Business & execution
Thailand's AI Opportunity Needs a Procurement Evidence Test
Why an AI strategy announcement is only the beginning of understanding how a public-sector customer actually buys.
Read on AI in Asia (opens in a new tab)Writing
Ideas, observations and practical perspectives.
I write about leading and growing businesses, the changing role of technology, and the decisions that turn ideas into useful outcomes.
My perspective comes from commercial and operating leadership, building services of my own, and staying curious about how people and organisations work. I explore what emerging ideas and developments mean for businesses and communities across Asia and globally, and how their implications change with the market, culture and context.
Here you will find longer essays alongside the Friday Frame, my weekly reflection on something that caught my attention and what it might mean in practice. For the books, conversations and interests shaping my thinking, visit my now page.
All views are my own.
The latest Friday Frame comic
A Friday Frame, in pictures.
Should you pay for how long it used to take?
Faster production raises a commercial question: are customers getting a document faster, or getting the job done?
A visual take on the ideas behind my weekly reflection. Explore the comic, then read the full piece.
A wider reading list
Across my publications.
Selected writing on technology, work, data and everyday life. Each piece was published under my byline and links to its original home.
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Investment & innovation
Poland's AI Opportunity Needs Products, Financing and Access to Compute
Looking beyond national AI ambitions to the financing, product development and access to computing that businesses need.
Read on AI in Europe (opens in a new tab) -
Work & pay
The nine thousand dollar early-career job, and what it usually is
What high-paying early-career job adverts reveal when you read the role titles as carefully as the salary figures.
Read on PayLine (opens in a new tab) -
Cars & city life
Singapore EV registrations: first-half 2026 data and COE categories
Reading Singapore’s car-registration data beyond the brand rankings, while keeping the limits of the comparison in view.
Read on COEwatch (opens in a new tab) -
Language & technology
Three Capitals, Three Bets: Inside the Arabic LLM Race in Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, and Doha
Three approaches to Arabic-language AI, exploring the choices behind open models, consumer products and specialised systems.
Read on AI in Arabia (opens in a new tab)
The Friday Frame
Business, technology and what developments mean in practice.
One thing noticed, every Friday.
- 6 November 2026 FF
Should you pay for how long it used to take?
Faster production raises a commercial question: are customers getting a document faster, or getting the job done?
- 30 October 2026 FF
Where will experience come from?
If AI takes over the work people used to learn on, where will the next generation gain experience?
- 23 October 2026 FF
How much of your growth plan belongs to someone else?
Who actually controls that decision? By what date do we need an answer? What’s Plan B?
- 20 October 2026 marketing / measurement / commercial strategy
Attribution modelling starts with a better question
Attribution can organise marketing evidence. Better decisions also need clear questions, commercial context and honest limits.
- 16 October 2026 FF
Your next customer may never click.
The sales conversation can end before we know it’s started.
- 15 October 2026 marketing / commercial strategy / measurement
Digital marketing that earns its budget
Connect marketing spend to customer decisions, commercial outcomes and evidence that supports the next investment.
- 10 October 2026 technology / China / business strategy
How to assess China's technology ecosystem with more care
Evaluate technology businesses through customers, research, competition, policy and the operating conditions a decision depends on.
- 9 October 2026 FF
What’s changed since we approved it?
Does the approval still fit the work?
- 4 October 2026 digital wellbeing / online safety / technology
Understanding digital self-harm without blaming the child
What digital self-harm means, why assumptions can mislead, and where adults can find informed guidance on supporting young people.
- 2 October 2026 FF
What changes after the training?
Training becomes useful when people have the workflows, incentives and support to put what they learn into practice.
- 29 September 2026 leadership / work / wellbeing
Burnout and the decision to leave
Persistent work strain deserves practical support, honest changes to the job and room to consider whether staying is sustainable.
- 25 September 2026 FF
A shared platform still needs local judgement.
Scaling across markets means deciding what stays consistent, what local teams can adapt and who has authority to act.
- 24 September 2026 communication / leadership / public speaking
Speak clearly and give the room time to listen
Make your point easier to follow with a clear structure, deliberate pauses and a room that supports your voice.
- 19 September 2026 business models / leadership / technology
When technology changes faster than the business model
Technology investment needs pricing, incentives, customer expectations and operating responsibilities that fit the promised service.
