TechTouch Asia

Salesforce, the world’s No. 1 AI customer relationship management (CRM) has reported Singapore's desk workers are among the least sceptical about AI globally, yet rank the lowest for adoption. The gap points to a specific, solvable problem, the company said: corporate rollouts are falling short, leaving workers unable to make the most out of AI in their day- to-day work. The company's survey* of more than 1,500 desk workers spanning four continents found that just 29% of Singapore respondents identify as AI sceptics — well below the global average of 37%, and significantly lower than the 53% recorded in the US, UK, and France. Yet, this has failed to translate for Singapore businesses as a competitive advantage. Only 6% of Singapore desk workers say AI is a core part of their daily work, placing the market among the lowest globally and nearly half the global average of 11%. The data reveals an adoption paradox: willingness without traction. This gap between attitude and a...

- Core banking applications now run twice as fast - Slashed application lag has driven a 50% surge in customer satisfaction scores - Optimised infrastructure efficiency, lowering virtualisation and software licensing costs Belagavi District Central Co-Operative Bank (BDCC Bank), a premier financial services provider for local farmers in Karnataka, Southwest India, has transformed its data centre with the latest-generation Lenovo ThinkSystem servers and storage, powered by Intel Xeon 6 processors.  The modernisation has doubled the performance of key banking applications, reducing response times by 70%; increased customer satisfaction by 50%, and cut virtualization and software licensing costs by 70%. This has enabled faster, more efficient digital banking services while lowering operational costs. Farming is a 24x7 job, and BDCC Bank relies on its core banking applications to remain online 24x7x365 to support its web and mobile banking platforms. With its existing infrastructur...

Genesys, a global cloud provider in AI-powered experience orchestration, has found that customer experience (CX) has become an increasingly decisive factor in consumer loyalty and spending decisions across the Asia-Pacific region (APAC). Source: Genesys landing page . The agentic era requires a new operating model for CX. The 5th edition of Genesys' State of Customer Experience report has revealed that half of APAC consumers say they would rather do anything else than contact customer service, with the sentiment rising sharply in Singapore (63%) – the highest among APAC markets covered in the research. Poor service is also hitting the bottom line. Across APAC, 86% of consumers say poor service has caused them to spend less or stop doing business with a brand altogether. The impact is especially pronounced in markets such as the Philippines and Thailand, where the figure rises to 91%, while Japan stands out as a lower outlier at 67%. The research found consumers across APAC are i...

- Salesforce's biggest Agentforce Commerce release includes new AI capabilities across B2C and B2B commerce, order management, and point of sale  - The latest capabilities enable retailers to deliver AI-powered shopping experiences while maintaining control over their customer relationships and data  - Shopper Agent, Buyer Agent, and Merchant Agent are now generally available Salesforce has announced that Shopper Agent, Buyer Agent, and Merchant Agent are generally available now — with native integration into ChatGPT; Google Search, including AI Mode; and the Gemini app arriving in the coming months. Agentic commerce has already reshaped the customer journey, Salesforce said. During the 2025 year-end holiday shopping season, AI influenced 20% of global online sales to the tune of US$262 billion. Peak season also revealed that some AI strategies outperform others. AI-referred traffic converts at eight times the rate of social*, for instance. Retailers running their own shopper...

HSBC Singapore is accelerating the rollout of adviser-enabled AI, including Wealth Intelligence and AI Prepare. Launched in Singapore and Hong Kong in September 2025, Wealth Intelligence is HSBC Private Bank's proprietary generative AI platform. It was built by in-house developers and is powered by OpenAI's large language model. The platform synthesises Chief Investment Office research and more than 10,000 external data sources to provide wealth management teams with real-time investment insights. It is being progressively scaled across HSBC's global markets.   AI Prepare, introduced in 2026, is HSBC’s AI-powered pre-meeting wealth engagement tool. It brings together a client’s financial overview, tailored talking points and investment insights into a single view in seconds. This helps wealth management teams prepare more efficiently for client meetings, and supports more informed and personalised client conversations. The AI focus follows a global multiyear AI partnership...

Source: Meta. Illustration of Muse Spark 1.1 . Meta has announced Muse Spark 1.1, the latest model from Meta Superintelligence Labs. The multimodal reasoning model is a significant upgrade to Muse Spark , Meta said. Muse Spark 1.1  is built to plan, reason, and take action across multiple tools and applications. It can intelligently orchestrate multistep workflows, manage long-running tasks with a context window of up to 1 million tokens, and adapt to changing information with minimal human intervention.  Enhanced multimodal capabilities enable  Muse Spark 1.1  to better understand images, video, and audio, supporting more sophisticated real-world use cases that combine perception with action. The new model can do more for coding and computer-use tasks, including debugging complex codebases, building applications, automating workflows, and navigating desktop interfaces.   Meta is introducing the Meta Model API in public preview, giving developers access t...