Vol.025 — The Direction Is Real. The Number Isn’t.
Date: 2026-05-12 | Newsletter
Key Summary
Rachio, a US smart-sprinkler company, went from 20% to 99% AI accuracy in customer support and cut its seasonal hiring entirely — figures a vendor published this week. Zenta’s response is methodical skepticism: the jump was bad-AI to good-AI, not zero-to-AI; the “one CS leader for 1M customers” headline hides Crescendo’s managed-human team still answering escalations on a different invoice; voice deflection is 25%, not 99%, and most ASEAN customer contact happens by voice; and the two-week deployment hides eighteen months of knowledge-base discipline that preceded it. Yet he argues the underlying direction is real and transfers directly to ASEAN businesses with predictable seasonal peaks — Singapore accounting firms at tax season, BPO operators at overflow, hospitality groups at long weekends, tuition centres at enrollment. Functional AI Partners’ distilled advice: build the knowledge base now before touching AI, because the AI plug-in is two weeks and the KB build is eighteen months. Most ASEAN SMEs Zenta knows are still at “ask Auntie May, she’s been here twenty years” — a single point of failure with a payroll number. Do it simple. The direction is real. Your labor calendar should change before your vendor list does.