How startups in SEA are experimenting with generative AI

The speed at which generative AI is changing the world is nothing short of breathtaking.

It feels like ChatGPT was launched only yesterday (it was actually November 2022), but sectors as diverse as education and travel have been changed forever.

We’re nowhere near the end game for how generative AI will be used in our workplaces, but we can peek into the future by seeing how startups are experimenting with it. We asked some founders in diverse industries just how they’ve started to use the tech in their work.

Sheji Ho – co-founder and CEO of HD, a healthcare and surgery marketplace

Sheji Ho / Photo credit: Sheji Ho

We’re exploring several applications of generative AI that range from the tactical to the strategic. We’re enhancing our day-to-day work, optimizing chat commerce, and creating long-term moats using our unique healthcare data set.

About 20% of our staff is already using ChatGPT daily to speed up simple tasks. These range from creating job descriptions and coming up with ad copy suggestions to generating basic code and templates for press releases and product specification.

Around 30% of our transactions on our HDmall marketplace are processed through chat commerce. GPT-3 had some limitations, especially when applied to non-English languages like Thai and Bahasa Indonesian, but initial tests with GPT-4 have been quite promising. This will allow us to streamline and enhance parts of the chat commerce funnel using GPT-4.

Lastly, for many startups, there’s no long-term moat in being just a wrapper for something like ChatGPT. And for those in Southeast Asia, it’s just not realistic to be building and training those models at the scale required to compete.

That said, HD’s value is in the unique data we collect. That’s why as a healthcare marketplace, we have a unique opportunity to build the de facto electronic health record for patients in our markets. When it’s eventually run through open-sourced or API-based AI models, that unique data will be super powerful in applications such as precision medicine and high-tech surgical care.

Ling Yah – lawyer and founder of the So This Is My Why podcast

Ling Yah / Photo credit: Ling Yah

As a full-time lawyer running a weekly podcast on the side, time is of the essence. I need to research, consume, and synthesize a tremendous amount of information in a very short time for each interview.