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Theo is in the interviewer’s chair for this episode as Frank Liu from Zilliz joins the show to talk about how AI and machine learning are making it possible for developers to understand and extract more value from unstructured data such as text, audio, images, video, and more. Traditional databases are great for handling structured data, such as information that can easily be captured and categorized in a table. For example, a book database would have columns for the title and author. This allows the data to be searched, sorted, and filtered according to those values. However, unstructured data isn't so easily managed. Frank explains how vector databases and AI can use algorithms and increased compute power to search unstructured data without relying on just tags and keywords. This has led to Zilliz being a major contributor to two open source projects - Milvus, which stores embedding vectors and feature maps from trained machine learning models, and Towhee, a machine learning platform built on top of Google’s Tensorflow and the Pytorch open source machine learning framework. Tools like these could be used to do a reverse image search to find similar photos, or even music recommendations based on the rhythm or sound of the music instead of being restricted to artist and genre keywords. Frank shares some of the highly specific and interesting use cases Zilliz has seen in fields like network security and pharmaceutical molecular analysis, in their journey to being the one-stop-shop for anyone needing to understand human-generated unstructured data.

In this episode, Jay and Theo are joined by Pak Kusumo Martanto, CEO & Co-Founder of Blibli, who shares how the business is constantly adapting and staying agile to ensure excellent e-commerce experiences for millions in Indonesia. Pak Kusumo discusses how the pandemic was a wake-up call for many, with the needs of customers constantly changing. Keeping in mind that the digital economy saw a 50% increase globally over the past two years, and insights that are unique to Indonesia, for example being a gadget centric-culture, Blibli saw an opportunity for service fulfilment and helping partners with digital infrastructure. By leveraging technology and big data, Blibli was able to build a single customer view to guide their omni-channel strategy. In doing so, the business was able to introduce features that help improve the daily lives of people in Indonesia, swiftly and securely. From “Click-and-collect” at the closest store available, to their “Cinta Bumi” and “Buy-now-Pay-Later” programs, people and technology have been at the centre of every innovation, be it online or offline. Pak Kusumo also shares how Blibli places emphasis on digital security to ensure that customers’ data remain safe from cyber threats. By having a deep understanding of customers and their motivations, Blibli is able to ensure a seamless end-to-end experience across the retail value chain, right up to last mile delivery.

Faced with changing customer behaviors and demands, tightening margins, and increasing threat from digital competitors, financial services institutions (FSIs) will need to meet customers where they are, open up their services, and establish new ways to monetize their products. Doing so will also enable them to build a better profile of their customers, and deliver more personalized user experiences and fast, convenient banking and payment services. Cloud technology plays a big role in this shift toward digital FSIs. In Asia, bank branches now account for just 12% to 21% of monthly transactions in the region, with customers turning to digital channels for routine transactions such as peer-to-peer transfers and bill payments, according to McKinsey&Company. Overall customer engagement has climbed from an average 12.7 to 14.9 transactions a month in Asia's developed markets, and from 6 to 8.1 in emerging markets. In today's episode, Chris Hood chats with Paul Rohan and Aser Blanco to learn why embedding financial services into digital experiences can generate new revenue.

Enterprises across the globe are struggling to innovate because their data and applications are siloed, disconnected, and not easily accessible. Today, Google Cloud is announcing the general availability of Apigee Integration, a solution that helps enterprises easily connect their existing data and applications and surface them as easily accessible APIs that can power new experiences. Data and applications are enablers of digital experiences. However, for many enterprises across the world, data and applications are siloed, buried inside various on-premises and cloud servers, and cannot be easily accessed by internal developers or partners. This challenge slows down efforts of digital transformation by extending development timelines from weeks to months. Integration and API management solutions address this challenge by enabling developers to seamlessly connect their data and applications, and surface them as easily consumable APIs. In this episode, Chris Hood sits down with Scott Haaland and Andrew Pickelsimer to better understand how an API-first approach to integration can help deliver on consumer expectations and generate business value.

Enterprises across the globe are seeing surging demand for digital experiences from their customers, employees, and partners. For many of these enterprises, hundreds of business applications are hosted in private or public clouds that interact with their users (customers, partners, and employees) spread across geographies, channels (web, mobile, APIs, VPNs, and cloud services), and time zones. As a consequence of this surge in demand, enterprises are also experiencing increased pressure to fortify their technical infrastructure against cyber attacks. The number of reported cyber attacks on U.S. companies rose 69% in 2020 from the previous year, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Web and API attacks cannot be prevented but can be mitigated—a recent study showed that 55% of organizations experience a DDoS attack at least every month. While many enterprises are accelerating digital transformation to build omnichannel experiences, they need to keep security and privacy top of mind across all of these channels. This goal can only be supported by implementing a robust security architecture and organizational policy enforcement model that enables enterprises to prevent, detect, and react to newer threats, in near-real time. While it is easy to say, implementation of such a system can be extremely challenging. In this episode, Chris Hood is joined by Sai Saran Vaidyanathan and Sachin Kalra to break down the benefits and best practices for securing APIs for safer application development in the cloud.