- 18 September 2026 FF
The best mentoring leaves the decision with the team.
Share useful experience, understand the context and give people room to develop their own judgement. Lessons for mentoring and leading teams.
- 14 September 2026 leadership / decision making / management
Leadership is visible in the decisions people can make
Clear decision rights help teams act with confidence, surface risk early and keep work moving.
- 11 September 2026 FF
Productivity is evidence. It is not yet a verdict.
Reported AI productivity gains are encouraging. Leaders still need a baseline, a business outcome, a guardrail and a dated decision.
- 9 September 2026 gaming / product strategy / customer experience
DLC earns engagement by extending a good game
Useful downloadable content gives players a clear reason to return and developers a better question than how much to release.
- 4 September 2026 productivity / operations / working practices
Inbox Zero is useful when the work stays visible
An empty inbox helps only when commitments, decisions and follow-ups have a reliable home.
- 4 September 2026 FF
The monopoly ruling that changes nothing.
A court can find an illegal monopoly and still change nothing about who owns the trade on either side of it. The fix that's meant to follow isn't public yet, and won't be for another month.
- 29 August 2026 customer experience / payments / commercial strategy
What Amazon Pay reveals about the customer journey
Amazon Pay offers a lens on checkout, customer trust and the commercial decisions involved in adopting a familiar payment service.
- 28 August 2026 FF
The EU AI Act needs more than one deadline.
A later high-risk deadline does not answer a transparency question. Start with the system, the organisation's role and the obligation, then put a date beside it.
- 24 August 2026 marketing / commercial strategy / mobile advertising
How to decide what your mobile advertising budget should do
Judge mobile advertising spend through customer intent, commercial contribution and the quality of the journey after the click.
- 21 August 2026 FF
Gen Z hasn't stopped using AI. They've just stopped enjoying it.
A friend's design house lost its production work and its first-year jobs over several years, without a single month where anything visibly happened. Gen Z's adoption is holding steady, excitement is down 14 points and anger is up 9.
- 19 August 2026 learning / leadership / professional development
Four ways to make online learning work
Choose a useful question, practise remembering, apply one idea and give learning a place in your working week.
- 15 August 2026 FF
The last mile.
AI can be at the table. It can't be in the dock. Three answers I gave a panel about what I wouldn't use AI for, and a fourth I nearly missed.
- 7 August 2026 FF
Human-in-the-loop is doing less than you think.
If reviewers miss a third of dangerous agent requests, what you've written into policy as a control is really a story you're telling the board.
- 31 July 2026 FF
Sovereign posture and commercial dependency are the same conversation.
AI suppliers lobbying against a ban on their biggest competitor are quietly disclosing something about their own commercial model. Most boards haven't worked out what that means for their risk register yet.
- 24 July 2026 FF
The browser wasn't the product either.
OpenAI is shutting down Atlas nine months after launch. The lesson isn't that browsers failed. It's that the agent capability moved into the surface users already open, and it doesn't fire the pixels boards still budget against.
- 17 July 2026 FF
Your AI budget just went uncapped.
Vendors are quietly shifting from flat licences to usage-based pricing. If the board hasn't built a token-consumption governance layer, next year's AI spend has no ceiling.
- 10 July 2026 FF
Channel, competitor, or infrastructure?
OpenAI will have ad sales on the ground in every major advertising region within a year. If boards haven't decided what ChatGPT is to them by then, procurement will decide for them.
- 3 July 2026 FF
The demand side has finished eating the supply side.
Google's AI Overviews are the antitrust question wearing a search costume. Boards asking what their own model can do are missing the bigger question their CFO is about to own.
- 26 June 2026 FF
Project Genie killed the storyboard.
Google DeepMind's Project Genie at Cannes turned the storyboard into a playable prototype. The pitch becomes the prototype. Agencies have to decide whether they own the prototype layer or orbit it.
- 19 June 2026 startups / positioning / go-to-market / founders
Be unmissable to someone
Most founders think their job is to be wanted by everyone. It's the opposite. The ones who win choose someone to be unmissable to, say a polite no to the rest, and let the market confirm the choice. Here's the case, with the data and the stories behind it.
- 19 June 2026 FF
Be unmissable to someone.
Most founders think their job is to be wanted by everyone. It's the opposite. Choose someone to be unmissable to, say a polite no to the rest, and let the market confirm the choice.
