For years, content marketing was something many founders knew they should be doing but rarely prioritised early in their company journey. Not because writing was difficult. But because publishing consistently required a workflow: topic selection, search validation, editing, formatting, distribution planning and platform adaptation.

All of this added up to something that looked less like a single task and more like a small team function, often requiring at least a marketing manager and supporting execution capacity.

AI agents are changing that timeline.

They are not simply helping entrepreneurs write faster. They are making it possible to start publishing earlier, before dedicated marketing teams exist.

That shift is already changing how startups build visibility.

Content marketing used to depend on coordination

A single article rarely exists in isolation.

Even a straightforward piece often involves:

• validating whether the topic matters
• structuring the argument clearly
• aligning tone with audience expectations
• preparing metadata
• formatting inside a CMS
• adapting captions across platforms
• deciding when and where to distribute it

None of these steps individually are complex.

Also Read: Malaysia’s Qarbotech takes top honour at SusHi Tech 2026 global pitch contest

Together, they create friction, especially for founders without a digital marketing background. Even my tech-savvy husband asked what a focus keyword or meta description was when he started planning content for his own website. That moment reminded me how invisible the mechanics of content marketing are until someone has to run them personally.

AI agents reduce that friction across the workflow, not just by drafting articles. As such, consistent publishing is now possible earlier in a company’s lifecycle than before.

Agents change execution capacity, not strategy responsibility

Many teams still treat AI as a writing shortcut. But agents are more useful as workflow collaborators.

Instead of asking whether AI can write a post, founders can now test whether a post is worth writing at all.

Agents can help:

• compare positioning angles
• explore topic clusters instead of isolated ideas
• adapt content across multiple platforms
• maintain tone consistency
• shorten experimentation cycles

This shifts content marketing from production-heavy work toward decision-heavy work.

Also Read: When collaboration systems break down in tech-driven workplaces and how to fix them

Earlier publishing changes startup visibility dynamics

In Southeast Asia especially, many startups operate without dedicated marketing teams in their early stages.

At the same time, online visibility shapes:

• investor discovery
• hiring credibility
• partnership opportunities
• category positioning

Previously, consistent publishing usually followed scale. Now, it can happen earlier.

That creates a different starting point for how entrepreneurs shape their narrative. Instead of waiting until a marketing function exists, companies can begin building presence while they are still defining their category.

Why this matters for how founders build early teams

There is another shift happening quietly alongside this. Many early-stage founders still prioritise hiring sales before marketing.

The logic is understandable. Revenue feels urgent. Pipeline feels measurable. Sales conversations feel closer to outcomes.

But without positioning, messaging and content, sales teams often end up building their own materials as they go. That slows conversations instead of accelerating them.

Also Read: When AI agents start deciding, what happens to human judgment?

I saw this directly in a previous startup I worked in, where the sales team visibly relaxed once someone finally owned messaging and content. They immediately shared with me a long list of materials they needed in order to sell the company’s products and services with credibility.

Traditionally, the alternative was hiring a marketing manager earlier than founders felt comfortable doing. AI agents are changing that trade-off.

Founders can now support early sales activity with structured messaging, lightweight editorial presence and consistent narrative positioning even before a full marketing function exists. This creates a more balanced setup: sales teams still focus on conversations, while founders establish the materials and context those conversations depend on.

At the same time, it raises expectations for founders and early operators, including sales teams. When agents can support parts of the marketing workflow, people can no longer rely entirely on role boundaries. Early teams increasingly need to work across positioning, messaging and execution layers rather than waiting for a dedicated function to exist.

And despite the technical framing around AI, prompt engineering still behaves more like an editorial craft than a precise science.

Agents can accelerate output. They cannot decide what your company should stand for.

That part remains human.

AI agents make editorial testing cheaper

One of the less obvious effects of this shift is how it changes experimentation.

Founders can now explore multiple editorial directions before committing time to full production.

Also Read: Crypto plunges, big tech earnings are strong. So why are markets nervous?

For example, when evaluating whether an announcement or industry development deserves coverage, it is possible to quickly test whether it works better as:

• a search-driven article
• a founder-perspective reflection
• a newsletter insight
• a platform-specific short-form post

Previously, testing those options required drafting each version separately or consulting a PR agency.

Now the decision can happen earlier in the process. That reduces the cost of experimentation, and lower experimentation cost usually leads to better positioning decisions.

Agents expose weak content strategy faster

There is understandable concern that AI-assisted publishing will increase generic content online. That risk exists. But weak positioning did not begin with AI.

Agents simply make it easier to replicate surface-level strategies across the market. If content depends entirely on summarising trends or repeating competitor narratives, the advantage disappears quickly once everyone has access to similar workflows.

What remains difficult to replicate is interpretation.

Editorial judgement still determines:

• whether a topic matters
• how it should be framed
• who it is for
• why it deserves attention now

Agents assist execution. They do not replace positioning.

Also Read: When collaboration systems break down in tech-driven workplaces and how to fix them

Founder perspective becomes more valuable, not less

Another common concern is that AI-assisted workflows reduce authenticity. In practice, the opposite may be happening.

As production becomes easier, differentiation shifts toward perspective. Readers increasingly respond to lived experience, practical lessons, framing decisions and clearly explained trade-offs.

Agents are strong at structure. They are weaker at conviction.

That makes founder-led thinking more visible inside content strategies rather than less relevant.

The real risk is outsourcing judgement

There is a genuine risk in agent-supported workflows. It is not automation replacing marketers.

It is founders allowing agents to decide what should be published.

Agents should reduce execution effort. They should not replace editorial ownership.

If positioning starts sounding interchangeable across companies using the same tools, the issue is usually strategy rather than technology.

The founders who benefit most from agents are the ones who remain intentional about what their content represents.

Content marketing is becoming earlier and more strategic

AI agents are already changing:

• who can publish consistently
• when founders can begin shaping visibility
• how quickly ideas can be tested
• what a marketing team needs to look like

But they are also raising expectations.

If everyone can publish faster, the advantage shifts toward people who know what is worth saying in the first place.

And in the interest of transparency, and perhaps slightly proving the point… yes, this article was written with the help of an AI agent too.

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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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Across industries and geographies, technology has become embedded in nearly every professional’s workflow. A typical workday now starts and ends with notifications, as messages, meetings, dashboards, and updates compete for attention across multiple platforms. Yet as digital touchpoints multiply, many organisations are discovering that constant connectivity does not automatically translate into better collaboration, stronger alignment, or equitable participation.

According to recent research in APAC, while 69 per cent of organisations have adopted hybrid work models, six in ten employees are reporting moderate to high levels of burnout. Virtual and hybrid meetings, in particular, have emerged as the primary environment where employees report mentally disengaging while working.

