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2 weeks ago | 
cdotrends.com | Winston Thomas
Every time you’ve been placed on hold, you’ve unknowingly contributed to one of the most valuable — and trapped — datasets in the digital economy. Buried in the digital vaults of call recording companies like Nice, Verint, and Genesis lie billions of hours of raw human conversation, locked away in proprietary formats like medieval texts awaiting translation. The voice is primal.
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2 weeks ago | 
cdotrends.com | Winston Thomas
Here’s a familiar scenario: The chief executive officer talks up a cutting-edge AI pilot and makes it an imperative, gets the boardroom excited about why AI is the future and why the organization needs to get on the bandwagon, and then gets the budget approval. That was how it looked during the last Chief Digital and Data Officer Asia Summit 2024. In the latest edition — Chief Digital and Data Officer Asia Summit 2025 — the mood had turned somber.
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2 weeks ago | 
cdotrends.com | Winston Thomas
The financial services industry is evolving fast. And so is fraud. Take “friendly fraud.” A staggering 42% of Gen Z consumers now engage in it – deliberately disputing legitimate transactions they actually made. It’s not a glitch in the system; it’s now part of a new financial landscape where AI-powered attacks and digitally-native dishonesty are becoming the norm across Asia Pacific’s banking sector.
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2 weeks ago | 
cdotrends.com | Winston Thomas
When it comes to financial services security, Southeast Asia is at the epicenter. Rapid digital adoption has opened up security holes, a fragmented regulatory landscape allows threat actors to hide, and is where sophisticated identity fraud syndicates call home. Financial services players in Southeast Asia also face another challenge.
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2 weeks ago | 
cdotrends.com | Winston Thomas
Is the modern enterprise cybersecurity apparatus an expensive illusion? Companies spend billions annually on perimeter defenses, threat detection systems, and security operations centers — yet breaches persist with alarming regularity. The truth is that most security strategies suffer from a fatal flaw: they are designed to stop attacks but are unprepared to investigate them when attacks succeed.
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3 weeks ago | 
cdotrends.com | Winston Thomas
The digital revolution has a new geo-economic battleground: Asia’s AI ecosystem. As U.S. tariffs upend regional supply chains and inflate hardware costs by up to 34%, the USD722 billion APAC tech market is facing fragmentation that could either forge a new era of innovation or create dangerous "islands of intelligence" cut off from global developments. Welcome to tech’s new Cold War.
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3 weeks ago | 
cdotrends.com | Winston Thomas
The most stable data center is the one nobody touches. That used to be the conventional wisdom among network engineers, at least until the explosion of AI workloads and cloud computing shattered that paradigm. Today’s reality is different. Your data center network faces constant change, mostly due to the unpredictable demands of AI. And either you engineer it for stability under those conditions, or you’re headed for trouble.
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3 weeks ago | 
cdotrends.com | Winston Thomas
The days of Excel spreadsheets haunting the dreams of CFOs may be finally numbered. GenAI is already creating waves across industries, from creative services to software development. It is also placing the once-rigid domain of corporate finance — traditionally married to deterministic models and auditable certainty — at an interesting flashpoint.
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1 month ago | 
cdotrends.com | Winston Thomas
The Asia Pacific manufacturing sector is undergoing a profound renaissance, a period of intense evolution accelerated by unprecedented global pressures. When the pandemic first impacted Asia Pacific's manufacturing hubs and their intricate production lines, it was merely the initial wave of disruption. This was swiftly followed by trade wars, pervasive supply chain chaos, and geopolitical earthquakes, sending continuous aftershocks across shop floors from Shenzhen to Malaysia.
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1 month ago | 
cdotrends.com | Winston Thomas
Fintechs, tech companies and established financial services institutions have always been an awkward tango. A focused tech upstart looking to disrupt and reinvent a specific function of the bank and insurer is always seen as a threat. And until regulators say otherwise, banks and insurers have always kept them at arm’s length, flirting with their value propositions, adopting technology for customer experience but never truly adopting them for their core banking services.
