The Loop Asia

Jon Scheele

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In-depth conversations with technology leaders across Asia-Pacific. Host Jon Scheele talks with CTOs, founders, and industry experts about AI, APIs, cybersecurity, DevOps, and digital transformation — the technical and strategic challenges shaping modern organizations. Real-world experience. Actionable insights. Stay in the loop.

4 days ago

AI Governance in the Age of Agentic AI — Matthias Biehl, IBM

95% of AI initiatives never make it out of prototype — not because the technology isn't good enough, but because organisations haven't figured out how to govern it. Matthias Biehl, API and AI Strategist at IBM, breaks down exactly what it takes to move AI agents from internal demos to customer-facing production systems. What we cover: • Why the "just wait for a better model" approach doesn't solve the trust problem • The three components of every AI agent and the governance layer each one needs • LLM gateways, MCP gateways, and A2A gateways — what they are and why all three matter • When to use an agent vs stick with a deterministic workflow • Context APIs: rethinking your existing API landscape for the agentic era Connect with Matthias Biehl: linkedin.com/in/matthiasbiehl The Loop Asia: www.theloop.asia
16 Jun

Sovereign AI Strategy with Aki Ranin: Own Your Agents

Aki Ranin has spent years helping organizations think clearly about AI strategy, and right now he is focused on a problem most companies are only beginning to notice: the deeper you embed AI agents into your business, the more exposed you become to providers you do not control. In this episode, recorded soon after his keynote at apidays Singapore 2026, Aki walks through what sovereign AI actually means in practice — not as a regulatory concept, but as a question of operational risk. If your agents can be switched off without warning, if you cannot quantify hallucination rates, if you do not own the code, you do not own your business. What you will learn: Why the AI supply chain carries the same fragility risks as physical supply chains — from TSMC and ASML to the concentration of frontier models in Silicon ValleyHow a startup of 40 people running on Claude APIs was accidentally banned for 24 hours, and what that tells you about building on closed platformsThe Shopify case study: how one team reduced their AI costs from $5 million per year to $70,000 by moving down the model stack without sacrificing accuracyWhy "AI inflation" may matter as much as financial inflation — and how token costs are rising even as providers keep calling new models "Flash"The difference between drag-and-drop agent platforms and code-owned agents, and why that distinction will determine who keeps the IPHow to build a sovereign AI stack as a gradient: from paid cloud APIs, to private cloud instances, to open models, to on-premise inference hardwareWhy AI governance belongs at the board level, not delegated to a single AI leadHow Singapore's Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan is running a local AI second-brain on a Raspberry Pi — and what that signals about accessibility.The sovereign AI stack Aki describes: Free tools — acceptable for non-sensitive, public-domain research onlyPaid subscriptions — minimum bar for any work touching company dataPrivate cloud instances (AWS, Azure, GCP) — frontier models with access controls and no training data exposureOpen models via API — more portability, less vendor lock-inOpen models on your own hardware — maximum auditability, task-specific agents, sensitive workloadsAbout Aki Ranin: Aki Ranin is a two-time founder, AI advisor, and published author who has focused exclusively on machine learning and AI since 2016. He co-created the "Usable AI" transformation framework, advises startups, corporates, and VC funds on AI strategy, and serves as Affiliate Faculty in AI and ML at Singapore Management University. Follow Aki Ranin on Substack, especially his article "Not your AI, not your business" — https://recursivelabs.substack.com/p/not-your-ai-not-your-business
28 May

The AI triangle: transformative, sovereign, fast — Sutowo Wong, Temus

Most enterprise AI programmes produce proof-of-concepts that never reach production. Sutowo Wong, Managing Director of AI x Data at Temus, has a framework for diagnosing why — and fixing it. He calls it the AI Triangle: three conditions that must be satisfied simultaneously. Miss any one and the transformation stalls. Recorded after apidays Singapore 2026, this conversation covers the structural reasons AI initiatives fail to scale, why AI transformation has to be CEO-led, how to close the tempo gap between model releases and enterprise deployment, and why governance designed into architecture from the start is an accelerator — not a speed bump. What we cover: • The AI Triangle — transformative, sovereign and fast, explained • The POC trap and why it is a structural problem, not just a technology problem • Data sovereignty and contextual sovereignty in practice • Prototype in 6 hours, live deployment in 6–12 weeks • Why the CEO, not the Chief AI Officer, must drive AI transformation • Governance as accelerator — and why it must be baked in from the start Connect with Sutowo on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sutowo/ Temus: temus.com The Loop Asia: www.theloop.asia
5 Mar

AI, agentic development, and the future of software engineering — Manjunath Bhat, Gartner