FinTech is a fast growing and competitive industry. To stay ahead, companies need to innovate and release new features more quickly than the competition. In this episode, Theo chats with Giovanni Sakti (Gio) and Giri Kuncoro from Indonesian financial services platform GoTo Financial, which includes the popular e-payment service GoPay. Gio and Giri discuss their commitment to improving the developer experience (DX) and how that led to the creation of their new internal developer platform. Gio explains that GoTo Financial grew rapidly in the beginning, releasing more features and hiring more people. But that velocity soon reached a plateau as developers began to work in silos, leading to fragmented decision-making. And because GoPay’s systems need to be scalable and reliable, a lot of innovation is focused on cloud-native technologies such as microservices, containers, and service meshes. But as the infrastructure became increasingly more complex, developers found themselves spending more of their time fine-tuning infrastructure instead of delivering on features. Listen to the firsthand account of how Giri’s team built their internal developer platform called GoPay.sh to improve the developer experience using not just the four pillars of good DX, but also how empathy played a major part in improving the experience and ensuring full adoption.

This week, Jay and Theo talk with Anny Huang, DVP & Head of Digital Business for Singaporean insurer Income (previously NTUC Income). Singapore’s only insurance co-operative, Income is also one of the country’s oldest and largest insurers. It is also one of the most forward-looking. Income is the only composite insurer to offer all of its products and services online and has ranked as the number one digital insurer in Singapore for the last two years. Anny describes the pressure to retain that title as more insurers and InsurTech players enter the market. Central to Income’s success is its commitment to providing a fantastic digital experience. While Income has a digital transformation office, Anny believes true digital transformation starts with the BAU staff. She began by looking at marketing’s core activities to identify ways that technology could improve tactics and increase returns. By adding a data person to her team, it became possible to analyze how marketing activities in various channels produced financial returns for the business. Once it became possible to identify the weak links or failure points in these connections, Anny built a MarTech team to find solutions and improve returns – supported by machine learning and the Google Cloud team. Anny sees a key part of her role as being on top of the latest technologies and digital trends – which requires her to be naturally and insatiably curious. Whether she’s configuring her own smart home or checking out the latest apps her son has found, Anny never stops exploring, experimenting, and playing. Her formidable skills, experience, and passion for digital technologies of all kinds sees the discussion turn to gender biases in tech roles. According to McKinsey, the finance and insurance industry in Singapore is leading the way when it comes to gender parity – particularly at the executive level. But as certain roles in the industry continue to be dominated by males, Anny is proof, if proof were needed, that digital talent is defined by passion, not gender.

In this episode, Associate Professor Sarah Kummerfeld, Head of Data Science for the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, joins Jay and Theo to discuss the vital role cloud computing plays in genomic sequencing. Genomic sequencing has been contributing to medical research to improve the understanding and diagnosis of rare diseases for many years. However, sequencing a single genome produces approximately 100GB of data in its raw format, which then needs to be converted into a format that can be analyzed and shared with researchers. This process can take as much as 600 CPU hours per genome. The Garvan Institute knew that processing vast amounts of genomes was far beyond the capabilities of on-prem infrastructure. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, genomic sequencing took on even more importance. Sarah’s team realized that moving to the public cloud was the only way, embarking on a pilot program to process 14,000 genomes. Listen in as Sarah reveals how the team at Garvan Institute reduced the time it took to sequence the virus from a PCR test from two days to about four hours – dramatically speeding up contact tracing and reducing the spread of COVID-19 in the community. She talks through how the team uses a system called Terra, and how it became easier to manage the privacy and security of genomic data in Google Cloud, and the vast capacity required for this data in the region. In fact, Sarah’s team discovered that with Google Cloud, there was enough capacity available within Australia to run a pilot program three times as big. As biology increasingly becomes a data science, generating enormous pools of data, Sarah shares how the Garvan Institute is embracing the huge opportunity machine learning presents to help build and improve the vital genomic infrastructure for Australia.

In this episode, we are joined by Paul Thanaarmates Arriyavat, Head of Venture Builders at Kasikorn X, to discuss how Kasikorn X is making blockchain technologies, NFTs, and decentralized finance more accessible to people. Kasikorn X has long been committed to building the future of digital banking through its Business–Technology Group (KBTG). In 2021, KBTG launched Kasikorn X, focused on the rapidly evolving world of decentralized finance (DeFi). In partnership with Google Cloud, Kasikorn X develops projects that make the benefits of DeFi, the blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs accessible to most people. With the DeFi space growing so rapidly, any new startup needs to move fast to avoid missed opportunities. As a result, Kasikorn X operates separately from the bank and the KBTG, with its own operating model and culture. To date, Kasikorn X has already launched Kubix, the first ICO portal from a Thai financial institution, and Coral, a marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) empowering Thai and Asian artists to sell their artworks globally. Pauls gives a firsthand account of how the bank is looking to simplify the buying and selling of NFTs with the Coral platform, as most people lack the knowledge or understanding necessary to navigate this space. Coral aims to solve pain points by focusing on three key areas for both the artist and collector community - security, payments and reach. He ends by sharing how Kasikorn X intends to stay competitive by consistently innovating, and creating products that people love because they’re simple and easy to use. At the heart of the business is the same spirit of innovation that continues to drive rapid developments in blockchain, NFTs, and decentralized finance, while the culture is one of learning fast by trying everything.

