AI noise not distracting Asian businesses

AI is a big opportunity for everybody as long as they can through the noise and focus on the things that will bring value to them, says Shaun Clowes, CPO at Confluent.

The AI bubble continues to have its way in 2026 with businesses aware of the concerns but also optimistic on the promises of the technology. At the recent World Economic Forum, AI was heavily talked about with many business and tech leaders sharing their visions and goals for enabling better AI capabilities.

While the outcome of these discussions often results in positive outlooks for businesses in how their plan their AI journey, the key component for all this is bringing the best value from all the AI investments.

More often than not, most of the discussion around AI ends up generating a lot of “noise” in industries. Businesses want to be ahead in their AI journey. But making the right choice can be challenging, with some companies eventually realizing that they may have over invested in AI or focus on areas that can actually bring more value to them with their existing AI tools and data.

For Shaun Clowes, Chief Product Officer at Confluent, this noise that is being generated on AI is one of the biggest challenges that businesses would need to deal with eventually. Companies want the best out of AI, but they need to be able to execute their AI strategies by ensuring they get the most the value out of it.

“The AI gold rush is going on. You have different data privacy laws and different geopolitical things going on, which are making the landscape very complicated. There's also lot of things about data. Where is it being deployed? How is it being used? How do organizations bring it to bear for things? What data do they even need? How do businesses build agents faster? So, there's a lot of different competing pressures,” Clowes said.

He believes this also raises questions on where companies should invest and focus on as businesses will want to know if the investment in durable.

“I would argue the flip side of that is the opportunity, both for us and for our customers and for partners, is where you can invest to unlock data for many use cases at once. For example, you can unlock it for analytical use cases, you can unlock it for agents or unlock it to build really powerful applications where you can kind of get bang for your buck. You can effectively solve your problem once and reuse that outcome repeatedly for many different use cases. That's where magic happens in technology,” he added.

For Clowes, AI is a big opportunity for everybody as long as they can through the noise and focus on the things that will bring value for them. This will accelerate their business outcomes.

AI noise in Asia

Interestingly, Clowes pointed that that the APAC region has an advantage when it comes to dealing with the noise in AI. Specifically, most businesses in APAC move extremely quickly and tend to be tech forward and innovative.

“There's innovation across countries, innovation within countries. It's always fun to watch from that perspective. I think the big opportunity for APAC is to continue to be super innovative. We need to reimagine the things that are possible. And I've always really looked to all the innovation going on in APAC and see a whole different business model that people did not even understand. That is how you can build sophisticated value,” he said.

“And so if I look at the AI boom in APAC, I think what will be really interesting is to see for organizations that don't just incrementally improve the way they innovate but try and reimagine what is possible entirely. I think that's where the magic will really happen in the whole industry. And as an innovation hub, I think that APAC is especially well set to kind of capture that,” he added.

Many businesses in Asia were able to skip prior generations of technology life cycles because they were able to skip straight to a ubiquitous internet world. As such, Clowes believes that the concerns businesses should have is not whether there is an AI bubble or not.

For Clowes, businesses should look at their data and see if they are being transformative about it instead. They need to know if the data making experiences and driving capabilities ten times better than before. Some companies may have overinvested, and many have to pull back.

However, Clowes feels the world ends up being remade in ways that usually end up incredibly capable, incredibly powerful for end consumers and create some really big businesses that create a lot of good in the world.

“The AI bubble bit is overrated and is potentially overblown. The most important bit is, whether there is a bubble or there is not, how do you make certain you're on the right side of history? How do you capture real value from this and not get distracted by the other trends,” he concluded.