TechTouch Asia

- ServiceNow unveiled six security solutions with AI agents called AI Specialists to enable prevention-first, AI-native cyberdefence - ServiceNow's risk and security business unites exposure management, identity, cyber-physical, incident response, and compliance as one governed motion  ServiceNow, the AI control tower for business reinvention, has accelerated its Autonomous Security vision with six solutions that help deliver prevention-first, AI-native cyberdefence. The aspects of security covered include unified exposure management, continuous vulnerability detection, cyber-physical security, identity and access security, agentic incident response, as well as cyber risk and compliance.  With new AI specialists that complete security workflows autonomously, including the Vulnerability Resolution AI Specialist , these capabilities enable enterprises to prevent, contain, and remediate risk at machine speed, before threats become breaches, ServiceNow said. According t...

Source: Singtel YouTube channel. Beyond Connection is Singtel's National Day film for 2026.  Singtel Group has launched its 2026 National Day film, Beyond Connection. The film is a tribute to the spirit of progress that has shaped Singapore over 61 years, charting the country's journey from a resource-poor island in 1965 to today’s global economic success story before looking ahead to how digital infrastructure and AI will support Singapore's next lap as a Smart Nation and regional AI hub. Beyond Connection also tells the story of Singtel's own evolution and the role it has played in nation building, showing how its investments in subsea cables, satellite communications, advanced mobile networks and AI-ready data centres have supported the nation's progress and continue to lay the foundations for Singapore's next chapter. Yuen Kuan Moon, Group CEO, Singtel, said: “The story of Singapore has always been one of looking beyond the horizon and building for the ...

- NUS is the first university in the region to develop a proprietary conversational AI platform which supports academic enquiry by drawing on exclusive NUS research and regionally-focused special collections - AI Sense Maker can generate concise topic summaries, identifying related concepts, curating references for further reading and creating interactive knowledge graphs that show how ideas are connected - The platform will launch with an initial foundation of 150,000 digitised materials Source: NUS. Located on the second floor of NUS’ Central Library, the BookBridge showcases more than 3,000 rare books and artefacts, offering a glimpse into NUS Libraries’ much larger special collections. The National University of Singapore (NUS) has announced AI Sense Maker (ASM), becoming the first university in Southeast Asia to use conversational AI to transform students and academics’ learning journeys. Developed jointly by NUS Libraries and NUS Information Technology (NUS IT), AI Sense M...

Source: Lenovo. Sunset at a sports stadium. Lenovo, FIFA’s Official Technology Partner , has celebrated the successful delivery of its AI-powered technology solutions and an unprecedented technology deployment across a tournament watched by billions of fans around the world. The project also validated Lenovo’s hybrid AI strategy and full-stack portfolio, showing how AI becomes most valuable when combined with infrastructure, devices, services and deep operational expertise to solve real-world challenges at scale. Spanning three host countries, 16 cities, 48 teams and 104 matches, FIFA World Cup 2026 represented an unprecedented operational and technological challenge, Lenovo said. The company provided the devices, infrastructure, services, and solutions that helped support FIFA operations, global broadcasts, team analysis, officiating technology and fan experiences at scale. These solutions were delivered with 99.99% uptime. Across the FIFA World Cup ecosystem, Lenovo deployed an...

- Over 1,500 files uploaded across multiple formats - Nearly 10,000 pages ingested - Over 90% reduction in document screening time Staff from the Singapore Management University’s (SMU’s) admissions office used to spend hours scrolling, copying, pasting, and double-checking student applications to identify qualified candidates. Wanting to speed up these time-consuming manual processes, it turned to automation. But instead of alleviating the situation, new problems emerged. Automations frequently broke down due to minor user interface changes, leading to high maintenance effort and frequent disruptions. The problem with typical AI agents is that while they can understand and process simple templated documents, they struggle to read documents that come in varying formats, or which contains elements like embedded tables, graphs, and inferred values. What SMU needed was intelligent document processing, where agents can operate effectively in unstructured environments, tackle complex prob...

A new cyber resilience simulation from Commvault lets participants create and experience a frontier AI cyberattack before one hits their organisation.  Commvault, a unified resilience at enterprise scale provider, has introduced Commvault Minutes to Recovery – a scenario-driven cyber resilience simulation that lets participants act as a hacker and run their own attacks using frontier AI tools. Participants are then challenged to defend against and recover from an incident under pressure to test their resilience against the AI-driven cyberattacks. The window between vulnerability discovery and active exploitation, once measured in days, has narrowed to 29 minutes in 2025, 65% faster than the year before*.  As attacks become significantly quicker, organisations need more than recovery plans – they need proven recovery readiness. Commvault Minutes to Recovery is a hands-on, live simulation that allows security and IT teams to stress test their readiness for frontier AI threats ...

