SuperAI Singapore
I talked to as many people as I could and scanned the list of attendees. I noticed people from the C-suite and non-IT teams alongside technology specialists. It was encouraging to hear business and technology perspectives in the same conversations about value beyond a proof of concept.
AI maturity
In the conversations I had, personal productivity was often the starting point: summarising emails, making slides or preparing for meetings. I also heard about production scheduling, handling inbound calls and detecting data-entry errors. Those examples raised useful questions about outcomes, reliability and measurement. They were conference conversations, not results I independently verified. I like it when AI gets boring.
Physical AI
AI embodiment, touchable AI, call it what you like. SuperAI 2026 was nowhere near WAIC 2025 in Shanghai when it comes to robots that look like humans, dogs, or nothing we've seen before. Still way ahead of Australia, in my opinion.
Tokenmaxxing and token costs
Cost came up in several conversations, be it flat monthly subscriptions or pay-as-you-go API costs. People described combining frontier models with cheaper models, and some talked about running open-weight models on their own hardware. It's the economy, love.
Token usage skills
I came across two siblings from Vietnam who were putting real effort into learning how to make Claude useful. Their resourcefulness stayed with me. Getting value from a tool takes practice and judgement, not just a subscription. I hope that effort opens good opportunities for them.
Pivots
Some tech companies in the region earned their first million before 2020 from blockchain development. They survived Covid. And they are now, surprise surprise, pivoting heavily to AI. I guess, and hope, they'll be formidable players in the AI economy.
Best presentation
Google's Moe A. on the main stage. Ten out of ten for insight and audience engagement.
The original post was typed on my iPhone on board a flight from Singapore to Melbourne. Thumb intelligence, at altitude.
Thank you to the AI leaders operating in the region who chose to share their time with me in one-to-one conversations.
First posted on LinkedIn. Revised for this site in November 2026.