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
4 Mar 2026
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
25 Feb 2026
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.
Inside a recent episode
Asia Tech Podcast – Episode 62 – Colin Hodge – The Global Growth Expert – I’ve Been on Quite the Journey
Published 1 Feb 2020 · Transcript excerpt
[…] They had close to no revenue. They had a decent amount of users, but it was only in Taiwan and it wasn't really a top 50 app yet, even top 100 app yet. So I did see, though, that they had a really, really good gut instinct for marketing and they could iterate very quickly. We worked side by side and we got them in a very good experimental setting. So we were testing out new growth ideas and ways to monetize all the time. And we grew them together into the top dating app in Taiwan in terms of revenue. We grew their user base by like 20, 30 times, I think 30x last time I talked to them. So it's a huge success story for them, and I'm super proud of them. […]
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