Manjunath Bhat leads software engineering research at Gartner and has been one of the most thoughtful voices tracking what AI is actually doing to the way we build software — not just the productivity story, but the structural changes to teams, platforms, and careers. He's a returning keynote speaker at apidays Singapore and apidays Australia. In this conversation we cover: The shift from AI-augmented human work to agent-driven development — and why Manju deliberately avoids calling these tools "peer programmers"Why the prototype-to-production gap hasn't closed, and where the real friction still livesThe hidden downside of vibe coding: when you fully offload to AI, you stop learning tooHow platform engineering is evolving from template-based governance to embedding intelligence directly into the development workflowThe three mismatches platform teams now have to resolve: speed, determinism, and accountabilityWhat junior engineers should actually focus on as AI absorbs more entry-level workWhy Gartner's position is that creativity — not productivity — will be the new measure of engineering excellence Manju will be delivering a keynote at apidays Singapore, 14–15 April 2026. Connect with Manju: linkedin.com/in/manjunathbhat apidays Singapore 2026: apidays.global/singapore TheLoopAsia: www.theloop.asia
11 Feb

"What's Not in Your Data?" — Karin Verspoor, RMIT University

"What's not in your data?" is the question Karin Verspoor asks before trusting any model — because LLMs are excellent at aggregating what's been said thousands of times, and blind to the specific context you're actually working in. Karin Verspoor is Executive Dean of Computer Science at RMIT University, with over 20 years applying natural language processing to healthcare, from molecular biology literature to electronic health records. What we cover: • How a chance question at Los Alamos National Lab led a computational linguist into biomedical NLP • The Unified Medical Language System — 40 years of structured medical vocabulary • Why simple dictionary lookup fails on medical negation, and what it takes to get right • Why AI scribes still put a human in the loop to catch drift and complacency • The domain-knowledge argument: you need to know more than the LLM to catch when it's wrong The Loop Asia: www.theloop.asia
27/10/2025

Managing your tech stack — Akhil Bhaskar, AWS

When a critical Log4j vulnerability hit, Akhil Bhaskar's team went from "how exposed are we?" to a full CIO briefing with an exact component count in two hours. The reason: they knew where everything was. Akhil Bhaskar works at AWS with experience spanning consulting, customer-side technology leadership, and engineering across the US, Australia, and Singapore. What we cover: • The Log4j incident that turned a potential crisis into a 4-hour fix, thanks to a software catalog tracking every dependency • "Undifferentiated heavy lifting" — why opinionated scaffolding templates make contractor time more efficient • Why agentic AI needs the same catalog discipline as software — boundaries and explainability for regulated industries • The shift from programmatic to intent-based development • The two skills Akhil says matter most: storytelling and critical thinking The Loop Asia: www.theloop.asia
29/09/2025

Data integration: connecting business systems — Fethi Rabhi & Alan Hsiao

$33 trillion in global trade runs on a flimsy piece of paper — the invoice. Fethi Rabhi and Alan Hsiao on why "electronic invoicing" mostly isn't, and what actually has to change. Fethi Rabhi is Professor of Software Engineering at UNSW; Alan Hsiao is Founder and CEO of Cognitivo, an AI company focused on making natural-language interfaces work with structured systems. What we cover: • Why a PDF invoice sent by email isn't "e-invoicing" — real e-invoicing has no human eyes on either end • PEPPOL, explained: a transmission standard, not a full data integration solution • The tension between rigid structured standards and natural-language flexibility • Why invoice factoring is quietly a ~27% APR product • Why Alan is calling time on the ERP era in favour of agent-to-agent commerce The Loop Asia: www.theloop.asia
12/08/2025

The hidden cybersecurity risks in your devices — Joseph Yap

Singapore is the world's second-largest source of DDoS attacks — not because Singaporeans are attacking anyone, but because their smart home devices have been silently hijacked. Joseph Yap on the home network risk almost nobody audits. Joseph Yap is founder of Otonata, a boutique cybersecurity firm that scans home networks for vulnerabilities, following a corporate background in supply chain and operations. What we cover: • Why plugging a device into your home network is "the digital equivalent of letting someone into your house" • The nearest-neighbor attack — hackers using your Wi-Fi as an entry point to reach your neighbor • A widely-known robot vacuum vulnerability that let strangers watch and control units worldwide • Applying Lean's 5S framework to home cybersecurity: asset audits, cleanup, and ongoing hygiene • How Joseph mails a scanning device to clients to audit their home network remotely The Loop Asia: www.theloop.asia

In-depth conversations with technology leaders across Asia-Pacific. Host Jon Scheele talks with CTOs, founders, and industry experts about AI, APIs, cybersecurity, DevOps, and digital transformation — the technical and strategic challenges shaping modern organizations. Real-world experience. Actionable insights. Stay in the loop.

Creator

Jon Scheele
Years Active

2024 - 2026
Episodes

23
Rating

Clean
Copyright

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The Loop Asia