Yunindita Prasidya · · 8 min readRiding the tide against AI agent bust
Welcome to The Signal, a monthly newsletter about how Asia’s scrappiest companies get more done with less. We go behind the scenes with the builders rethinking how people, tools, and information work together, and explore the connected infrastructure making smarter ways of working possible.
Hello reader,
The first AI agent demo I’ve ever witnessed was pretty amusing. It was for an agent created to order a margherita pizza.
It happened while I was attending a developer gathering hosted by Cloudflare at its London office in April 2025. An ElevenLabs engineer was showcasing how you could build an AI agent that integrates the software company’s voice tools into chatbots like Claude via its recently released model context protocol server. Basically, you can type in a prompt and have the agent do the call for you.
Back then, companies had just started exploring different applications for an AI agent. What exactly could it do?
The bar has since risen. It’s no longer enough for an agent to play personal assistant. We want it to audit workflows and catch capital leakage, with companies scrambling to onboard agents into their processes.
But the results have been less than stellar: 95% of AI pilots failed to deliver measurable returns, according to an MIT Media Lab report. Over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, Gartner says, citing escalating costs, unclear business value, and inadequate risk controls.
That is likely because many companies focus on building the AI application layer without digging into the invisible connectivity that sits underneath.
In contrast, Axium Industries, an industrial AI startup based in Singapore, treats connecting fragmented data as the hardest and most valuable part of the work.
Image credit: Ulla
“We spend 80% of our time working on data, only 20% on AI,” says Jeremy Ang, co-founder and CEO of Axium. “If any company comes in to say that they have it the other way around, I think customers should start to walk away knowing they’re in for a bad time with that approach.”
For this month’s edition of The Signal, Tech in Asia speaks with Ang, alongside Tobias Leong, Axium’s co-founder and CTO. The company took inspiration from the forward deployed engineering model (FDE) invented and popularized by Palantir, which sends engineers to clients’ factories and lets them figure out what needs solving. The co-founders say most of the heavy lifting is in data engineering.
It’s part of a bigger conversation about what it means to deliver AI-driven productivity. Is it a productive day when you burn tokens to outsource your pizza order to an AI agent? Or is it so when your agent finds a way to increase your company’s revenue by, say, 10%?
These hardly feel like a fair comparison. Yet they’re both part of the same conversation about what AI agents are actually for.
How Axium Industries builds AI agents that stick
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