Every October, Google, Temasek and Bain & Company gather Southeast Asia’s tech crowd around one seductive number. This year it is US$368 billion, the gross merchandise value (GMV) the region’s digital economy is projected to reach in 2026, up 17 per cent year-on-year. The longer-range promise is more than US$1 trillion by 2035. Long-time readers […] The post Southeast Asia’s US$1T digital dream slips five years, and AI is the new reason to keep believing appeared first on e27.

Somewhere in Singapore this week, a recruiter is probably rewriting a job ad that once asked for “advanced Excel skills” so that it now asks for “hands-on experience with agentic AI workflows”. Multiply that by a few thousand listings and you arrive at the headline figure in Jobstreet by SEEK’s new AI Gauge. According to […] The post Agentic AI is Singapore’s hottest job skill, and that should worry the people it replaces appeared first on e27.

Malaysia’s border control chief pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to two charges of assaulting junior police officers at the country’s main international airport last month, after a video of the confrontation went viral. Mohd Shuhaily Mohd Zain, director general of the Malaysian Border Control and Protection Agency, was filmed confronting two men at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on September 28. He previously linked the incident to an operation against airport touts following complaints about...

Malaysia is negotiating with Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia to establish overland transit routes for fresh durian exports to China, according to Agriculture and Food Security Minister Mohamad Sabu. The minister said the move would reduce transport costs and improve access to the lucrative Chinese market. “Durian is a favourite among Chinese consumers, but they sometimes find it difficult to get the fruit at a more affordable price,” he said during parliament’s question and answer time on...

I build AI tools for marketers, and run an AI marketing software firm in Singapore, so I spend a lot of time hearing about AI adoption. A recent talk by Robert Lai, founder of performance agency Kaliber, stuck with me because it opened with an uncomfortable claim: most of the AI work in the room […] The post AI won’t tidy your business. It just moves the mess faster appeared first on e27.

A Singaporean couple who regularly abused their first child after he was born, resulting in his death at the age of eight months, were sentenced to jail on Wednesday. Chloe Gan Ci Xuan, 23, and Neo Jia Ming, 27, were sentenced respectively to 15 years and three months’ jail and 16 years’ jail for various charges over the death of their son, Trevor Neo Yu Hin. Gan pleaded guilty to three charges comprising causing the death of a child, ill-treating a child and permitting such ill-treatment. Neo...

After narrowly losing yet another pitch earlier this year, I added up the time I had spent preparing proposals: 300 hours in four months. I wanted to know whether we were pursuing the right business. Using Gemini and a script in Google Docs, I compared five years of proposals with our client invoicing records. One […] The post How I use AI to support public relations  appeared first on e27.