data Services Malaysia is buying a 184,000 sq m freehold plot in Dengkil, Sepang, from developer Sunsuria. The deal needs state and data-centre task force approvals, with completion due by Q2 2027.

Zeya Health buys ConnectLah to automate clinic bookings with AI: Antler-backed Zeya absorbs ConnectLah’s WhatsApp-based booking workflows after posting 15-fold revenue growth. It serves providers in six markets and targets 1,000 by mid-2027. ConnectLah founder Jules Pereira-Gomes joins as strategic advisor.

MoneyHero shareholder urges board to explore sale after stock slump: Jonathan Honig, who owns about 9% of MoneyHero’s Class A shares, wants an independent adviser hired as the Singapore-based platform battles leadership uncertainty, stalled revenue growth and a sharp fall in its Nasdaq-listed shares.

MDEC chief Anuar Fariz Fadzil to exit after US$44B investment push: Anuar leaves Malaysia’s national digital-economy agency when his contract ends on 2 October, closing a two-year tenure that sharpened MDEC’s focus on AI, high-value investment and measurable economic outcomes.

Temasek to open first Middle East offices in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi: Due to open in 1H 2027, the new hubs will widen Temasek’s deal access into Central Asia and Africa and lift its network to 15 offices in 11 countries. The state investor manages a S$518B net portfolio.

Malaysia’s top 100 startups generated US$2.98B in FY2024 revenue: Cradle’s inaugural Top 100 list shows an 87% average CAGR, with 36 startups earning over MYR1M in net profit and 58 operating abroad. AI and data-driven businesses make up 66% of the cohort.

Kawaijuku backs Do Ventures to enter Vietnam’s education market: KJ Holdings, the education group’s holding company, has invested in Do Ventures Fund II, using a Ho Chi Minh City-based VC as its route into Vietnam as a shrinking population squeezes demand in Japan.

Meta names Dhruv Vohra to lead its Southeast Asia business: Vohra becomes Managing Director of Meta’s Global Business Group, overseeing commercial strategy across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam as AI and chat commerce reshape online retail.

Singapore leads region with US$284B in crypto activity: Chainalysis: Singapore’s activity rose 55.4%, driven by a 94% jump in institutional trading, even as the wider Central and Southeast Asia and Oceania region contracted 6.8%. Vietnam ranked fourth with US$122.2B.

AI could lift Singapore’s potential output by 1.06%, says AMRO: Only half the gain arrives by 2035 under AMRO’s baseline scenario. Just 3.8% of firms have built AI into core operations, while 22.3% of jobs face high automation exposure, squeezing fresh graduates.

IMDA, TikTok launch programme to build Singapore microdrama talent: Professionals from 20 accredited companies will learn to produce 50-100-episode microdramas across live-action and AI-animated tracks, including ByteDance’s Seedance 2.5, before onboarding onto TikTok’s distribution ecosystem.

EV adoption spreads beyond China into Southeast Asia, says BMI: BMI expects Asia-Pacific vehicle sales to shrink 0.5% in 2026, yet EVs will keep gaining in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. Malaysia’s tax break for imported EVs has expired, favouring locally assembled models.

AI exposure widens the credit gap across Asia-Pacific sectors: S&P: Issuers with AI demand exposure, pricing power and supply-chain flexibility look most resilient. Prolonged energy disruptions threaten manufacturing, agriculture and transport, while emerging Asia remains exposed to capital rotation.

FEATURES AND INTERVIEWS

AI agents are exposing SEA startups’ codebase problem: As developers move from AI autocomplete to agents that work on codebases unsupervised, Southeast Asia’s startups face a harder question: whether their code is in good enough shape for AI to touch safely.

Philippine brands win AI mentions but lose control of context: A Spiralytics study finds consumers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity for buying advice, creating a new visibility problem: being named by an AI does not guarantee being described the way a brand intends.

Why token prices understate the real cost of AI agents: Founders who forecast AI costs from a model provider’s pricing page treat AI like a utility meter. Autonomous agents break that model, making usage, and the bill, far harder to predict.

Michael Padilla on turning risk management into a business: After 31 years in the US Army, the retired colonel founded Al Thuraya Holdings, now 18 companies spanning risk, security, technology and consulting. He argues the costliest failure is refusing to stop when strategy no longer holds.