In this episode, Marcus Lopez, Senior EVP of Digital, Data and Technology for Cathay Financial Holdings, joins Jay and Theo to discuss the organization’s approach to innovation as it rethinks its services and customer journeys. As the largest financial holding company in Taiwan with about 14 million customers, Cathay operates in China and most countries in Southeast Asia. Marcus explains how a joint venture with Alibaba six years ago prompted the Cathay team into reconsidering their approach to acquiring customers, product innovation, and the technology stack. Since then, the organization has undergone a mobile-first, data driven digital transformation with the help of Google Cloud, which he believes has allowed Cathay to become a market leader in Taiwan. Marcus breaks it down for us into three pillars with Cathay’s transformation. First, improving the customer journey and experience with new products and innovations. Second, looking at long term infrastructure investment to ensure the business has the capabilities it needs three to five years from now. And third, helping people adapt to more tech- and data-driven ways of working. Cathay is also looking beyond its own operations to find ways to embed its products and services within the customer journeys of its strategic partners with an API-driven strategy, as Cathay as a Service (CaaS). Cathay has been able to scale up this ecosystem of financial services and analyst capabilities to partners by using the Google Cloud and the Apigee API Platform. Learn what were some of the challenges faced, and about Cathay’s future expansion plans through Southeast Asia, where they treat each operation as a fresh start, redesigning everything from the ground up with a cloud native, mobile first approach.

In this episode, Jay and Theo are joined by Herman Widjaja, CTO at leading marketplace platform Tokopedia, to learn more about its culture of customer-focused innovation. Tokopedia’s recent merger with Southeast Asia's leading mobile on-demand services and payments platform Gojek to form the GoTo group, made headlines as Indonesia’s largest business deal. 13 years ago, Tokopedia’s two founders set out to solve the problem of transparent pricing for Indonesians, regardless which of the 17,000 islands they may live on, while also helping merchants to be successful without relocating to Jakarta. Today, 12+ million merchants use the platform to sell 638+ million products. Herman outlines six priorities for Tokopedia’s technology team over the next two years. These include strengthening the platform, increasing security and privacy, focussing on consumer technology innovation, AI-first and data driven transformation, financially optimized execution, and ultimately, building a world-class technology organization. Platform stability, reliability and quality are of maximum importance for Tokopedia. While five minutes of downtime might only shave a tiny fraction of a percent off the platform’s uptime record, every second has an impact on the lives of customers and the income of merchants. Tokopedia is also keen on expanding their use of AI and ML to solve problems and provide more powerful data-driven features for customers and merchants. Central to Tokopedia’s vision is customer empathy. Every new feature or build is guided by the question 'What’s in it for the customer?' Herman talks about how this has led to a cultural shift within the technology team that doesn’t seek to simply deliver on a PRD or BRD. By talking to customers and understanding their pain points, the team reveals new opportunities for innovation that solve genuine problems.

In this episode, Jay and Theo chat with Arjun Gupta, Senior Software Engineer at Josh Talks, to learn about the company’s mission to empower the youth of India, with relatable role models and e-learning. The media platform targets young people in smaller towns across India with content in ten vernacular languages. Arjun likens Josh Talks to an elder brother, guiding users through critical life decisions and mentoring them to improve their lives. Josh Talk’s ten YouTube channels currently have 14 million subscribers, with videos garnering about 70 million views each month. The success of Josh Talks led to the launch of an e-learning application, Josh Skills, to upskill young people and better-equip them to find employment. The flagship course is Spoken English, as this remains a common reason employers reject job applicants. A popular feature of Josh Skills is P2P, a peer to peer service allowing users to click a button to talk to friends within the Josh community, practicing their spoken English skills. To improve completion rates, Arjun shares how his team is currently working on ways to gamify the learning process, with subscribers competing in trivia contests to climb the leaderboard. But interactive features like this don’t come without technical challenges, which is where Google Cloud can help. To make game play within the app as real-time as possible, Josh Talks will scale its servers to handle the increased load with minimum latency. Josh Talks long-term vision is to support subscribers from school age (14-15) until they are settled into their careers (30-35), which is why Josh Talks is building an infrastructure capable of supporting multiple tools and products so it can grow alongside them.