Analyse Podcast

The Sentient Startup: Building Companies in the Age of AI with Arnaud Frade

Fresh out of the studio, we commemorated the 10th anniversary of the e-Conomy SEA [Southeast Asia] Report with Sapna Chadha from Google, Florian Hoppe from Bain & Company, and Cassie Wu from Temasek, celebrating a decade of tracking Southeast Asia's digital transformation. The panel reflected on the region's remarkable achievement of reaching $300 billion in GMV—exceeding the original $200 billion goal by 1.5x—alongside revenue growth of 11x over the past decade. The panellists examined pivotal themes including Southeast Asia's position as the world's most AI-curious region with three times more interest than elsewhere, the explosive rise of video commerce and the maturation of digital financial services. The conversation explored the expansion from SEA-6 to 10 ASEAN countries, the ecosystem's resilience through multiple crisis cycles, and the shift from growth-at-all-costs to sustainable profitability. The episode concludes with each panellist sharing their vision for 2030, emphasizing building trust in AI adoption, creating an inclusive AI economy that benefits SMEs alongside large platforms, and navigating the AI transition gracefully to unlock innovation while addressing employment challenges—underscoring Southeast Asia's evolution from digital catch-up player to global innovation leader rewriting the playbook for digital adoption.

"We set this audacious goal of 200 billion by 2025. People told us we were crazy. In 2016 when we put that ambition out there, we've actually reached 1.5x that and we've hit 300 billion. And so it's just reflective of this incredible economy." - Sapna Chadha

"Indonesia e-commerce still I think is larger or about the same size as all of India e-commerce. And yet the attention tends to be a little bit veering away from Southeast Asia, but this is actually a real economic powerhouse I think for all of Asia Pacific." - Florian Hoppe

"Southeast Asia as a region, as we think about digital economy adoption, we are not playing catch up anymore. In many ways we're leading the digital adoption. We're writing how digital economy, how digital adoption could look like for a population and demographic like us." - Cassie Wu

Profiles: 
Sapna Chadha, Vice President Southeast Asia and South Asia Frontier, Google Asia Pacific
Florian Hoppe, Partner at Bain & Company
Cassie Wu, Director, Southeast Asia at Temasek
e-Conomy SEA 2025: https://economysea.withgoogle.com/

Episode Highlights:
[00:00] Quote of the Day by Sapna Chadha, Florian Hoppe & Cassie Wu
[01:17] 10th anniversary of e-Conomy SEA Report
[03:00] Digital economy hits 300 billion, exceeding goals
[04:09] Ecosystem resilience through multiple crisis cycles
[06:10] Report expands from SEA-6 to ASEAN-10
[08:13] Southeast Asia most underappreciated AI opportunity
[09:31] Indonesia e-commerce matches all of India
[10:04] Region leading digital adoption, not catching up
[12:13] Cash no longer king, payments fully inverted
[13:00] Revenue growth 11x over past decade
[15:00] 300 billion GMV despite headwinds and tariffs
[16:00] Video commerce grew 5x in three years
[19:03] Digital payments north of 60% of transactions
[23:32] Super apps unique to Southeast Asia ecosystem
[25:45] Data center capacity growing faster than anywhere
[27:01] Lower labor costs delayed AI adoption initially
[31:00] Ecosystem healthier than ever before
[33:08] Talent is the critical AI bottleneck
[35:19] Digital infrastructure must align with green economy
[39:00] Southeast Asia remains globally underappreciated
[40:39] Can Southeast Asia leapfrog into AI era
[43:00] Closing

#economysea #southeastasia #digitaleconomy #google #temasek #bainandcompany #ai #generativeai 

Podcast Information: Bernard Leong hosts and produces the show. The proper credits for the intro and end music are "Energetic Sports Drive." G. Thomas Craig mixed and edited the episode in both video and audio format. 

Southeast Asia's Digital Economy 2025 with Sapna Chadha, Florian Hoppe & Cassie Wu

Fresh out of Oracle AI World 2025, Chris Chelliah, Senior Vice President of Technology and Customer Strategy for Japan and Asia Pacific at Oracle, joins us to unpack how Oracle is positioning itself as the definitive enterprise AI platform across the region. He shares his career journey from a computer science geek working on distributed databases to leading technology strategy across a market representing two-thirds of the world's population. Chris explains Oracle's comprehensive four-tier AI stack—infrastructure, data platform, applications, and agentic orchestration—emphasizing how this unique full-stack ownership enables enterprises to consume AI out of the box and extend seamlessly without ripping and replacing existing systems. He highlights compelling use cases from financial fraud detection and healthcare automation to precision agriculture and energy grid optimization. Closing the conversation, Chris shares his vision for what great Oracle will look like in Asia Pacific, continuing its 50-year legacy as the behind-the-scenes platform provider powering everything from OpenAI and TikTok to global banking infrastructure.