However, the challenge is not simply about productivity. Increasingly, organisations are recognising that how digital collaboration systems are designed can shape who is heard, who participates, and who progresses in the workplace. The core challenge leaders face today is not access to tools, but understanding how to leverage them to foster genuine collaboration and engagement at scale.

A tech-integrated hybrid work environment offers endless opportunities for innovation, yet many teams only use digital tools to replicate their traditional, hierarchical ways of working. To effectively harness the power of both technology and human creativity, organisations must design their digital ecosystems intentionally to nurture a culture of collaboration that balances efficiency with meaningful human connection and inclusive participation.

When digital tools create friction instead of connection

In most organisations, employees juggle multiple platforms for communication, task tracking, and knowledge sharing, often with overlapping purposes and unclear ownership. Research shows that desk workers now use an average of 11 applications, up from 6 back in 2019. This complexity can lead to confusion and inefficiency, especially when collaboration norms are undefined, such as expectations around response times, meeting purpose and decision ownership.

But beyond inefficiency, poorly designed collaboration systems can also reinforce structural inequities in the workplace. Employees who are newer to organisations, working remotely, or located outside headquarters often have fewer informal opportunities to build visibility or influence decisions.

Also Read: How to launch collaborations that grow communities: A guide for Web3 founders

Without shared norms for collaboration, employees may experience constant interruptions and meeting overload, fragmented attention and reduced capacity for deep work, and a growing sense of isolation despite frequent digital interaction. Over time, unsolved collaboration friction can erode engagement and increase attrition, even in organisations that are otherwise digitally mature.

Why workplace culture must be treated as infrastructure

Collaboration does not fail because employees are unwilling to work together, but because leaders rarely design an intentional, consistent strategy for collaboration. In many technology-driven organisations, culture is still treated as a set of perks or values statements, rather than a form of organisational infrastructure that shapes how decisions, opportunities, and recognition flow.

An intentional collaboration culture means leaders actively shape how people work together by setting clear expectations and modelling consistent ways of working, instead of just providing tools. In practice, this type of culture gives employees clarity about: how decisions are made and communicated; where knowledge lives and how it is accessed and shared; and when collaboration adds value versus when focused, independent work should be protected.

When these systems are intentionally designed, collaboration becomes more inclusive and transparent. Employees have clearer pathways to contribute ideas, access information, and participate in decisions regardless of seniority, location, or background. This can spark motivation, as employees see the impact of their contributions towards shared goals, and can likewise strengthen retention, as research shows that employees with a higher sense of purpose at work are less likely to disengage or leave.

Rebuilding engagement and alignment with interactive digital tools

Unlike passive communication channels, which can distract employees from meaningful work, digital tools that use interactive formats prompt employees to engage and co-create. When embedded within a clear collaboration culture, these technologies can help restore energy, alignment, and participation across teams.

For example, tools that incorporate live polls, quizzes, and real-time feedback allow teams to align quickly on priorities and decisions while surfacing diverse perspectives across locations. Additionally, game-based elements can also reinforce learning through active recall of knowledge and skill practice among teams.

Also Read: Weathering the tariff turbulence: How AI and collaboration can lift SEA SMEs

Gamified interactions also create low-pressure opportunities for connection, making collaboration feel more human and inclusive. In hybrid environments, this approach helps level the playing field by ensuring voices are heard regardless of location, role, or visibility. 

Collaboration by design for a more equitable digital workplace

In an always-on, digitally mediated workplace, how people collaborate now shapes not only productivity, but also who has access to opportunity and influence within organisations. This is why collaboration by design is increasingly essential to building an engaged and equitable workforce. Leaders who intentionally design collaboration through clear norms, inclusive behaviours, and engaging digital experiences create environments where teams can perform sustainably without burning out.

The next evolution of collaboration is not about adding more platforms or flashy features, but about using technology thoughtfully to help people connect, contribute, and grow together with purpose. When workplace culture is treated as infrastructure, organisations are better positioned to build digital economies where participation and opportunity are more evenly distributed.

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The post When collaboration systems break down in tech-driven workplaces and how to fix them appeared first on e27.

Indonesia has handed eFishery founder Gibran Huzaifah a nine-year prison sentence, bringing a brutal legal end to a fraud scandal that vaporised roughly US$300 million in investor value and shattered one of Southeast Asia’s most celebrated startup narratives.

The ruling, delivered by the Bandung District Court on April 29 and first reported by Bloomberg, marks a rare moment in the region’s tech industry: a once lionised founder of a unicorn-scale startup being convicted in a criminal case tied to corporate deception, embezzlement and money laundering. For Indonesia’s startup ecosystem, it is not just a courtroom verdict. It is a public reckoning.

Also Read: “There’s no excuse”: Aqua-Spark calls out eFishery’s deception

Huzaifah, the former CEO of eFishery, was also ordered to pay a fine of roughly US$60,000. Prosecutors had earlier sought a 10-year prison term. He now has seven days to appeal.

That still leaves the same uncomfortable conclusion for VC firms, founders and boards across Southeast Asia: one of the region’s flagship agritech companies did not simply fail. It unravelled into a governance disaster on a scale large enough to rattle global investors, damage confidence in private-market due diligence and expose how easily startup mythology can outrun financial reality.

From agritech darling to courtroom collapse

For years, eFishery was held up as proof that Southeast Asia could produce category-defining startups outside the usual ride-hailing, fintech and e-commerce script. The company, which supplied smart feeders and related services to fish and shrimp farmers in Indonesia, was once valued at more than US$1 billion. It had the right ingredients for a VC success story: a large domestic market, a sector with real-world impact, and a founder selling not just software but national relevance.

That story has now ended in disgrace.

According to Bloomberg, a panel of judges found Huzaifah guilty after a case centred on allegations that eFishery’s financial statements had been manipulated over several years. The company’s collapse followed a board investigation that raised concerns about inflated revenue and profits. What followed was a slow-motion demolition of one of Indonesia’s most prominent tech brands.

The investor list makes the fallout especially painful. Backers caught in the wreckage include Temasek, SoftBank Group, Peak XV, and 42XFund. Temasek had co-led a US$90 million investment round in 2022 and also participated in a US$200 million round in 2023. After those rounds, reports indicated that Temasek held about 5 per cent of eFishery.

The destruction was not limited to cap tables. The scandal also hit the credibility of a wider ecosystem that has spent the past decade selling growth, disruption and inclusion to global capital.

The numbers that should have set off alarms earlier

The prosecution’s case, as outlined in earlier proceedings and reported by e27 on April 20, traced the alleged manipulation back to 2017, when eFishery’s cash balance reportedly fell to just US$8,142.

From there, prosecutors alleged that revenue manipulation continued from 2018 to 2024 as the company fought to sustain operations and maintain fundraising momentum. That timeline is the real nightmare here. This was not an isolated accounting slip or a bad quarter dressed up to buy time. The allegation was of a long-running distortion that coexisted with aggressive capital raising and a unicorn valuation.

