Adrian Watkins.
Writing

Frames, essays, and cross-posts.

Long-form writing, with cross-links to AIinASIA where appropriate. The canonical executive writing lives here. Two regular threads: the Friday Frame (weekly, 200 words) and the Reading list (quarterly).

The Friday Frame

The weekly 200-word missive.
Operators, governance, Asia-Pacific.
One thing noticed, every Friday.

Read the latest frame →Read the whole archive →
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

Cross-posted essays.

Bylined work first published on the AIinASIA / AIinArabia / AIinEurope mastheads. Canonical lives at the source.

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