INTERNATIONAL

OpenAI in talks to raise US$30B at a US$1.4T valuation: The pre-IPO round would bridge OpenAI to a delayed 2027 listing. Run-rate revenue jumped 70% since July to US$40B in August after a refocus on coding, according to Bloomberg.

SoftBank completes final US$10B OpenAI investment: The final tranche closes out SoftBank’s OpenAI commitment as the ChatGPT maker lines up a fresh pre-IPO round ahead of its planned 2027 public debut.

CYBERSECURITY

OpenAI apologises after its AI agents breached Australian govt sites: An experimental model accessed a Services Australia system holding Medicare data in June, but authorities learnt only on 10 September. OpenAI says no personal records were accessed and is setting up an independent Australian task force.

89% of Singapore leaders fear data sovereignty failures: Yet 81% of Singapore enterprises lack a formal data sovereignty strategy, the highest of eight markets in Everpure’s survey, and 68% have no plan for geopolitical data exfiltration or service disruption.

ThreatBook buys AI penetration testing platform CyberStrikeAI: The Singapore- and Hong Kong-based firm plans an Asia-Pacific rollout of an enterprise edition with on-premises deployment and audit trails this month. Researchers have linked the open-source tool to infrastructure tied to FortiGate targeting.

SEMICONDUCTOR

Infineon opens US$1.4B Thailand plant as Bangkok pushes into chips: The German chipmaker’s highly automated backend facility in Samut Prakan makes power modules for EVs, renewables and industry, anchoring Thailand’s bid to draw at least 500 billion baht in chip investment by 2029.

Taiwan’s AVC plans US$500M Vietnam expansion and R&D centre: The AI-server cooling supplier would lift its total Vietnam investment above US$1.26B with the 2027 spend in Bac Ninh, where the new R&D centre will train semiconductor and high-tech workers.

Amazon seeks to offload US$8B of Nvidia chips to investors: FT: Amazon is looking to sell US$8B worth of Nvidia chips to outside investors, the Financial Times reports, as hyperscalers hunt for new ways to finance the soaring cost of AI compute.

Malaysia needs 50,000 engineers but graduates only 5,000 a year: MBSB Research warns the talent gap will cap tech-sector earnings as Malaysia moves from back-end assembly into IC design and advanced packaging. The National Semiconductor Strategy targets 60,000 skilled engineers by 2030.

AI

OpenAI cuts ties with three safety researchers, WSJ reports: OpenAI says the trio mishandled sensitive information by sharing it with an outside AI safety group. The exits follow reports that executives brushed aside staff safety warnings, and a string of rogue-agent incidents.

Grok reportedly shaped Trump’s thinking before the Venezuela raid: Trump spent hours asking Musk’s chatbot in December 2025 how Venezuelans would react to Nicolás Maduro’s capture, Time reports. The Pentagon has since tapped Musk to co-lead a study on battlefield technology.

ChatGPT now lets shoppers virtually try on clothes: OpenAI has added a virtual try-on feature to ChatGPT, pulling the chatbot deeper into shopping as AI assistants compete to become the starting point for online retail.

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

The cross-border due diligence questions most founders can’t answer: Chris Chen recalls a polished Singapore semiconductor pitch that faltered on three questions, starting with where the intellectual property legally sits. A clean deck and cap table cannot hide a messy cross-border structure.

What TaniHub teaches Indonesia’s agritech founders about credit: Bobby Yulandika Putra revisits the first agritech generation, from TaniHub to Crowde and iGrow, which tried to do for smallholder farmers what fintech did for SME credit, and why credit became the sector’s paradox.

Why con artists get the meeting that honest founders can’t: David Kim uses Elizabeth Holmes’ 10-minute slot with George Shultz, which ran two and a half hours, to examine why charisma opens investor doors that substance alone often cannot.

SMEs adopt AI four times slower than big business: Alexey Navolokin cites IMDA data showing SME AI adoption at 14.5% against 62.5% for larger firms, and argues that closing the gap starts with something basic: the PC on every employee’s desk.

The next information advantage is knowing what changed: Jeff Chong argues AI summarisation solves only part of the problem for decision-makers. The real edge lies in tracking what has shifted between one announcement, report or filing and the next.

Why AI could unbundle the beauty industry: With contract manufacturers and e-commerce already in place, John Millar argues AI removes one more reason new beauty brands need their own factories, R&D teams or nationwide retail networks.

Why social commerce seeding is replacing influencer retainers: With acquisition costs on Meta, TikTok and Google up 60-80% in 18 months, Serge Berezhnoy says brands are swapping guaranteed upfront fees for performance-linked creator seeding.