- 12 June 2026 FF
TCS is not a headcount story.
Boards keep asking 'what's our number?' But headcount is the output of a decision, not the decision itself. What's changing is the unit of work, and the junior-heavy pyramid that was built to deliver it.
- 5 June 2026 FF
The goal of a Chief AI Officer should be to eliminate the need for a Chief AI Officer.
A single seat for AI accountability is a comfort to the board, not a fix for the operating model. The work belongs distributed, or it doesn't land at all.
- 29 May 2026 FF
Agentic measurement will reprice the market.
When the reporting layer finally sees what was always there, a lot of marketing orgs are going to discover they've been optimising against a fiction. The repricing won't be gentle.
- 22 May 2026 FF
The search box wasn't the product.
Share of voice was about being seen. Share of prompt is about being cited. Most operators don't have a number on it yet.
- 16 May 2026 FF
Outcome ownership needs control.
Vendors are being asked to commit to business outcomes they cannot solely steer. Outcome ownership without control is not a contract. It is a story.
- 10 May 2026 japan / asia-pacific / ai policy / applied intelligence
The Slow Bet: how Japan is building AI that refuses to race.
Japan does not have a Sam Altman moment or a DeepSeek moment. What it has is a patient accumulation of laws, line items, and small models that, taken together, form the most institutionally serious AI strategy in the Asia-Pacific. It is the most under-read story in the region.
- 9 May 2026 FF
Heroics and the system that required rescuing.
Every late-night save is a system that did not catch the issue earlier. The best operators stop rewarding heroics and start rewarding boredom.
- 3 May 2026 singapore / asia-pacific / ai policy / governance
The Quiet Sovereign: how Singapore wrote Asia's AI playbook with 5.9 million people.
Singapore is not racing China on chips or training a frontier LLM. It is doing the slower thing. Building a rulebook, a compute plan, and a workforce ladder that other Asian countries can plausibly adopt. That is starting to look like the most replicable AI strategy in the region.
- 2 May 2026 FF
Delivery model or coping mechanism?
Most AI adoption is the second. Coping faster than competitors is a real advantage, for a while. But it has a shelf life.
- 25 April 2026 FF
Who owns the outcome?
If a vendor commits to an outcome and the customer has not nominated a single named owner internally, the deal has already failed. It just has not noticed yet.
- 18 April 2026 FF
The tooling works. The operating model has not caught up.
The tool produces an answer in four seconds. The organisation still takes four weeks to act on it. The bottleneck has not moved. It has just got more visible.
- 17 February 2026 reflection / applied intelligence / asia-pacific / edge
The Year of the Horse: running forwards while looking back.
A first-day-of-Lunar-New-Year reflection. The Horse is forward momentum. The discipline I want to take into 2026 is choosing what to run towards, and what to carry with me when I do.
- 28 November 2025 governance / taiwan / applied intelligence / edge
Is your AI earning its energy? Taiwan has left me wondering.
Taiwan can't treat AI as abstract. It hosts the infrastructure, feels the weight of every training run on the grid, and is forcing the question most markets are avoiding: does the benefit justify the load?
- 12 September 2025 AI literacy / singapore / governance / applied intelligence
Why AI literacy events matter more than ever.
AI is not new. It has cycled between hype and AI winter since the 1950s. What is new is the scale of the bet, and the fact that the people making decisions about it often have no shared vocabulary for what they are actually buying. That is why the literacy events matter.
- 8 August 2025 singapore / governance / applied intelligence / asia-pacific
Singapore at 60: still the smartest experiment in the room.
Singapore is not just a city-state. It is a live experiment in intelligent design applied to everything from urban planning to economic policy. After nearly 15 years living here, I keep coming back to one question. What if more companies actually ran themselves the way Singapore runs itself?
- 5 April 2025 governance / AI literacy / executives / edge
Why modern executives must become tech translators.
Predictive analytics. LLM hallucinations. Reinforcement learning. The boardroom has a vocabulary problem. With AI reshaping every part of the business, senior leaders cannot afford to speak only one language, especially if it is not tech.
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I publish irregularly. The Friday Frame ships most weeks. The longer essays land when they are ready. Drop your email and you will get a note when something new goes up, or when an existing post gets a meaningful rewrite. Nothing else.