State prosecutors had said Huzaifah and two other executives caused losses of more than US$4.1 million to the startup itself, while the broader investor damage reached around US$300 million. Two former executives, Angga Hadrian Raditya and Andri Yadi, also faced prison demands during the earlier phase of the case.

Also Read: How eFishery lost control of its narrative

That discrepancy between internal losses and investor wipeout matters. It shows how startup fraud does not need to drain every dollar directly to cause a catastrophe. Inflate performance metrics long enough, raise against the fiction, and the eventual collapse does the rest.

A founder’s defence, and a judge’s answer

During an earlier plea, Huzaifah argued the matter should not be treated as a criminal case. In remarks cited by Bloomberg, he said: “If, in leading a company scaling and evolving so rapidly, I am accused of making administrative errors, I am ready to be held accountable civilly.”

That defence now looks as revealing as it is unsuccessful. It reflects a mindset that has long existed, quietly, in parts of the startup world: that aggressive accounting is a by-product of speed, that investor expectations justify distortion, and that the boundary between operational chaos and fraud is somehow negotiable.

It is not.

In Huzaifah’s own earlier comments, the cultural rot was even more stark. “I knew it was wrong. But when everyone else is doing it and they’re still fine and never get caught, you start to question whether it’s really wrong.”

That sentence may end up being the most important line in the entire saga. It speaks to a broader ecosystem problem, not just an individual fall. Startup fraud rarely begins with a cinematic act of villainy. More often, it begins with pressure, storytelling, weak controls, investor enthusiasm, and a widening internal belief that numbers can be “adjusted” until the business catches up. Sometimes it never does.

The damage to Southeast Asia’s venture machine

The eFishery case lands at an awkward moment for the region’s startup market. Capital is already tighter than it was during the zero-interest-rate boom. Investors are demanding clearer paths to profitability. Public market exits remain uneven. Against that backdrop, a scandal of this size hardens every existing doubt.

The immediate effect is reputational. Limited partners and institutional investors will ask harder questions about how a company backed by blue-chip names could allegedly misstate performance for years without being stopped sooner. The secondary effect is practical. Expect tougher diligence, more forensic audits, milestone-based disbursements, stricter board oversight and far less tolerance for founder opacity dressed up as vision.

Indonesia, in particular, may feel the impact sharply. It remains Southeast Asia’s largest digital economy and still offers enormous startup potential. But eFishery has shown that size and promise do not immunise a market against governance failure. If anything, a large opportunity can sometimes make investors more willing to suspend disbelief.

That does not mean capital will flee Indonesia. It does mean the terms of trust are changing.

Not a Wirecard, but close enough to sting

Southeast Asia has seen governance failures before, but few with the symbolic weight of this one. Globally, comparisons to Wirecard and Luckin Coffee are unavoidable, even if the scale differs. In each case, inflated numbers met investor appetite, and narrative delayed scrutiny until reality became impossible to hide.

eFishery now joins that cautionary archive.

The difference is that Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem is younger and still proving itself to global capital. That makes each scandal heavier. A blow in Silicon Valley can be framed as an outlier in a mature market. A blow in Indonesia risks being unfairly read as proof of systemic weakness, whether or not that conclusion is justified.

That is why this sentence matters beyond one founder’s fate. It tells the market that criminal accountability is possible. It also tells founders that “administrative errors” is no longer a phrase likely to rescue them once manipulated accounts and investor losses pile up.

The end of a fantasy

Visibly shaken, Huzaifah reportedly cried in court and embraced family members after the verdict, Bloomberg said. Humanly, it is a tragic image. Commercially and institutionally, it is also the end of a fantasy that too many in tech still cling to: that growth can excuse anything, and that governance can always be fixed later.

Also Read: eFishery founder held by Indonesian police over alleged embezzlement

It cannot.

eFishery was once sold as a symbol of what Indonesian innovation could become. It is now a warning about what happens when ambition outruns accountability. For Southeast Asia’s startup industry, that warning could prove more valuable than another unicorn headline. Painful, yes. Overdue, absolutely.

The post eFishery founder gets 9-year jail term, closing the book on one of SEA’s worst startup collapses appeared first on e27.

One of our founder friends tried it. He really did.

About six months into the AI wave, he sat down and did the math. Hiring a PR agency was too costly, factoring his startup stage and business operational expenses, so he figured now with Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, NotebookLM – tools that could theoretically do what took an entire PR team—he could basically cut costs and do his own PR.

One solid prompt gets you strategy. Another gets media monitoring. A third spits out outreach lists and pitch emails. A fourth generates press releases and article drafts. You scale from a full PR team to one person managing the AI outputs. You cut costs, reduce overhead, move faster.

So he experimented. Six months later, he dropped me a WhatsApp saying it just wasn’t working. That was when we sat down and tried to figure out what went wrong. And that’s when we realised the real gaps in AI.

What changed (The pros)

Speed, for starters. Press releases, pitch emails, and article drafts were generated in minutes. His startup’s social media calendar was practically built out for a full year and scheduled to go. Research that took a researcher two days? Done in under an hour. That part actually worked.

Cost-wise, yes, he saved money on the volume side. That’s not nothing for a bootstrapped startup. And on paper, it looked like a win, especially for other founders wondering if they could ditch the PR agency retainers.

Also Read: The classroom: An untapped testbed for human-centric AI

What didn’t change (and this is where it got real)

But when he reached out saying results weren’t materialising, I pulled up my sleeves to help him figure out why. And that’s when we realised something: AI can hand you the tools, but it can’t hand you the judgment. There’s a fundamental difference.

A good PR professional isn’t just a content machine; they’re a translator of nuance. They understand that some information transfers through coffee chats and off-the-record conversations. They know that certain journalistic relationships are built on years of trust and calibration, not just a well-crafted pitch email. They recognise that what works in a pitch to a tech journalist in Singapore might fall flat with a business editor in Indonesia because of cultural context, language, and heck, which platform or channel you’re using to reach out to that particular editor.

AI doesn’t have access to that. And that became very obvious very quickly.

What made us re-evaluate things

First: The media list that looked perfect but wasn’t

His AI-generated outreach list looked pristine. Categorised perfectly. Emails formatted flawlessly. But when he actually started using it, he started hearing back: “This person doesn’t work here anymore.” “Wrong email.” “Not sure who this is.”

One producer was still listed because the online media registry hadn’t updated. But she had left for a new opportunity years ago, before I had even thought of starting SARAHÁ Advisory. Where was she now? Nobody would know unless they followed her LinkedIn or caught wind of it through industry chatter. That’s human knowledge. That’s the stuff you pick up over coffee with other journalists, or by noticing someone’s career move announced on social media.

