Asia Tech Podcast

EP 417 - AI Agents Can Think and Act. Is Your Business Ready? - Raymond Ngan, Appian

For many years, automation inside businesses followed simple rules. If something happened, a system performed the next predefined step. That model created enormous efficiencies, but it was limited by rigid logic and narrow workflows. Today, a new generation of artificial intelligence is emerging that can reason about problems, plan tasks, and take action across multiple systems. In this episode of the Asia Tech Podcast, Raymond Ngan [https://www.linkedin.com/in/raymond-ngan-2681286/], Regional Vice President at Appian [https://appian.com/] for Singapore and Asia, explains why the conversation about AI in business is shifting from simple automation to something much more powerful: agentic operations. Some of the topics that Raymond covered in detail: * Agentic AI Is Not Just Automation, It’s Autonomy * The Future of AI in Business Is Orchestration * Trust in AI Is Built Through Guardrails and They Must Be Manufactured * Deploying AI at the Right Speed and in the Right Situations Is Key * Data Strategy Continues to Be the Real Foundation of AI

EP 416 - Is B2B FinTech Quietly Running Asia’s Economy? - Raunak Dembla and Daniel Keki

FinTech headlines often focus on consumer apps, but the bigger economic story in Asia may be happening in business finance. B2B fintech targets the problems that shape real growth: helping companies get paid, manage working capital, move money across supply chains, and access services like lending, payments, and treasury in a reliable way. In this episode of the Asia Tech Podcast, Daniel Keki [https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-keki-211456b0/], Head of Revolut [https://www.revolut.com/] Business Singapore, and Raunak Dembla [https://www.linkedin.com/in/raunakdembla/], a founding member at Decentro [https://decentro.tech/global], explain why B2B FinTech may be Asia’s quiet economic engine. Some of the topics that Daniel and Raunak discussed in detail included: * Southeast Asia’s real challenge is not “competition”—it’s fragmentation * In India, the regulator’s north star is simple: protect the consumer and prevent system stress * The most underappreciated innovation in B2B is not “new products”—it’s onboarding * Agentic AI doesn’t kill platforms—it makes APIs more valuable and shifts the “front end” into conversation * B2B FinTech in Asia is not a sprint—it’s a marathon built under pressure from customers

EP 415 - If Cyber Attacks Move at Light Speed, Can Humans Defend? - Guy Brown and Tony Jarvis

Automated traffic is starting to outweigh human traffic online, and a growing share of it is not harmless. Attacks are no longer occasional or manual—they are constant, adaptive, and increasingly powered by AI. In this episode of the Asia Tech Podcast, Guy Brown [https://www.linkedin.com/in/guybrownaustralia/], Staff Enterprise Security Architect, APJ at Fastly [https://www.fastly.com/], and Tony Jarvis [https://www.linkedin.com/in/tony-jarvis/], Field CISO, APJ at DarkTrace [https://www.darktrace.com/], describe a “bot war” defined by three forces: volume (more attacks), velocity (attacks move at machine speed), and variety (tactics mutate constantly). Some of the topics that Guy and Tony covered in detail include: * Automation turns crime into an industrial process. And AI turns that process into something adaptive. * LLMs did not just improve attacks. They changed the economics of attacks. * "Static defenses” don’t map to an adaptive attacker. Importantly, behavior and intent matter more than patterns. * Effective cyber defense increasingly means modeling what normal looks like, then detecting what doesn’t belong. * Agentic AI changes the blast radius because it sits inside the system with permissions.

EP 414 - How Programmability Changes the Game for Payments - Kanupriya Sharda (Tazapay) and Abhishek Padhy (Aspire)

Instant payments are often described as the new baseline in modern finance. But speed alone does not define progress. In many cases, “real-time” only applies within narrow limits, small transaction sizes, or pre-funded domestic rails. Cross-border flows remain constrained by liquidity requirements, fragmented standards, and compliance bottlenecks. In this episode of the Asia Tech Podcast, featuring Kanupriya Sharda [https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanupriya-sharda/], Chief Business Officer at Tazapay [https://tazapay.com/] and Abhishek Padhy, [https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhishekpadhy/] Head of Product Payments and FX at Aspire [https://aspireapp.com/] we cut through the noise around “instant payments” to reveal a deeper truth: speed alone is no longer the real frontier in payments. Some of the topics that Kanupriya and Abhishek covered in detail: * “Real-time” is often real-time only for small money and with a crucial caveat: it’s mostly true for domestic payments in parts of Asia, but it breaks down fast when you zoom out to cross-border and B2B. * Pre-funding is the hidden architecture of “instant” payments and it’s incredibly expensive. * Stablecoins aren’t just a “crypto” story, they’re a liquidity and settlement story. * The next advantage isn’t only speed, it’s certainty and transparency. * AI isn’t replacing compliance, it’s compressing time and expanding context. * The contrarian view on consolidation: payments aren’t commoditizing as fast as people claim.

EP 413 - AI’s Impact on Digital Experience: What Metrics Should You Actually Track? - Jeffrey Lin - ContentSquare

Digital organizations today are surrounded by data, yet many still struggle to understand what their numbers truly mean. Traffic, engagement, and conversion rates are carefully tracked, but often without clear insight into whether they reflect real progress or hidden problems. High activity can mask confusion. Familiar metrics can reinforce outdated thinking. In this episode of the Asia Tech Podcast, Jeffrey Lin, [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeflin/] Senior Manager, Solutions Consulting APAC at ContentSquare [https://contentsquare.com/]discusses why digital experience benchmarking has moved from dashboards to boardrooms. Some of the topics that Jeffrey covered in detail: * Digital experience is a board topic because the investment cycle is demanding proof that the metrics they are using are relevant. * Man teams self-deceive because KPI culture hardens into habit and a KPI can be internally consistent and still externally wrong. * Digital engagement can spike even when your experience is failing. * "The right metric” starts with a baseline user journey, not a dashboard, because what counts as “good” depends on context. * Premium experiences are not a fleeting trend. They are the logical response to distraction at scale.