Enterprise Explores

BFM Media

Helping you navigate the ever-changing universe of business, from headlines to the bottom line

  1. 1 DAY AGO

    Star Trek or Wall-E? When AI Does Everything

    We often talk about AI disrupting jobs, but Peng T. Ong (Co-Founder of Monk's Hill Ventures) is talking about something far more absolute: a singularity. In his essay, "The Economic Singularity: Life as Work Transforms," Peng argues we are approaching a tipping point where the marginal cost of labor and knowledge trends to zero. When AI can write code, draft contracts, and generate strategy decks faster and cheaper than humans, the traditional engine of the economy, trading labor for wages, breaks down. So, what comes next? Will we live in a "Star Trek" utopia of exploration, or a "Wall-E" dystopia of consumption? We discuss: Defining the Singularity: Why the economy faces a "Blue Screen of Death" when infinite productivity meets zero-cost intelligence. The 7 Future Worlds: From the "Star Trek" pursuit of discovery to the "Backup World" where communities preserve pre-tech skills for resiliency. The Vulnerability Paradox: Why unregulated white-collar jobs (consultants, investors) are on the chopping block before blue-collar trade work. UBC vs. UBI: The critical difference between giving people a salary (Income) versus giving them a stake in the means of production (Capital). The "Entrepreneurial" Shift: How education must pivot from vocational training to teaching children how to create value in a post-labor world. The Open Source Defense: Why the value of AI models themselves will drop to zero, preventing any single corporation from holding a monopoly on intelligence. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    37 min
  2. 27 JAN

    Meituan’s Shadow: How China’s Delivery Wars Changed ASEAN

    Food delivery in Southeast Asia is no longer just about moving meals from Point A to Point B. It has evolved into a $22.7 billion industry where platforms don't just facilitate demand, they orchestrate it. According to Momentum Works, the sector has bounced back with 18% year-on-year growth, but the rules of the game have fundamentally changed.  Grab continues to dominate with 55% market share, while Shopee has surged past Foodpanda to claim the #2 spot, but the bigger story is the shift in power. Weihan Chen explains why platforms are transitioning from simple transaction channels to "Operating Environments." In this new reality, discovery is no longer linear; it is content-led, incentive-driven, and algorithmically curated. For F&B merchants, this creates a potentially harsh "pay-to-play" landscape where data asymmetry favors the platform, not the restaurant. We discuss: The Meituan Shadow: How the threat of China’s delivery giants is forcing local players to adopt "batching" and extreme efficiency to survive. The Leaderboard Shakeup: How the landscape has consolidated, with Shopee leveraging its ecosystem power to overtake Foodpanda. Demand Orchestration: Why platforms are moving beyond logistics to actively influence what you eat through "content-led discovery" and data asymmetry. The "Pay-to-Play" Era: Why organic reach is dying for F&B merchants, and why menus must now be designed specifically for platform algorithms. The Death of Dark Kitchens: Why the "Real Estate Arbitrage" model failed in Southeast Asia due to a lack of demand density. Unit Economics 2.0: How platforms are staying profitable despite falling Average Order Values (AOV) by driving up frequency and optimizing delivery batches. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    41 min
  3. 26 JAN

    From Chatbots to Do-Bots: Rise of the Agentic Enterprise

    For the last two years, corporate AI strategy has largely revolved around "Assistants", chatbots that wait for a human prompt, but could that phase be already coming to an end? Nicholas Eayrs of Databricks argues we are now entering the era of the Agentic Enterprise. In this new paradigm, AI stops waiting for instructions and starts interacting with other systems autonomously. Imagine a "Procurement Agent" negotiating with a "Finance Agent" to optimise supply chains in real-time, without human intervention. We explore how this shift from "chatting" to "doing" is already happening, and much more, including:  The Death of the Prompt: Why the future isn't about better prompt engineering, but about architecting autonomous flows where humans act as supervisors, not operators. The "Multi-Agent" Swarm: How specialised, smaller models (rather than one giant LLM) will collaborate to handle complex tasks like finance and logistics. Bridging the Data Gap: The role of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) in allowing AI agents to "talk" to legacy systems of record (like CRMs and ERPs). Solving "Black Box" Anxiety: Why a bad chatbot answer is annoying, but a bad agentic decision is expensive, and how Evaluation Frameworks and strict data lineage provide the necessary governance. The Human in the Loop: Why the modern workforce must pivot from "users" of software to "Systems Architects" who define the constraints and outcomes for autonomous agents. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

    36 min

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Helping you navigate the ever-changing universe of business, from headlines to the bottom line