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...

- Over a third (35.5%) of enterprise data is now AI-generated - Up to one in five organisations don't know whether employees are using unsanctioned AI tools - Up to 72% of organisations are confident they are secure, but still experienced unauthorised access in the past 12 months  AvePoint, the global AI data protection provider, has released its 3rd  annual State of AI Report: Scaling Trust, Control, and Readiness in the Agentic Era* . The report found that AI has scaled into everyday work, while organisations have less visibility into what employees are using than they did a year ago.    Source:   State of AI Report: Scaling Trust, Control, and Readiness in the Agentic Era . The percentage of employees with access to unsanctioned tools for creating AI agents for work has grown in the past 12 months. The percentage of organisations unable to determine whether employees are using unsanctioned AI tools has nearly tripled, from 6.3% in 2025 to 17.6% in 2026. For ...

- Ninja Van Malaysia doubled its scanning speeds and eliminated peak-period lag by integrating Zebra's TC2 series mobile computers with AC2 WAVE Warehouse Management System - The deployment of reliable ZD200 series desktop printers enabled the instant generation of accurate shipping labels Ninja Van Malaysia, one of the country's fastest-growing logistics providers, has modernised its fulfilment operations with Zebra’s warehousing solutions. Source: NetApp success story page .  Ninja Van Malaysia deployed Zebra's TC2 Series mobile computers alongside the AC2 WAVE Warehouse Management System , enabling faster and more reliable warehouse operations. Founded with a clear ambition to connect Southeast Asia with hassle-free delivery, Ninja Van Malaysia serves nearly 25 million recipients nationwide. As the company scaled to serve both e- commerce and B2B clients, the complexity of its fulfilment operations grew. This created a need for agile, automated solutions to keep...

NetApp Keystone will power CGI’s block storage solutions within its shared services platform as part of an expansion of the companies’ global alliance partnership. Under the new phase of the alliance, CGI and NetApp will co-design, deliver, and operate best-of-breed solutions that support clients’ evolving digital needs. CGI will deliver services on behalf of NetApp, while NetApp will partner with CGI to deliver enterprise-grade data and storage services that enable flexible, consumption-based solutions for joint clients across industries. Together, CGI and NetApp will help organisations modernise IT infrastructure, improve data management, and advance AI initiatives across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. By combining the power of the NetApp platform to help customers build intelligent data infrastructure supported by scalable storage capabilities with CGI’s expertise in digital transformation, cloud, AI, and managed services, clients can strengthen operationa...

Source: Huawei. The world's first commercial multimodal LLM for cultural tourism, BoGuan, is powering the preservation of cultural heritage in one of China's oldest cities, Xi'an. The world's first commercial multimodal large language model (LLM) for cultural tourism, BoGuan, is now broadly adopted in one of China's oldest cities, Xi'an. This model generates commercial returns by supporting the creation of digital intellectual property (IP) for intangible cultural heritage, the development of cultural tourism applications, and the improvement of short drama production. This is injecting new momentum into both China's heritage preservation initiatives and the cultural tourism industry. Xi'an is a popular international tourist destination. Shaanxi Culture Industry Investment Group (SCG) is working with partners like Huawei, China Telecom Shaanxi, and China West Airport Group (CWAG) to promote cultural tourism in the city using digital technologies includin...

By Simon Tung, GM for ASEAN and Asia Emerging Countries (AEC), Kaspersky While cybersecurity companies leverage AI to enhance threat detection, cybercriminals are weaponising the same technology for automated phishing and malware attacks — highlighted by the fact that 43% of organisations believe hackers are using AI-driven methods to boost their effectiveness. To stay protected, organisations must adopt AI-powered platforms rather than relying on isolated tools. AI has firmly established its presence in enterprise cybersecurity. According to data from Kaspersky’s 2026 global study, almost 100% of organisations in the Asia-Pacific region (APAC) – including firms in markets like Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam - intend to incorporate AI into security operations. This is consistent with solution providers embedding AI into their workflows to accelerate detection, reduce analyst workload and counter-attacks that move faster than human responders can manage.  On the other hand, cybe...