Asia’s accelerating digital transformation has created an environment of unprecedented interconnection, and unprecedented vulnerability. Threats now move quickly across borders, clouds, and supply chains, exposing both large enterprises and SMEs to risks that often stem from the simplest gaps: weak authentication, exposed remote access, and misconfigured systems.

In this episode of ATP, Paul Jackson, CEO of THEOS Cyber, argues defenders can keep pace when fundamentals are properly applied and Gene Yu, CEO of Blackpanda, frames resilience as the speed and effectiveness of ‘Readiness, Response, and Recovery’.

Some of the topics that Paul and Gene covered in detail include:

• Resilience in the cyber space starts with “properly applied” basics, yet most organizations simply have not applied the fundamentals.
• Cyber insurance is essential, cyber preparedness should not be outsourced to a policy.
• Resilience is a rehearsed behavior...full stop.
• Business interconnectivity drives value, but third party risk is now first-order risk.
• Regulation matters, but enforcement of that regulation is the real lever.

Financial innovation in Asia is accelerating, but not in a uniform way. Markets across the region move at very different speeds, shaped by culture, regulation, and consumer behavior. At the same time, major technological shifts are underway.

In this episode of ATP, Chee Beh, SVP & GM APAC at Yuno, explains how the center of gravity is shifting from Generative to Agentic AI, where autonomous agents do not just make recommendations but execute end-to-end actions.

Some of the topics that Chee discussed in detail included:

• Last year’s frontier was GenAI. This year’s is agentic AI: autonomous, goal-oriented agents that don’t just suggest, but do.
• Autonomous commerce agents are only half the story. Payments agents will choose among your payment methods to optimize for your payment objectives.
• Payment or frankly any technological optimization is getting more and more personalized and multi-dimensional.
• For agentic commerce to complete the loop, merchant agents and consumer agents must communicate seamlessly, with payment orchestrators acting as the connective tissue.
• Southeast Asia markets behave like startups: price-sensitive, experiment-friendly, and hungry for growth. Japan behaves more like an enterprise: precision, trust in institutions, and measured adoption.

Artificial intelligence is forcing humanity to confront what truly makes us valuable. As machines become more capable of performing tasks once reserved for human intelligence, the definition of talent is shifting away from knowledge and efficiency toward qualities like judgment, empathy, creativity, and ethical decision-making.

In this episode of ATP, Jeevika Makani, Francis Pẽna, and Kristen Lim posit that while AI levels access to information, it ultimately widens the gap between people who use it to deepen thinking and those who accept generic outputs.

Some of the topics they covered in detail included:

• There is no room for nostalgia about grunt work. Offloading drudgery is progress if we use the time to think, decide, and connect.
• AI Tools do not replace creativity; they raise the bar for originality.
• The new premium skills are stubbornly human. Empathy, ethics, and relationship-building do not compress to an AI prompt.
• Mainstream exposure to AI is barely two years old. As a community, we will build collective intuition for what AI is good at and where it fails.
• AI is democratizing product creation for SMEs and other small companies.