A 20% stablecoin APY may be less magical than it sounds: Drawing on a costly 2022 lesson, Douglas Gan urges Singaporeans used to 2.5% CPF returns to ask who pays the yield, and why, before chasing double-digit stablecoin returns.

Tokenisation: Crypto’s symbolic walk on Wall Street: Yiwei Wang examines the SEC’s Innovation Exemption for tokenised US stocks, and warns that hacks such as Bitget’s US$387.5M loss show integration with traditional finance is no substitute for security.

The sovereign shift: Why nation states trade gold for Bitcoin: Anndy Lian points to sovereign wealth fund allocations, new institutional products and ETF inflows as evidence that Bitcoin is maturing from a speculative retail asset into an institutional cornerstone.

Will Bitcoin’s 19% Uptober average survive US$100 oil?: Anndy Lian’s data points to neither a triumphant rally nor a collapse this October, but a tougher middle path as the economic pressures that defined the year weigh on crypto.

Could the US jobs report make or break Bitcoin’s rally?: Bitcoin rose 1.7% to US$85,002 and the crypto market reached US$2.89T ahead of the data, with Anndy Lian crediting institutional optimism and policy progress for the coordinated advance.

Why a good product isn’t enough for sustainable growth: Reem Bekdash argues that when growth stalls despite customer interest and a hard-working team, the problem usually lies outside the product itself.

Building a Bangladesh agency from the inside: Part 2: Tajul Islam picks up Ngital’s story after its early years, exploring what client trust looks like once work is underway in an industry he says is built on vanity metrics.

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Singapore’s early bet on artificial intelligence could give its economy a modest but meaningful lift as population ageing starts to bite. But the real test will not be how many companies say they use AI. It will be whether they can rebuild work around it.

The ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO) said in its annual consultation report on Singapore that AI adoption could raise the city-state’s potential economic output by 1.06 per cent in the long run. That would offer a partial buffer against slower labour-force growth as Singapore’s population ages, although the transition may also create pressure for some workers, especially fresh graduates entering white-collar jobs.

The estimate is not a forecast. AMRO described it as a calibrated counterfactual focused on domestic supply-side effects. It does not include possible upside from external demand for Singapore’s AI-linked trade and investment, nor broader gains from innovation or the creation of entirely new types of work.

Also Read: iWOW’s US$11M placement tests investor appetite for Singapore’s ageing economy

Even so, the finding matters. Singapore’s long-term growth model has always relied on moving up the productivity curve, given its limited land, small domestic market and tight labour supply. AI is now being folded into that familiar national problem: how to make a small workforce produce more value.

Under AMRO’s baseline scenario, only about half of the potential-output gain from AI will be realised by 2035. The boost is expected to rise to 0.65 per cent by 2040 and 0.78 per cent by 2050. The drag from ageing is expected to become more pronounced from 2030, making productivity improvements more important to sustaining economic momentum.

Adoption is rising, but depth remains shallow

Singapore has moved earlier than many of its neighbours in treating AI as an economy-wide priority rather than a narrow technology-sector issue. The government has pushed national AI strategies, industry programmes and skills initiatives, while major cloud and chip players have continued to expand regional operations from the city-state.

Business adoption is now accelerating, but it remains uneven.

According to the Infocomm Media Development Authority, AI adoption among small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs) more than tripled to 14.5 per cent in 2024 from 4.2 per cent in 2023. Among non-SMEs, adoption rose to 62.5 per cent from 44 per cent over the same period.

The gap becomes starker when company size is considered. The Ministry of Manpower’s (MOM) 2026 establishment survey found AI adoption at 23.9 per cent among firms with fewer than 25 employees, compared with 76.4 per cent among firms with more than 500 employees.

That divide is familiar across Southeast Asia. Larger companies are more likely to have the budgets, data infrastructure and technical teams needed to experiment with AI, while smaller firms often struggle with implementation costs, data readiness, governance concerns and a shortage of in-house expertise.

But AMRO’s report suggests the larger issue is not initial adoption. It is integration.

Only 3.8 per cent of firms surveyed by MOM had integrated AI into their core operations. Most were still planning, testing or using basic tools. Among firms already using AI, off-the-shelf generative AI tools accounted for 84 per cent of adoption, while fewer than half had implemented customised or proprietary AI solutions.