What's been consistent for Oracle is to be a platform provider that helps organizations unlock full value of their data. Today it is all about AI and unlocking the value of your data in AI, and cloud is a mandatory enabler. With AI and agentic AI, an agent is effectively an employee—it's an automated employee, a process, a workflow. You want your employees to be within your ecosystem, within your firewall. AI thrives at the edge because that's where inference happens. With AI and agentic AI, an agent is effectively an employee—it's an automated employee, a process, a workflow. You want your employees to be within your ecosystem, within your firewall. AI thrives at the edge because that's where inference happens. - Chris Chelliah

Profile: Chris Chelliah, Senior Vice President of Technology and Customer Strategy for Japan and Asia Pacific at Oracle https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrischelliah/

Episode Highlights: 
[00:00] Quote of the day by Chris Chelliah
[02:10] Chris's journey from computer science to enterprise tech
[03:13] Technology tinkering and Oracle's innovation culture explained
[04:17] Two-thirds world population drives APJ market potential
[05:06] Career advice: Find passion, own your brand
[06:54] Oracle's mission: Unlocking data value for enterprises
[07:58] 47,000 customers, 44% yearly consumption growth in JPAC
[08:51] Oracle AI World 2025: AI changes everything announcement
[09:12] Four-tier stack: Infrastructure, data, applications, agents
[11:25] AI Data Platform enables production-grade AI systems
[14:14] AI Agent Studio and Marketplace solve scaling challenges
[15:12] Agents as higher-level abstraction for enterprise automation
[16:27] Real-world AI use cases across industries shared
[18:49] Multi-cloud strategy accelerates enterprise AI adoption
[21:16] Partners enable scale with 100 marketplace solutions
[23:01] Convergent AI: Consume applications then extend capabilities
[26:51] Multi-cloud and multi-model future requires strong governance
[27:31] Four-tier security isolation from infrastructure to applications
[29:57] AI agents need enterprise-level data residency controls
[31:02] Using AI to accelerate cloud migration skills
[[33:08] Design thinking to working prototype in days
[36:10] Success metrics: Beat your personal best daily
[39:55] Why Oracle differs: Only four-tier stack player
[43:01] What great looks like for Oracle in the Asia Pacific
[45:51] Closing 

Podcast Information: Bernard Leong hosts and produces the show. The proper credits for the intro and end music are "Energetic Sports Drive." G. Thomas Craig mixed and edited the episode in both video and audio format. 

How Oracle Became the Backbone of Enterprise AI with Chris Chelliah

Simon Milner, Vice President of Public Policy for Asia Pacific at Meta, joins us to explore how Meta's deliberate commitment to open source AI is reshaping innovation across the world's most diverse and dynamic region. He shares his journey from the BBC to nearly 14 years at Meta, where he built policy teams from the ground up to lead Meta's Asia Pacific strategy. Simon unpacks Meta's open source philosophy behind the Llama models, explaining how openness accelerates innovation through community scrutiny, provides governments greater control over sensitive data, and enables local developers to fine-tune models for languages like Korean, Vietnamese, and Bahasa Indonesia. He highlights compelling use cases across the region in Japan and Korea. Looking ahead, Simon reveals why the future of AI isn't on our phones but in wearables like AI-enabled glasses that create always-on assistants seeing what we see and hearing what we hear, enabling us to be more present in the world while Meta supercharges its family of apps serving billions globally. Last but not least he shares what great looks like for Meta in the Asia Pacific on open source AI. 

"We believe that openness is actually a really key feature of accelerating innovation because it fosters inclusion, it builds trust, and it ensures that the benefits of AI are more evenly distributed around the world.The openness of models allows other people to, as they were, push and pull and prod at the models at a fundamental level in order to see where might the problems be. And so that kind of community, the developer community scrutiny around open source is fundamental to spotting issues and addressing them quickly.Actually, the story of AI is about yes... that is important. The investments that companies like Meta and others are making is important, but actually, it's really about local ownership and local innovation." - Simon Milner

