Analyse Asia With Bernard Leong

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 is not 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

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-yea

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, emphasizin

<p>Fresh out of the studio, Arnaud Frade, Managing Partner at Mesh Advisory and author of the upcoming book The Sentient Startup, joins us to explore how AI is fundamentally transforming entrepreneurship through the radical concept of AI as a true co-founder rather than merely a tool. He distinguishes between startups that are merely "AI-onboard" versus true sentient startups where AI operates as part of how the business is run, and introducing the concept of Machine Resources (MR) as a new organizational function alongside Human Resources to manage evolving AI models and maintain knowledge integrity. He emphasizes the co-intelligence model over the sterile human-versus-machine debate, highlighting how the 95% AI project failure rate stems from organizational issues rather than technology problems—a reality perfectly captured by the Banani framework (Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, Incomprehensible) that explains why companies struggle with AI readiness. Closing the conversation, Arnaud shares w

Fresh out of the studio, Ralph Haupter, President & CRO, Small Medium Enterprises and Channels at Microsoft, joins us to explore how Microsoft is empowering 400 million small and medium businesses globally across 56 counties through a partner-first strategy that combines platform standardization with deep specialization. He shares his career journey spanning over 20 years at Microsoft, from running Europe to leading Greater China, building Asia's geographical operations in Singapore, and eventually taking on global SME strategy. Ralph explains that Microsoft's unique advantage lies in being a platform company at its finest, offering a complete technology stack from productivity to infrastructure, security, and applications—all with core AI integration—while relying on a specialized partner ecosystem to deliver local expertise and support. He highlights how partners are creating entirely new business models on agentic AI while emphasizing the four critical partnership moments from transaction to on

Fresh out of the studio and we hit our 500th episode milestone, guest host Yana Fry from Yana TV turns the tables on Bernard Leong, CEO of Dorje AI and host of Analyse Asia, in a special ask-me-anything format. We start with Bernard's journey from finding his first guest to navigating 11 years of podcasting, revealing his 12-word life philosophy: "Learn from everyone, follow no one, observe the patterns, work like hell." Following on, Bernard shares how his theoretical physics background provides the tools on everything from digital transformation to building Dorje AI's vision of reimagining ERP systems. The conversation dives deep into Bernard's pragmatic idealist worldview, product management philosophy and focus on the future. Bernard announces a major rebrand: Analyse Asia is dropping "Asia" to become the Analyse Podcast as it expands to a global audience, marking a new chapter in the show's evolution."For Dorje AI, what great looks like is being able to solve the

Fresh out of the studio, Ling Hai, President of Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East, and Africa at MasterCard, joins us to explore how payment networks are evolving to embrace stable coins, AI agents, and the future of digital commerce across diverse global markets. He shares his career journey from management consulting to retail banking and eventually to MasterCard. Ling Hai shares that MasterCard is a global technology company that creates interoperability and universal acceptance, with technology services like cybersecurity, data insights, and consulting increasingly contributing to revenue beyond traditional payment processing. He highlights compelling innovations from Asia Pacific leading the way, including Singapore's nationwide open loop transit system and MasterCard's approach to stable coins as settlement vehicles alongside traditional currencies, while emphasizing how the company bridges the DeFi universe with the physical merchant world through on-ramp and off-ramp solutions for crypto adopt

Fresh out of the studio, Yuying Deng, Co-founder and CEO of Esevel, shares her transformative journey from corporate lawyer to healthcare operator to tech entrepreneur with our guest host Yana Fry from Yana TV. Yuying discusses how the pandemic's sudden shift to remote work in April 2020 revealed critical gaps in IT infrastructure for distributed teams, inspiring her to launch Esevel—a platform now serving companies across 88 countries. Yuying challenges the traditional HQ-centric worldview, advocating that "HQ should be a mindset, not a location," and shares how Esevel deliberately builds leadership opportunities for talented professionals regardless of whether they're based in Manila, Singapore, or São Paulo. Last but not least, Yuying shares what great would look like for Esevel's future: becoming the indispensable tool companies think of first when scaling global teams, while proving that talent and performance matter more than location."Many companies that say they do distribut

"In the context of where Confluent can play a critical part, it's also the interoperable integration with all the respective AI ecosystems. If you think about what AI is doing, it's working across microservices, working across data lakehouses, databases - could be a different endpoint service. Bringing all that together in a secure and consistent manner, constantly serving that information, is where I think it plays the most pivotal role." - Kamal Brar Fresh out of the studio, Kamal Brar, Senior Vice President of Worldwide ISV and Asia Pacific/Middle East at Confluent, joins us to explore how data streaming platforms are becoming the critical foundation for enterprise AI across the regions. He shares his career journey from Oracle to Confluent, reflecting on his passion for open source technologies and how the LAMP stack era shaped his understanding of real-time data challenges. Kamal explains Confluent's evolution from the category creator of Kafka to a comprehensive data streaming platform combining Kafka,