Also Read: Pandai’s low-cost growth playbook puts the edutech startup on LSE’s 100x Impact radar

The AI agent pulled her old email and title. Our PR human, who stays plugged into the industry? She wouldn’t have even sent that email. That’s not a marginal difference, that’s the difference between a pitch that lands and one that gets lost in space.

Second: The article that was smart but generic

He had a real story to tell. A hard-won lesson in e-commerce store optimisation in a volatile economy.  A perspective that only he could speak to as a multi-entrepreneur. He gave the AI a brief: create a thought leadership piece that positions him as an industry voice.

But it never made it into the opinion editorial calendars where it mattered. Editors who he pitched it to said the same thing: too high-level, generic. It was lacking value. What could readers learn from this piece that they haven’t read on probably a million other pages? It lacked the hard-won insight, the “I’ve been in the trenches and here’s what I learned” energy that actually gets coverage in opinion sections.

Our founder could tell that story. It’s real to him. But he wasn’t a PR professional who was accustomed to knowing exactly what editors were looking for, the extra meat that made the news, so it became a blind spot that he skipped – his own customer use cases. And AI wasn’t smart either to call him out for more personal insights and experiences that couldn’t be found on the internet.

A human who’s been in this space knows what not to do. They know which journalists are burned out and unlikely to respond. They know which outlets have recently changed their editorial focus. They know the unspoken rules of how to approach different editors. That institutional knowledge isn’t in any database. It lives in people who’ve been paying attention.

Also Read: Alan Turing asked if machines could think. We asked if they could lie

The lesson for early stage startups

Your next PR hire might not be a large-scale PR agency. But it’s not AI either.

It’s a human, someone who can fact-check what the AI spits out. Someone who can look at a media list and know immediately if the contacts are real and current. Someone who understands your market, your founder’s voice, and the subtle differences between a pitch that lands and one that doesn’t.

You don’t necessarily need four PR hires as an early stage startup. But you do need the advice of one really good person who can be the quality filter between what AI produces and what actually goes out into the world.

That person isn’t managing AI agents. They’re auditing them. They’re the bridge between algorithmic efficiency and human judgment. They’re the reason your outdated contacts never make it into a pitch, and why your thought leadership actually sounds like it came from a real human who’s been in the trenches.

AI is the accelerant. This person is the steering wheel.

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Image Credit: Matt Botsford on Unsplash

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.

The post Why startup founders shouldn’t trust an AI agent to replace a PR team appeared first on e27.

Across Asia Pacific, AI is already embedded in fraud prevention and anti-money laundering (AML). Most organisations use it daily and trust it; yet, many still cannot connect the outputs into a single, coherent view of risk.

For Tamas Kadar, co-founder and CEO of SEON, an AI command centre for fraud prevention and AML compliance, that gap defines the current phase of the industry.

“AI is already well established,” he says. “The issue is what happens when those outputs need to support decisions across the full lifecycle.”

Also Read: Building an anti-scam ecosystem is the key to a safer digital future

In many companies, onboarding, transaction monitoring, screening, and investigations still sit in separate systems. AI improves individual workflows, but without integration, it does not improve decision-making overall. The result? Fragmented visibility.

The real question is no longer whether companies use AI, but whether they can turn it into decisions that are consistent, explainable and fast enough for real-time environments.

Integration is becoming a growth advantage

The divide shows up most clearly in growth.

Higher-growth companies are far more likely to have integrated systems. Kadar stops short of claiming direct causation, but the pattern is consistent: companies that scale quickly tend to treat integration as core infrastructure.

“Fraud and AML complexity rises quickly as a business grows,” he says. “The companies that scale best integrate early, so complexity does not become a drag.”

Disconnected systems create friction. Teams spend time reconciling data, decisions lack context, and accountability becomes unclear. Integration reduces that friction and allows businesses to expand without letting fraud losses or compliance bottlenecks spiral.

What “unified” actually means

“Unified” is often used loosely. In practice, it means building a shared backbone.

Fraud and AML teams need access to the same customer context, decision logic, and audit trail. Risk signals, from behaviour to transactions, must feed into one system so AI can understand relationships between them, not just make isolated judgements.

This is difficult to implement. System complexity, talent shortages and incompatible data remain major barriers.

In Southeast Asia, the challenge is amplified by market variation. Payment systems, regulations and fraud patterns differ widely. A workable model is not a single rigid system, but a consistent core with local flexibility layered on top.

The biggest mistake: automating too early

Many companies move fast on AI but skip a critical step.

“The biggest mistake is automating before defining decision ownership,” Kadar says.

Also Read: Why AML compliance is becoming proptech’s biggest opportunity in 2026

Buying multiple tools or automating weak processes are symptoms of the same issue: unclear decision-making structures. Without clarity on how decisions are made and reviewed, automation simply accelerates confusion.

This becomes more serious as companies expand. Fraud and AML decisions need to be explainable, especially when they affect customers and compliance obligations across multiple markets.

AI does not remove that responsibility. It makes it more urgent.

When speed turns into operational debt

Startups often prioritise speed and patch systems later. In fraud and AML, that approach can break down quickly.

Operational debt becomes dangerous when temporary fixes start influencing high-stakes decisions: customer access, financial exposure or regulatory compliance.

The warning signs are straightforward: teams jumping between dashboards, different departments working from conflicting data, and leadership lacking a clear view of risk. At that point, the system is no longer supporting growth. It is slowing it.

There is also a timing problem. Fraud evolves quickly, but many systems are slow to deploy or adapt. Delays increase both costs and exposure to risk.

The challenge is not choosing between speed and structure. It is building systems that can do both.

AI is changing work, not replacing it

Despite expectations, AI has not significantly reduced headcount in fraud and AML. Instead, it has changed the nature of work. Detection has improved, but the overall workload has increased. More users, more transactions and greater regulatory scrutiny have expanded the scope of operations.

AI acts as a force multiplier. It supports analysis and decision-making, but humans remain essential for oversight, interpretation and accountability.

Most organisations still favour human-in-the-loop models. AI assists, but final judgement stays with people.

Accountability cannot be outsourced to AI

As AI becomes more involved in decision-making, responsibility becomes harder to define.

Kadar is clear: accountability does not sit with the model. It sits with the system around it. That includes data quality, decision rules, governance processes and leadership choices. When something goes wrong, the issue is not the algorithm alone, but the broader control environment.

Vendors must provide transparency. Teams must monitor outcomes. Leaders must ensure systems prioritise accountability, not just speed.

The uncomfortable truth

The industry’s biggest misconception is that AI fixes operational problems.“The uncomfortable truth is that AI exposes weak operations faster than it fixes them,” Kadar says.

Poor data, unclear ownership and disconnected systems become more visible when decisions accelerate. Without a solid foundation, AI simply amplifies existing issues. That is why AI adoption in fraud and AML is not just a technology decision. It is an operating one.

