Vol.022 — Does Your Company Need an AI Strategy Director?
Date: 2026-05-07 | Newsletter
Key Summary
The mood among ASEAN business owners this week, Zenta observes, is “unforeseeable” — not chaotic, but heavy with decisions that feel larger than a year ago. At an AI Agents Conference in New York, attendees confessed that “the naive attempt to deploy AI onto Enterprise in 2025 has failed dramatically,” while a Singapore survey claiming 84% AI adoption was built on consumer touchpoints like Gmail Smart Compose. Against the instinct to hire a new Chief AI Officer or “Agentic Architect,” Zenta argues that the right person already exists inside most organisations: someone who looks at fundamentals not hype, knows the actual business operations deeply, can drive change without a fear mindset, and believes AI agents are a genuine building block rather than a fad. Functional AI Partners frames their first-90-days job as deploying three small, specific, boring agents — inbox triage, customer-onboarding follow-ups, report formatting — and running their first performance reviews on those agents before going further. One additional filter: the right person will not ask about their title. Do it simple. The right person is probably already in your office.