Episode Highlights: 
[00:00] Quote of the Day by Simon Milner from Meta
[01:37] Simon's journey: BBC, BT, Meta's 14-year evolution
[03:12] Navigating diverse regulatory landscapes across global markets
[05:24] Career advice: Take risks, embrace unexpected opportunities
[07:54] Open source AI democratizes access and innovation
[10:21] Meta sparked open model trend, others followed
[14:49] Open models enable faster innovation through community
[16:21] Government control and data sovereignty with open
[19:13] Governance mechanisms: transparency, red teaming, community engagement
[22:49] Meta learned responsible AI through 20 years experience
[25:49] Singapore, Japan, Korea developers using Lama locally
[28:26] AI isn't just big companies, local innovation
[31:15] Keeping AI open prevents fragmented national bubbles
[34:01] Governments balancing open innovation with national interests
[37:00] Future AI: wearables and glasses, not phones
[38:19] Always-on AI assistants seeing and hearing you
[41:35] Supercharging Meta apps and building new products
[42:00] Closing

Profile: Simon Milner, Vice President of Public Policy for Asia Pacific at Meta: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-milner-4790205/

#meta #opensource #ai #publicpolicy #sovereignai #asiapacific 

Podcast Information: Bernard Leong hosts and produces the show. The proper credits for the intro and end music are "Energetic Sports Drive." G. Thomas Craig mixed and edited the episode in both video and audio format. 

Open Source AI: Faster Innovation Through Community Across Asia Pacific with Simon Milner

Fresh out of the studio, Karen Hao, investigative journalist and author of "Empire of AI" joined us in a conversation to unravel how companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI have become modern empires reshaping society, labor, and democracy itself. Karen traces her journey from mechanical engineering at MIT to becoming one of the tech industry's most critical voices, sharing how Silicon Valley's innovation ecosystem has distorted toward self-interest rather than the public good. She unpacks the four characteristics that make AI companies mirror colonial empires: resource extraction through data scraping, labor exploitation of annotation workers, knowledge monopolies where most AI researchers are industry-funded, and quasi-religious quests to build an "AI God." Throughout the conversation, Karen reveals OpenAI's governance dysfunction stemming from its contradictory non-profit-for-profit structure and shares the inspiring story of Chilean water activists who successfully blocked Google's data center from draining their community's freshwater resources. She explains how Sam Altman's plans for 250 gigawatts of data center capacity—equivalent to four dozen New York Cities—would be environmentally catastrophic, while demonstrating how China's export restrictions paradoxically spurred more efficient AI innovation. Last but not least, she argues that empathy-driven journalism remains irreplaceable and calls for global citizens to hold these companies accountable to the broader public interest.

"These empires are amassing extraordinary amounts of resources by dispossessing a majority of the world. That includes like the data that they're extracting from people by just scraping it from online or intellectual property that they're taking from artists and creators. Most AI researchers now work for the AI industry and/or are funded in part by the AI industry. Even academics that have stayed within universities are often funded by the AI industry, and the effect that that has had on knowledge production is akin to the effect we would imagine if most climate scientists were bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry. I cannot stress enough how much they genuinely believe that they are on the path to creating something akin to an AI god, and that this is going to have cataclysmic shifts on civilization." - Karen Hao, Author of Empire of AI

Episode Highlights:
[00:00] Quote of the Day by Karen Hao
[00:47] Introduction: Karen Hao, Author of "Empire of AI"
[01:44] From MIT engineering to investigating AI journalism
[02:51] Silicon Valley distorts innovation toward self-benefit
[04:12] AI companies as modern empires of power
[06:00] Four traits of Empire: extraction, exploitation, monopolies, ideology
[09:01] Quasi-religious movements driving Silicon Valley AI development
[10:04] AGI believers speak specialized fanatical vocabulary
[11:16] OpenAI founding: nonprofit facade, profit ambitions
[13:53] Sam Altman firing: board's failed governance attempt
[17:13] Fragmentation: every billionaire building their own AI
[19:06] China's export controls sparked efficient AI innovation
[21:57] Silicon Valley lacks American democratic values entirely
[23:31] AI supply chain: annotation workers, content moderators
[25:06] Chilean activists successfully blocked Google's water extraction
[28:51] Altman's 250 gigawatts: four dozen New York cities
[31:21] Scaling continues despite base model asymptote reached
[32:53] Benchmarks faulty: training data unknown, results unreliable
[36:32] Empathy essential tool for investigative journalism process
[39:11] Success: sparking conversation about AI's human costs
[39:40] Closing

Profile: Karen Hao, Author of Empire of AI and Investigative Journalist LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karendhao/
Personal Site: https://karendhao.com/


The AI Industry Is Building Modern Empires with Karen Hao

The Analyse Podcast, formerly Analyse Asia, is a weekly show that dissects the pulse of business, technology, and media across the world. Hosted by Bernard Leong, it features in-depth conversations with leading journalists, senior executives, visionary authors, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders who shape industries and ideas. Each episode dives into the most important trends and stories redefining how the world builds, scales, and innovates — from Asia to the globe.

The Sentient Startup: Building Companies in the Age of AI with Arnaud Frade

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