Also Read: Asia’s new cyber threat: AI that speaks your language

Companies that benefit most are not those with the most tools, but those with the strongest foundations: clean data, clear processes and governance that can scale.

Without that, AI does not create clarity. It creates faster confusion.

The post AI doesn’t fix broken risk systems; it exposes them: SEON’s Tamas Kadar appeared first on e27.

The first time an AI agent changed how I think about building a team, it was 10 AM on a Tuesday.

We were trying to fix a performance drop for a brand that was spending heavily on Meta, Google, and TikTok. My team had three dashboards open, ten Excel tabs, and the same old arguments: is this creative fatigue, bad targeting, or just the algorithm having a bad week? Then our internal agent flagged a small cluster of keywords and creatives that were quietly burning around 18 per cent of the monthly budget across channels, with almost no downstream conversions. It suggested three specific actions; we shipped them, and we started to see signs of recovery over the next few days.

That night, what hit me was not “this can replace a junior analyst”. It was “this gives my team another brain that can stare at data all night, at a level of speed and precision that no human wants to maintain”.

This is what the rise of AI agents looks like in real marketing teams. Less sci-fi, more about adding a layer of always-on intelligence on top of the people you already trust.

Industry data backs this shift. McKinsey estimates that companies using AI in marketing and sales see an average increase in marketing ROI of 15 to 20 per cent. Nucleus Research found that modern marketing automation delivers about US$5.44 in value for every US$1 spent, with payback in under six months. These gains are not coming from “smarter dashboards” alone, but from systems that watch, decide, and suggest what to do next.

Also Read: Why Southeast Asia’s edutech must go beyond chatbots to truly transform learning

Where AI agents already help marketers today

In growth marketing, I see three areas where agents already act as amplifiers of human intelligence and speed, instead of just being another tool.

Always-on diagnosis, not more dashboards

Most teams still live in dashboards. They refresh Google Ads, Meta, GA4, and maybe a BI tool, then manually connect the dots. Agents flip this. They sit on top of these tools, watch data 24/7, and push a ranked list of problems and opportunities. A good example is an agent that tracks thousands of search terms, spots the small set that quietly burns budget, and tells you what to pause, what to move, and where to reallocate spend.

Turning gut feel into measurable patterns

Strong media buyers feel when a creative is dying or an audience is tired. What they lack is time to prove it across thousands of rows.
A creative analysis agent can watch every ad, group them into “winners”, “money pits”, and “hidden gems”, and link that to patterns like hook, format, or duration. The human still decides the next concept, but they are no longer guessing which variant to scale or kill.

Cleaning up reporting and hygiene work

Every brand team has someone whose week disappears into screenshots, slides, and “quick reports”. Reporting agents can pull multi-channel data, assemble reports, and schedule them, while other agents keep accounts clean of duplicate keywords, dead ad sets, and obvious waste. This does not remove people; it lets them spend more time on decisions instead of copy-pasting.

Under the hood, none of this is magic. These agents rely on solid integrations, clear rules, and feedback from the people using them. But when those pieces are in place, they genuinely extend what a small team can handle.

Also Read: Designing for the employable workforce with AI

How “one person with agents” changes the math

There is a lot of noise about “one-person companies” powered by AI. Parts of that are hype. Parts of it are already very real.

If you are a solo founder or a thin in-house team running paid-heavy growth, you can now offload work that previously required a few full-time roles:

• Account hygiene and first-pass optimisation across multiple ad platforms
• Weekly reporting and narrative for leadership or clients
• First drafts of creative analysis and testing roadmaps

With the right setup, a small team can manage somewhere around US$50,000 to US$150,000 a month in ad spend with a much lighter operational footprint than a few years ago, as long as they are disciplined about process, guardrails, and oversight. The cost curve at the lower and mid tiers of spend is already shifting.

But there are clear limits:

• Strategy still needs humans: Agents do not own positioning, product, channel fit, or the question “Should we be on this channel at all?” They optimise the game you hand them. If the brief is wrong, they just get you to the wrong outcome faster.
• Cross-functional trade-offs are still social: In fintech, for example, we have seen campaigns that look great at the “approval” stage but fall apart at the “disbursal” stage, once you connect ad data with CRM and loan data. An agent can surface that pattern, but it cannot negotiate between growth, risk, and unit economics.

So yes, one person plus agents can now run a more complex growth machine than a full team could have a few years ago. The leverage is real, but it is leverage on execution, not a substitute for judgment.

Also Read: Pandai’s low-cost growth playbook puts the edutech startup on LSE’s 100x Impact radar

Where agents still fall short

The most painful failures I see come from assuming that if an agent can act, it should act everywhere.

Three common gaps show up in real deployments:

• Important signals live outside the tools

Agents work best when key signals live in clean, digital systems. They struggle when the truth is in sales calls, WhatsApp chats, or internal politics.

No agent today can fully capture the reality of a sales team that quietly avoids leads from a certain campaign because “they feel low quality”, even if the CRM is clean.

• Vague goals lead to weird behaviour

If you tell an agent to “improve engagement,” you might get lots of cheap clicks and shallow actions. If you ask for “more approved loans that actually disburse” and wire in finance data, it starts to behave in a way that helps the business.
Clarity on the metric is still a human responsibility.

• Risk and context are still hard

Once agents get powers, changing bids, launching variants, or talking to customers, they will do something awkward sooner or later. In regulated spaces like finance or health, that is not acceptable. The safer pattern I see in these sectors is “agents recommend, humans approve” instead of fully closed loops.

In short, agents are strong where the work is repeatable, measurable, and bounded. They are weak where the work is political, ambiguous, or value-driven.

Also Read: Designing for the employable workforce with AI

Who holds the line when the agent is wrong?

The uncomfortable part about agents is that they no longer just suggest; they act.

They might pause a campaign, shift budget between geos, or prioritise one lead segment over another. When those decisions backfire, the question is simple: who owns it?

From what I have seen, responsibility lives at three levels:

• Metric owner: Every agent needs a named human owner for a specific metric: ROAS for a media agent, default rate for a lending agent, NPS for a support agent. Without that, the agent will end up chasing the easiest proxy it can move.
• Guardrail owner: Someone has to define what the agent is not allowed to do. That might include caps on budget swings, brand safety rules, or limits by region or audience. These are not engineering details; they are policy decisions.
• Explanation owner: When things go wrong, someone must be able to explain, in plain language, why the agent did what it did. That means logging decisions and surfacing reasons inside the UI, the way you would expect a junior team member to walk you through their thinking.

In my own teams, we often treat agents like named colleagues in review meetings. We walk through their decisions, question them, and then adjust the scope depending on how they did. Humans still decide when that scope grows.

The real question for founders

If you are a founder or marketing leader, the practical question is not “will agents replace my team”.

