Antoine Blondeau, Cofounder and Managing Partner, Alpha Intelligence Capital
Speaking to e27 before a panel discussion at the recent Forbes Global CEO Conference 2023 in Singapore, Alpha Intelligence Capital Co-Founder and Managing Partner Antoine Blondeau revealed that the firm is on its way to closing its latest fund, which is targeted to happen in 2024.
“We are sort of halfway through the race right now. We already closed about US$20 million but are about to close more. It is targeted at US$300 million plus, so it’s quite significant,” he said.
Having a presence in the US, Europe, and Asia, Alpha Intelligence Capital intends to invest 10 per cent of the upcoming fund in Asia, where the firm sees great potential for AI technology. Its portfolio consists of notable names such as AI Music (acquired by Apple), Reaqta (acquired by IBM), and Instadeep (acquired by BioNTech).
Blondeau himself is not a new face in the world of AI. He was the CEO of Dejima, the company that powered DARPA’s foundational CALO project that evolved into Apple’s Siri, and COO of Nasdaq-listed Zi Corporation, whose predictive text input software was embedded in hundreds of millions of devices.
In this conversation, we are looking into the present and future of AI in Southeast Asia, from the challenges to the opportunities. The following is an edited excerpt of the conversation.
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Everybody is talking about Gen AI today. But where do you think this trend is going?
Historically, machine learning was very good at solving things such as perception. So, you could perceive very well, or you could detect a tumour on a CT scan or MRI. It was also very good at optimisation; you could do price optimisations, logistics functions optimisations … But the cognition piece, which is critical to human decision-making, was not yet solved. Things such as being able to understand a question in context and being able to make sense of what is being perceived.
Gen AI is beginning to solve that. It is the first time ever that we see a non-human intelligence being able to close the loop fully; not just perception, optimisation, but also cognition.
To me, it’s just the beginning. We’ll still be talking about this in 10 to 100 years and beyond.
How do you envision this AI is going to be used in the future, within the next two to three years?
Historically, AI was about a few developers building it for a few users, which are mostly business users. But now, this can be built and consumed by many. That is a big difference.
We see a lot of interest in healthcare. We see a lot of interest in cybersecurity, enterprise software, and all the functions of a company from HR to IT services management, even down the road to accounting, legal to resource optimisation.
Whether it’s B2B or B2C … those are critical aspects where we see AI becoming more and more important and being adopted.
How about Southeast Asia? Is there any particular trend that is happening?
Historically, human talent in the AI space had some amount of critical mass in the Bay Area, London, and Tel Aviv. The requirement for deep talent is less obvious. What you really need is people who can understand how to use it. And also understanding the underlying aspects of the technology well enough to be able to cover for the pitfalls of it. So, the barrier to entry is coming down. And as a result, adoption can be broader, and interesting companies can be built anywhere.
Obviously, in Southeast Asia, Singapore has been the country where there has been more attention paid to it.
In our last fund, we actually invested in a Singapore company in the cybersecurity space, which we were able to sell to IBM. There will be a number of companies like this in Singapore and the region, but I think the opportunity is a lot more for large enterprise-type businesses.
The banking, logistics, and airline industries have begun to adopt it as well.
One thing that Gen AI is doing is pushing cloud consumption dramatically. Because it is like taking a slice of our biological brain and putting it into the cloud; essentially, that is what happening. It drives cloud consumption, which in turn is drive the demand for underlying hardware. Countries that are semiconductors manufacturing countries can benefit from it. It is clearly the case for some countries in Southeast Asia.
Last but not least, countries in Southeast Asia that have young populations, such as Indonesia, [have great promise for AI use].
For large enterprises, what are their main challenges in incorporating AI into their operations?
First is understanding what it can do. I think there is a big educational aspect there.
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Second is internal resistance because there is a lot of misconceptions and misunderstanding as to whether this is going to replace jobs. And I think there are also some legitimate concerns. So, being able to understand and assuage concerns is an important deliverable.
The third aspect is that when companies implement AI, they have to marry the technology aspects with deep domain expertise. So [they have to] organise project teams where the expertise is present.
When it comes to regulations and innovation, there is always that concern about it stifling creativity for the sake of security. So, where do we find a middle ground?
The middle ground is always to try and try; you can create things like sandboxes. Whether it is in finance or healthcare, you enable sandboxes so that you foster a certain amount of innovation that is somewhat controlled in terms of its distribution. Then once you cross the bridge of demonstrating value in a context where it is not detrimental to the user and societal fabric, then you proceed.
It is always easier to do when a country is small, where the stakeholders are few. So Singapore is always very well-placed to put that in place.
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