SuperAI Singapore
I talked to as many people as I could and scanned the list of attendees. There seemed to be more people from the C-suite and non-IT teams than from internal IT teams. I hope this places healthy expectations on internal IT teams and their solution providers to deliver real business value beyond POCs.
AI maturity
Almost no one said "I'm using Model X to summarise emails, make slides, build next quarter's plan, prepare for customer meetings. Look how cool it is." That's so 2025. AI boosting personal productivity is already part of their lives; business leadership already expects knowledge workers to be good at this. The conversations are now more like "we're using AI to optimise our production schedules", "we're handling x% of inbound calls using AI", "we've used AI to detect data-entry errors and improved data quality by x%". 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
Most people shared some concern about AI cost, be it flat monthly subscriptions or pay-as-you-go API costs. Many said they are trying to be smarter about token usage by combining frontier models with cheaper models. Some have gone as far as running open-weight models on their own on-premises hardware. It's the economy, love.
Token usage skills
I came across two siblings from Vietnam who pay US$200 a month for Claude Max. That's impressive by itself. Then I learnt that it's roughly 25% of their monthly income, about the same as they pay to rent their flat. They had sleepless nights making sure Claude was running until the minute the new billing cycle kicked in. Let that sink in. They obviously have skin in the game and will be more motivated than 99.9% of the earth's population to sweat their tokens. In a year's time they will be teaching companies how to be "token smart".
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.
This was typed on my iPhone on board a flight from Singapore to Melbourne. 100% thumb intelligence and 0% AI assistance.
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. This is the canonical copy, lightly tidied.