The better question is, “Which parts of my team’s week are too important to leave to tired humans scrambling through dashboards, and better handled by a machine that never blinks?”

Anywhere the work is repetitive, data-heavy, and tied to a clear metric, your next “addition” is likely an AI agent that watches the numbers all day and nudges your team when it finds something useful.

Anywhere the work is about choosing what matters, setting the bar, and holding a line on values or risk, you want humans, ideally humans who finally have the time and headspace to do that well.

—

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.

The post How AI agents are quietly rewriting the growth marketing playbook appeared first on e27.

Cube, a startup that tracks e-commerce markets for consumer brands, internet platforms and investment firms, has raised a US$3.7 million Series A round led by Betatron Venture Group, with follow-on backing from M Venture Partners and participation from strategic angels.

The funding lands at a moment when the economics of online commerce are becoming harder, not easier, to read. Brands have long relied on established data providers to understand what is happening in supermarkets, pharmacies and other offline retail channels. Online, that same visibility is far less developed. Product listings shift constantly, sellers bundle items in different ways, pricing changes by the hour, and marketplaces do not always present clean, consistent data.

Also Read: Cube Asia attracts US$1.5M to help e-commerce consumers make more data-driven decisions

That chaos is precisely where Cube has built its pitch.

Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Bangkok, the startup sells market intelligence to more than 20 enterprise customers, including global consumer goods groups, internet platforms and investment firms. Its core promise is simple: take fragmented e-commerce data, structure it, enrich it and turn it into something companies can actually use to make decisions.

For brands, that means tracking online market share, identifying where demand is growing and understanding how pricing, promotions and product visibility affect performance. For investors and platforms, it means building a clearer view of the size, shape and trajectory of digital commerce categories across emerging markets.

Why this matters now

The broader market backdrop is helping startups like Cube make their case.

In offline retail, measurement has been built over the course of decades. Categories are relatively stable, product attributes are standardised, and distribution channels are familiar. E-commerce is a different beast. Categories can fragment overnight — cross-border sellers muddy comparisons. A single item can appear in multiple formats, pack sizes or promotional bundles. In many high-growth markets, the data infrastructure around all of this remains thin.

That leaves brands trying to answer basic questions with imperfect tools: Which sub-category is actually growing? Where is the share being won or lost? Are consumers shifting to smaller packs, premium products or multipacks? What is happening to visibility on digital shelves as marketplaces tweak search and recommendation algorithms?

Cube is betting that enterprises will increasingly pay for answers. The company says its AI-enabled product tagging systems are central to its edge, allowing it to classify products at a deeper level than standard market dashboards typically allow. That includes breaking down dimensions such as pack size, primary benefit and target age group, and more recently, splitting bundled products to identify what is actually being sold inside combo offers.

That type of granularity matters because online shelves are not organised like physical ones. A shampoo is no longer just a shampoo; it might be a travel-size anti-dandruff bundle sold with a conditioner under a time-limited promotion by a third-party merchant. If a brand cannot see those layers, it can misread both consumer demand and competitive pressure.

As Cube co-founder Simon Torring put it, “enterprises would need more reliable and accurate market data and insights to win online, and this has proven even more true in the age of AI”.

Expansion beyond Southeast Asia

Cube started with a focus on Southeast Asia, where marketplace-led e-commerce growth has created large but uneven pools of digital demand. That regional base remains important, but the startup is now pushing further into North Asia and Latin America, two markets it describes as priorities for expansion.

Part of that plan includes expanding operations in Hong Kong SAR, which the company says will serve as a hub for North Asia-based clients and strengthen support for investment managers using its Tradewinds strategic market data product.

The move is notable. Many startups serving Southeast Asia struggle to scale beyond the region because local market structures differ sharply across countries. Consumer behaviour, marketplace dominance, language, logistics and regulatory environments all vary. Expanding into North Asia and Latin America suggests Cube believes the underlying data problem it solves is broad enough to travel, even if local execution will still matter.

Also Read: Hyperspace is making stores think and act like websites

That is also where the new funding is likely to be tested. Raising a Series A is one thing; proving repeatability across multiple geographies is another.

Betting on infrastructure, not just dashboards

Betatron’s backing reflects a wider investor appetite for business-to-business software that sits underneath major industry shifts rather than merely riding them.

In Cube’s case, the bet is not just on analytics dashboards but on the infrastructure needed to make e-commerce data usable. That includes data collection, product normalisation, tagging, enrichment and interpretation. If the raw material is poor, the insight layer on top quickly becomes unreliable.

Matthias Knobloch, Managing Partner and CEO of Betatron Venture Group, bluntly framed the gap, arguing that brands have solid tools for brick-and-mortar performance but still lack the same visibility in digital channels, where data is “messy, fragmented, and constantly in flux”.

That assessment is hard to argue with. Legacy market intelligence firms remain powerful in offline channels, but online commerce has produced a different set of technical challenges. Marketplaces do not expose data uniformly. Sellers manipulate listings. Product taxonomies vary from one platform to another. Promotional mechanics are more dynamic. In frontier and emerging markets, those problems are often magnified.

Cube’s opportunity lies in turning those pain points into a subscription business that feels indispensable to large customers.

The startup says its revenue has more than doubled annually since launch, and its business model is built predominantly around enterprise subscription plans. That is encouraging on paper, although the release does not disclose absolute revenue, retention or customer concentration figures, which remain key markers for any software company claiming strong enterprise traction.

The AI angle, minus the hype

Like many startups raising capital in 2026, Cube is leaning into the language of AI. But unlike businesses that sprinkle the term over generic automation, its use case is at least rooted in a concrete problem: making chaotic commercial data more precise and searchable.

That distinction is crucial.

For all the noise around generative AI, many enterprise buyers still care more about whether a system can improve data quality, reduce manual classification work, and surface useful signals faster than about flashy interfaces. In e-commerce intelligence, those gains can directly translate into pricing decisions, assortment planning, category expansion, and investment strategy.

Cube co-founder Sarabjit Singh said recent advances in AI have helped the company push reporting into deeper levels of detail, including the ability to separate bundled products and examine what sits inside them. That may sound technical, but it points to a practical reality: better parsing of online listings can lead to better business decisions.

What comes next

Cube is now entering a more demanding phase. The company has moved beyond proving that there is demand for better e-commerce market data in Southeast Asia. The next challenge is scaling that proposition across regions while defending the quality and accuracy of its insights as datasets become larger and more complex.

Also Read: E-commerce profits spark funding shift in Southeast Asia’s tech scene

That will require more than good fundraising headlines. It will require sustained product performance, strong enterprise retention and the ability to show that its intelligence is not merely interesting, but operationally valuable.

Still, the direction of travel is clear. As consumer spending continues to migrate online and digital shelves grow more crowded, companies that cannot properly read e-commerce markets risk flying blind. Cube is trying to become the system that tells them where the market is moving before their competitors see it.