Also Read: SIA has scaled AI. Aviation must now govern the point of action

That distinction matters. A company using a chatbot to draft emails is not the same as one redesigning customer service, compliance, logistics, finance or product development around AI-enabled workflows. The first may save time at the margins. The second could change productivity.

White-collar work faces the biggest adjustment

AMRO also warned that Singapore’s labour market has a relatively high share of jobs exposed to AI compared with other high-income economies.

It estimated that occupations with a high degree of automation exposure account for 22.3 per cent of employment. These are roles where AI could substitute for a substantial share of existing tasks and potentially reduce labour demand. The exposure is concentrated in professional jobs such as financial analysis, business administration, sales, marketing and public relations.

That does not mean a fifth of jobs will disappear. Many roles are bundles of tasks, and AI may automate routine activities while leaving humans to handle judgement, client relationships, decision-making, compliance and complex problem-solving.

Business administration professionals, for instance, may use AI for data processing or preliminary analysis while continuing to interpret findings, manage stakeholders and ensure regulatory requirements are met. In this sense, AI may change the route into expertise rather than eliminate the need for it.

Firm-level evidence so far points more towards restructuring than mass displacement. Among firms adopting AI, 18.9 per cent reported job redesign and 13.9 per cent reported creating AI-related jobs. Only 6.2 per cent reported reducing headcount.

This pattern will be closely watched across Southeast Asia, where governments are trying to raise digital productivity without worsening job insecurity. Singapore may be better placed than most economies in the region because of its training system, fiscal capacity and concentration of higher-value services. But it is also more exposed, because many of its workers are in precisely the professional roles that generative AI can affect first.

Fresh graduates may feel the pressure first

One of the sharper warnings in AMRO’s report concerns younger workers.

Entry-level professional jobs often involve routine research, coordination, documentation and analysis. These tasks have historically helped graduates learn the basics before moving into higher-value work. If AI absorbs more of that junior work, employers may need fewer fresh hires, or expect them to contribute at a higher level from day one.

AI could also widen competition for some service-sector roles. By reducing language barriers and making remote delivery easier, it may allow companies to source certain tasks from outside Singapore more easily.

Also Read: Malaysia wants 300,000 AI jobs by 2030. Talent will decide if it gets there

AMRO was careful not to claim that AI is already driving graduate employment weakness. It noted that the proportion of tertiary graduates in the labour force who were employed declined in 2025, while youth unemployment stayed at 6.6 per cent in both 2024 and 2025. The share of young people not in education, employment or training improved to 3.8 per cent in 2025 from 4.1 per cent in 2024.

Graduate hiring also slowed across advanced economies during the same period, particularly in technology and professional services. Still, the report’s warning is clear: the transition costs may be concentrated among those with the least workplace experience.

From AI access to AI productivity

AMRO identified three main channels through which AI could raise potential output: higher total factor productivity as tasks are automated, additional physical capital investment as output rises, and improved effective labour input if AI helps less experienced workers learn faster.

Most of the expected long-term gain comes from productivity and capital, which together contribute 0.98 percentage points to potential output. The human-capital learning channel adds 0.08 percentage points under the baseline scenario.

The overall gain could range from 0.47 per cent to 2.10 per cent, depending on productivity assumptions. Speed also matters. If diffusion is completed by 2030, AMRO estimates a long-run gain of 1.13 per cent. Under the baseline 2035 timeline, the gain is 1.06 per cent. Under a slower 2040 timeline, it falls slightly to 1.01 per cent.

For Singapore, the policy implication is straightforward but difficult to execute. Support cannot stop at encouraging firms to “adopt AI”. It must help them apply the technology to real operational bottlenecks.

That means sector-specific use cases, implementation help for SMEs, better data systems, cybersecurity, cloud access, computing capacity and managerial capability. It also means tracking outcomes such as productivity gains, deeper integration and worker transitions, rather than counting AI users.

Also Read: Seoul tops global AI implementation as Singapore enters top tier

Existing programmes such as SkillsFuture AI courses, the SkillsFuture Workforce Development Grant and the National AI Impact Programme could help. But AMRO said training and job-redesign support should focus more closely on novice and entry-level workers in roles where AI is likely to complement human tasks.

Singapore’s AI challenge is therefore less about ambition than execution. The country has the strategy, infrastructure and policy machinery to move early. The harder question is whether enough firms, especially smaller ones, can turn experimentation into everyday productivity before demographic pressures intensify.

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