“I think this is a sort of coming-of-age moment. When I say coming of age, I mean collectively for Chinese entrepreneurs. Many of these founders are my age, or even younger, and I’ve spoken with some of them. I can really relate to why they want to build businesses that target the global market instead of just China. In the past, you could build a company in China first and then think about expanding outward. That’s no longer possible. For any consumer-facing software company today, from day one you must decide: Do I build for China, or do I build for Global minus China? The examples of TikTok, Shein, and many others show that you cannot do both. It’s not possible to serve both markets at once.” - Jing Yang Fresh out of the studio, Jing Yang, the Asia Bureau Chief from The Information, shares her insights on ByteDance's pivotal moment, China's venture capital challenges, and the emerging U.S.-China competition in AI and robotics. Starting with ByteDance's latest financials, she revealed how the company now ex

"85% of AI use cases are being evaluated by the engineer who built it saying, 'yep, seemed to work pretty well.' If you're gonna build a system that's going to be critical to the business, that's going to be important that it gets it right, then you can't do that without evaluations." - Craig Wiley Fresh out of the studio, Craig Wiley, Senior Director of Product Management at Databricks who leads Mosaic AI, joins us to discuss the forefront of enterprise AI from model development to deployment at scale. Beginning with his career journey in ML operations, Craig explained how he recognized the critical connection between data and AI layers that could deliver order-of-magnitude acceleration in development cycles. Emphasizing the transition from classical ML operations to LLM operations, he showcased how Databricks' unified platform eliminates training-serving skew through data lineage capabilities and supports both fine-tuning and RAG approaches depending on industrial use case requirements. Highlighting compell

"I think the biggest trap to potentially fall into is, "Hey, it's moving so fast, so much is changing. Let's just wait it out." Completely the wrong approach. You just gotta get started." Nick Eayrs from Databricks "As tech people within the shipping industry, how do we explain, how do we make it accessible to all our users? So that's where we came up with the idea of a data supermarket, with in mind really the target of enabling self-service for our business. So by giving the analogy of a supermarket, it was much easier at the beginning to explain our business." - Simon Fassot from Hafnia Fresh out of the studio, Nick Eayrs, Vice President of Field Engineering for Asia Pacific and Japan at Databricks, and Simon Fassot, General Manager and Head of Global Data and Analytics at Hafnia, join us to explore how data intelligence is transforming enterprise AI across diverse industries in Asia. Nick explained the fundamental distinction between general intelligence and data intelligence - emphasizing how enterprises

"We took a longer time, there was a bit of roundabout, but the fact that we actually made like two or three times on whatever investment amount we did in the beginning - that for me was a very pivotal moment. Just because we didn't give up. The line between success and failure is so thin. So the impact of being a VC space is that you really can influence the technology founders that you back." - Beatrice Lion Fresh out of the studio, Beatrice Lion, the chief executive officer and global partner from True Global Ventures, shares the remarkable story of how she became one of the youngest fund managers and the backstory to secure Singapore's Capital Markets Service license from MAS equivalent to Sequoia & Andreessen Horowitz's RIA licence in the US. Beatrice begins with her unconventional career journey from university straight into venture capital in 2017 and details TGV's investment thesis of backing only tested serial entrepreneurs across AI and blockchain applications. Beatrice offers her perspectives on

Reuniting after more than a decade since their days in This Week in Asia Podcast from 2009, Michael Smith Jr., co-host of The Generalist podcast, and Daniel Cerventus Lim, semi-retired entrepreneur and community builder in Malaysia, join us for a candid assessment of Southeast Asia's tech ecosystem evolution. In this raw conversation, Michael offers his unflinching perspective on what he calls the 'broken windows era' of Southeast Asian tech, arguing that recent alleged fraud cases like E-Fishery and Tanihub require serious consequences to restore investor confidence, while questioning whether the region was ever correctly modelled for Silicon Valley-style outcomes. Daniel shares his pivot from startup founder to search fund advocate, explaining his bullish view on acquiring profitable traditional businesses and reflects on whether the region's potential was genuinely unrealized or simply impossible to achieve. Together, they explore the shift from venture-backed unicorn dreams to bootstrap realities, debate