For a startup born in Southeast Asia, that is an ambitious play. The new capital gives it more room to make it.

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Across Asia, a quiet revolution is underway. Banks are piloting AI agents to triage customer queries. Manufacturers are wiring factories with autonomous “co‑pilots” that watch sensor data and adjust production lines in real time. Governments are experimenting with digital assistants to guide citizens through permits and benefits.

These systems look like chatbots on the surface. Under the hood, they are something more consequential: AI agents, software entities that can perceive, plan, and act toward goals with less and less human supervision. They can call other tools, talk to other agents, and make decisions on our behalf.

For Asian policymakers, investors, and executives, the question is no longer whether these systems will arrive. They are already here. The real question is, can the region scale AI agents in ways that cut emissions, create good jobs, and strengthen social resilience—or will we simply import a new layer of risk and dependency?

This article looks at the environmental and social implications of AI agents in Asia and asks a more important question: can the region scale these systems in ways that reduce risk, strengthen resilience, and support long-term sustainability rather than simply accelerating automation?

The new machine room: Energy, water, and materials

Most conversations about AI agents focus on productivity. Far fewer acknowledge what it takes to keep them running.

An agentic system does not stop at one reply. It might:

• Call a language model dozens of times in a single task.
• Consult search, databases, or corporate systems.
• Coordinate with other agents, debating and refining answers in the background.

Each of those steps consumes computing cycles, which in turn draw electricity and require cooling.

Also Read: China blocks Meta’s AI bet on Manus: What it means next

Recent sustainability studies of AI infrastructure paint a stark picture. Training frontier models already uses massive energy and water; inference—the day‑to‑day running of models—now represents a growing share of the footprint as usage explodes. Agentic architectures amplify this trend. They stretch interactions over time and multiply calls by moving from individual queries to long workflows.

In Asia, that matters for three reasons.

• First, much of the region’s power is still fossil‑heavy. Adding large, always‑on AI agent workloads to grids in countries where coal remains dominant risks locking in additional emissions just as climate commitments are tightening.
• Second, water stress is rising. Many hyperscale data centres rely on water‑based cooling. Locating agent‑heavy workloads in already stressed basins—from northern China to parts of India and Southeast Asia—raises real questions about trade‑offs between digital ambitions and local water security.
• Third, hardware and materials are not neutral. Manufacturing the chips and networking gear that underpin AI agent platforms carries a global footprint, from mining to fabrication to e‑waste. Asia sits at several points in this chain—as producer, user, and often as the final destination for discarded electronics.

The uncomfortable truth is that energy‑blind and environment‑blind AI agents could quietly erode the very sustainability gains they are supposed to enable.

The Social Ledger: Work, Inequality, and Trust

Environmental impacts are only half the story. AI agents also reshape social and economic landscapes.

Also Read: Bridging the last mile: How AI can transform agriculture, health, and education in SEA

Work redesigned—from co‑pilot to overseer

Agentic AI changes not only which tasks can be automated, but also how work is organised. Instead of replacing an entire role, agents increasingly:

• Draft and refine content before a human sees it.
• Monitor activity streams and flag anomalies.
• Allocate work among humans based on rules the system learns over time.

In Asian service sectors—business‑process outsourcing, call centres, back‑office operations—this is already visible. Some tasks become easier or faster; others become more fragmented, more closely monitored, and less meaningful.

Research on automation and well‑being suggests that this kind of partial automation can create a peculiar mix of relief and strain. Routine burdens shrink, but so does autonomy. Workers may become supervisors of systems they neither understand nor control, bearing responsibility without agency.

The region faces additional challenges:

• High shares of informal employment mean many workers who feel AI pressure have little social protection.
• Power imbalances between multinational clients, local firms, and workers can turn “AI augmentation” into a vehicle for intensified surveillance.

Without deliberate choices, AI agents could widen gaps between high‑skill and low‑skill workers–between those who design systems and those who are managed by them.

Also Read: Creating a safe digital world: Protecting kids from cyber crimes and preventing cyberbullying

Social intelligence at scale

Most safety discussions have focused on single models hallucinating. Multi‑agent systems introduce a different class of risk. When agents interact, they can:

• Reinforce one another’s errors in long chains of reasoning.
• Converge rapidly on misleading narratives.
• Exhibit emergent “group behaviours” that their designers did not anticipate.

In markets where online information is already polarised or polluted, this matters. If news feeds, moderation systems, and political campaigns lean on swarms of semi‑autonomous agents, errors and biases can propagate faster and further. For countries balancing digital growth with fragile social contracts, that is not a theoretical concern.

Inequality of access and dependency

Finally, there is the question of who gets to own and steer these systems.

At present, the most capable agent platforms are being developed and hosted by a small set of global firms. Asian companies and governments increasingly rely on these platforms for critical functions—from software development and cloud operations to citizen services.

This raises familiar questions:

• How easy is it to switch providers if terms become unfavourable?
• Who sets the rules for data use, logging, and model updates?
• How can public regulators inspect systems that are only partially under their jurisdiction?

At the same time, there is a real opportunity for Asia’s own innovators—especially in countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, and India—to build lightweight, local‑language agent frameworks tuned to regional needs. Whether that opportunity is seized or squandered will depend on choices taken now about standards, open tooling, and capacity‑building.

Also Read: How to navigate through the vast opportunities in the finance industry

Thinking Like the Earth: A different starting point

In our book Thinking Like the Earth: How Synthetic Intelligence Saves Our Planet, we argue that the central question is not whether AI can be “made green” through efficiency tweaks. The deeper question is whether we design AI systems—including agents—to behave as if they were part of living, interdependent systems rather than abstract optimisation engines.

That implies three shifts in mindset:

• From throughput to sufficiency. Not every task that can be automated should be. The right metric is not “maximum usage” but “enough usage to achieve social and ecological goals.”
• From isolated tools to ecosystems. AI agents sit within networks of people, institutions, infrastructures, and environments. Governance must take that whole system into account, not just the software.
• From global templates to local wisdom. Asia’s ecological, cultural, and economic diversity is an asset. AI governance that ignores this richness will fail in practice.

Also Read: How to navigate through the vast opportunities in the finance industry

Building practical governance for AI agents

The challenge for Asia is not whether AI agents will be adopted, but whether governance can keep pace with deployment.

This means building practical systems for accountability before large-scale adoption becomes irreversible.

Organisations need clearer standards around environmental reporting, human oversight, decision traceability, and vendor accountability.

Regulators need tools that move beyond abstract principles and into operational questions: where agents are being deployed, how much infrastructure they consume, and how failures are handled when systems make decisions at scale.

Without this, governance remains reactive instead of preventative.