"The way that institutions emerge and entrench themselves and become a part of the functioning of an economy and society is because they solve some problems. So they're usually a non-market solution toward solving some problem that the economy, that the market system couldn't necessarily solve. Of course the most prominent example of an institution that solves an. Market problem in the non-market way is a firm, as Ronald Coase, of course very early on, taught us that. When a firm realizes that in some cases when transactions costs are high, you want to internalize things within the firm. That the firm is itself an institution. But these other social political institutions, they also exist to resolve some problem. And once they resolve that problem and they're resolving it adequately, then it becomes really hard to bring about change. So the institution solves a problem. So to be clear, it is better than in the absence of the institution, but it also means that without somehow breaking this institution or havi

"APAC represents 40% of global GDP. So you can see that there's huge opportunity in a very, very diverse region. The needs of Japan are different to the needs of China. India is exploding with SaaS, software, AI. Australia one of our larger markets, again, very different. And so Southeast Asia, the complexities of Asia make it a joy to work in." - Paul Harapin Fresh out of the studio, Paul Harapin, Chief Revenue Officer for Asia Pacific and Japan at Stripe, joined us in a conversation discussing Stripe's explosive growth in the region that represents 40% of global GDP. Paul dived deep into how Stripe is revolutionizing commerce through AI and stablecoins, sharing fascinating customer stories in the Asia Pacific and Japan. He delved into Stripe's current innovations specifically on agentic commerce toolkits, virtual card issuing, and adaptive pricing solutions that are transforming how businesses scale across the dynamic Asia Pacific region. Last but not least, Paul shared the key trends in AI-powered payments

"AI is in the minds of a lot of people right now and naturally with such big technological shift, you find that there is a big skill gap. You know, there is companies demanding skills in this area, and yet naturally in the marketplace, they might have difficulty finding that skills that is required for companies. So, you know, job seekers need to be a lot more conscious in terms of how they are equipping themselves. One of the things is that LinkedIn courses are there [to help]. I always talk about the three affirmative actions that you can do. One is making sure that you are fluent in this area. I think what are the things that you can do to actually get your hands on all these tools so that you become fluent in just playing around with the tool and making sure that you feel comfortable. The second area that I advise people is to make sure that you feel that you have the agency to master your destiny. The third thing will be to take action. If you have learned all these skills, find a way to showcase it and

"If you're going to be running a very elite research institution, you have to have the best people. To have the best people, you have to trust them and empower them. You can't hire a world expert in some area and then tell them what to do. They know more than you do. They're smarter than you are in their area. So you've got to trust your people. One of our really foundational commitments to our people is: we trust you. We're going to work to empower you. Go do the thing that you need to do. If somebody in the labs wants to spend 5, 10, 15 years working on something they think is really important, they're empowered to do that." - Doug Burger Fresh out of the studio, Doug Burger, Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Research, joins us to explore Microsoft's bold expansion into Southeast Asia with the recent launch of the Microsoft Research Asia lab in Singapore. From there, Doug shares his accidental journey from academia to leading global research operations, reflecting on how Microsoft R

"China's approach is very pragmatic. People have been saying DeepSeek did it out of necessity. There's obviously a GPU constraint and hardware constraint in China, something they're working around. In many ways, the engineering genius and engineering innovation is what set DeepSeek apart. It challenged a global narrative around needing more GPUs and more money to get better AI. It was about throwing capital at the problem. It was a different approach because the capital ecosystem in China itself is very different. People talk about proof of concept - you have to prove your concept first in China to get funding. For many startups, they weren't getting much funding before the DeepSeek moment. To your point, no one really knew it would have a strong ROI, so only the BATs that had money and understood the technology were backing it." - Grace Shao, Founder of AI Proem Newsletter Fresh out of the studio, Grace Shao, founder of AI Proem Newsletter and former CNBC and CGTN journalist, joins us to explore the rise of

"[Question: So what was the biggest misconception for most business leaders usually when it comes to operationalizing AI governance?] Based on my interactions and conversations, now suddenly they think they have to erect a whole set of new committees, that they have to have these new programs. You almost hear a sigh from the room. Like, oh, we have now this whole additional compliance cost because we have to do all these new things. The reason I see that as a bit of a misconception, because building on everything that was just said earlier, you already have compliance, you already have committees, you already have governance. It's an integration of that because otherwise guess what's gonna happen? We all know that this is the next thing around the corner that's gonna pop up, whatever it's gonna be called. Are you gonna have to set up a whole new committee just because of that? Then the next thing, another one." - David Hardoon Fresh out of the studio, David Hardoon, Global Head of AI Enablement at Standard Ch