A regional hub for AI environmental sustainability standardisation

Asia needs a voice in the way global environmental standards for AI are designed. If the region simply imports metrics, labels, and reporting formats devised elsewhere, two things may happen:

• Local environmental priorities—such as river health, air quality in dense cities, or climate resilience in deltas—will be underweighted.
• Smaller firms and public agencies may be overwhelmed by compliance demands that were never tailored to their context.

Through the Sustainable AI Portal, we are trying to work with partners to:

• Pilot energy‑aware and water‑aware metrics for AI workloads, including agentic systems, in real data‑centre and enterprise settings.
• Contribute Asia‑specific perspectives to ongoing discussions on AI sustainability in international standard‑setting bodies.
• Bring practical insights into multilateral venues, including the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance, as it begins to grapple with environmental dimensions of AI.

The goal is not to duplicate what others are doing, but to ensure that Asia’s experiences and experiments shape global norms from the outset.

Also Read: “The risk doesn’t go away; execution decides everything”: Altara’s Dave Ng

Open tools and science‑for‑sustainability

Finally, the Portal acts as an open infrastructure for researchers, practitioners, and communities:

• Shared case studies connect AI‑agent scenarios to SDG priorities such as climate adaptation, sustainable agriculture, and resilient cities.
• Collaborative “policy labs” bring together engineers, environmental scientists, lawyers, and community representatives to design governance interventions around concrete deployments.

This combination mirrors a broader conviction from Thinking Like the Earth: synthetic intelligence will only help save the planet if it is developed as part of a wider commons—of data, knowledge, and responsibility.

What leaders in Asia can do now

The environmental and social impacts of AI agents are not an argument for paralysis. They are a call for more grounded ambition.

For policymakers:

• Treat AI agents as infrastructure, not just apps. Require basic environmental and social risk assessments before large‑scale deployments in public services.
• Support regional governance and research hubs—including in emerging centres such as Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, and Bengaluru—that can study impacts locally and feed into global processes such as the AI Dialogue.

For executives:

• Ask hard questions about the energy, water, and labour implications of agent deployments, not just productivity gains.
• Build internal capability to instrument and monitor systems, including “kill switches” and clear lines of accountability when agents act unexpectedly.

Also Read: The one-person company was always possible. AI agents make it probable

For academics and civil society:

• Work across disciplines—computer science, environmental science, law, social sciences—to build a realistic picture of how agentic AI is reshaping specific sectors and communities.
• Cross-border collaboration between researchers, regulators, and industry leaders will be essential to building governance models that reflect real operating conditions rather than imported assumptions.

Asia stands at a fork in the road. It can become a passive consumer of agent technologies designed elsewhere, absorbing their environmental and social costs. Or it can lead to showing how AI agents, governed wisely and designed with the Earth in mind, might actually help the region—and the planet—thrive.

The difference will not be determined by a line of code in Silicon Valley or Shenzhen. It will be shaped in ministries and boardrooms, universities and communities across Asia, by leaders willing to ask a harder question: not “How fast can we deploy agents?” but “What kind of future do we want them to build with us?”

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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.

Image Credit: Noah Buscher on Unsplash

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For years, the promise of AI has been framed around productivity, faster workflows, leaner teams, better decisions. But there’s a less discussed second-order effect emerging: AI agents may not dismantle power structures. They may reinforce them.

Not at the bottom. Not at the top. But right in the middle.

The most exposed group isn’t manual labour or visionary leadership. It’s the layer in between, the management and knowledge workers whose roles revolve around processing, validating, coordinating, and repeating structured decisions.

It includes skills that once took years to build:

• Drafting technical drawings
• Running financial models and analysis
• Producing investment memos and research reports
• Structuring presentations and strategic recommendations

These were once considered hard-earned capabilities. Today, they are rapidly being commoditised.

There was a time when being an analyst meant something.

Also Read: The hidden link between FMCG and healthcare in Philippines

Working at firms like McKinsey & Company or Boston Consulting Group wasn’t just a job; it was access to elite thinking frameworks, proprietary insights, and structured problem-solving. They defined how industries thought.

Today, that advantage is eroding.

Their frameworks are public. Their thinking is widely distributed. And more importantly, AI can now:

• Replicate their structured outputs
• Synthesise cross-industry insights
• Generate tailored strategies based on specific contexts

What used to be “top-tier thinking” is now:

• Searchable
• Learnable
• Reproducible
• Customisable on demand

A founder, junior analyst, or even a solo operator can now generate outputs that resemble what top consulting firms once charged millions for, but faster, and often more tailored.

So the question is no longer: Who has access to the best thinking?

It’s: Who controls what gets accepted?

Also Read: China blocks Meta’s AI bet on Manus: What it means next

When skills become commodities

As AI agents flatten the skill curve, the market gets flooded.

More people can:

• Build financial models
• Produce architectural drafts
• Write investment theses
• Conduct market research

The barrier to doing drops dramatically.

Which sounds like progress.

But here’s the catch: when supply increases, incumbents don’t just compete. They defend.

If technical skills are no longer scarce, the defence shifts to something harder to quantify.

We’re already seeing:

• More emphasis on ethics and governance frameworks
• Stricter compliance layers
• Additional certifications and approvals

On the surface, these are safeguards.

In practice, they are filters.

Also Read: The autonomous agent paradigm: Meta’s Manus acquisition, MCP integration, and the disruption of SaaS

Because unlike technical skills, these criteria are:

• Hard to measure
• Open to interpretation
• Controlled by insiders

And that’s where guanxi comes in.

Guanxi becomes the real moat

When output quality is no longer the differentiator, access becomes the game.

Who gets approved?
Who gets trusted?
Who gets the mandate?

Not necessarily the most capable, but the most connected.

AI agents reduce the importance of what you can produce. They increase the importance of who can vouch for you.

This is how guanxi quietly strengthens:

• Not through explicit favouritism
• But through ambiguous systems that reward familiarity over merit

The irony is uncomfortable:
The more meritocratic the tools become, the less meritocratic the system may feel.

Also Read: Why investors are betting big on Asia’s social impact startups

The macro reflection: Systems that thrive on intermediation

Zoom out, and this dynamic doesn’t just exist within companies.

It shows up at the country level.

Take Singapore.

It doesn’t compete on scale manufacturing or raw output. Instead, it thrives as a:

• Financial hub
• Regulatory bridge
• Trust intermediary between East and West

In a world where AI lowers production barriers, this positioning becomes even more powerful. This explains why Singapore move fastest in:

• AI regulation
• Institutional controls
• Usage boundaries in sensitive environments like education

Not to stop AI — but to shape who benefits from it.

AI agents were supposed to level the playing field. In many ways, they already have. But when everyone can produce, the game shifts to who gets recognised. We might not get a more open system; we get a more subtle one.

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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.

Image Credit: ika ika on Unsplash

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