Tea & Jam: CTO Edition — Building an AI First Organisation
A working afternoon for technology leaders turning AI ambition into an operating reality over tea, coffee, and candid conversation.
A partnership between JDI (system integration), Preface (transformation enabler), and your CTO (internal leadership) working together to achieve an AI-first organisation.
When: 10th November 3:30pm - 5:30pm
Where: Preface Office, Singapore
Format: Fireside panel + facilitated roundtables
Seats: Intentionally limited
The Concept
Every company wants to be AI-first. Few know what that takes.
The gap between running a pilot and running an AI-first organisation is where most teams stall. Literacy is easy to buy; deployment at scale is the hard part as it touches your economics, your people, your data, and how you’re allowed to operate.
This edition brings CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and technical founders together to move along one shared roadmap: from literacy to deployment. We’ll work through the four dimensions that decide whether AI sticks:
ROI — Where AI actually pays back, and how to measure it.
Skills — Raising the whole org from AI-curious to AI-fluent.
Data — The foundations that make AI trustworthy and usable.
Governance — Deploying fast without losing control or trust.
Panel Discussion
Literacy to Deployment: The Road From “We’ve Read About AI” to “AI Runs in Production”
Most organisations are somewhere on the road from “we’ve read about AI” to “AI runs in production.” Our panel of technology leaders will map that journey honestly — what actually moved the needle on ROI, how they upskilled teams, what they had to fix in their data, and the governance calls they got right and wrong.
Speakers:
Kenny Liu, Head of GTM at Preface
Kenny Liu is Head of GTM at Preface, where he helps organisations adopt AI and turn emerging technologies into meaningful business outcomes. With more than two decades of leadership experience across architecture, business, technology and education, he has led multidisciplinary teams and complex projects across Asia. His academic background includes architecture at Cornell, a Master of Science in Multimedia and Entertainment Technology, and a doctorate focused on integrating AI into pre-construction planning and design. His work centres on practical AI adoption, organisational transformation and building communities around innovation.
Frank Lee, Founder & Managing Director at JDI Group
Mr. Frank Lee has been a Partner at TNF Ventures, a seed-stage fund with a portfolio of 20 companies (most having raised Series A/B or exited), since 2012, where he oversees all investment activities and portfolio companies and brings a deep network and understanding of the technology startup ecosystem and funding landscape across Singapore and Southeast Asia. In 2016, he founded Jumpstart Disruptive Innovations (JDI), a Singapore- and Vietnam-based investment advisory firm that helps fast-growing A/B/C-stage technology companies build technical teams in Ho Chi Minh City; JDI has since grown to over 350 personnel across six offices and expanded into Tech (Web2/Web3), Talent, Launch, Venture, and Capital services. He recently became Chair of the Startup and Innovation Sub-committee of the Singapore Chamber of Commerce in Vietnam, where he works to bridge the Singapore and Vietnam tech and innovation ecosystems.
Alan Lim, Co-founder & CEO at Southmead
Southmead is a company building AI agents that do real work and stay accountable. Alan came to AI from operations rather than from software. He started out rolling out barcode scanning and rebuilding inventory control in a warehouse, spent 15 years in enterprise software in Shanghai, and 7 years carried regional P&L across Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia in cross-border localization and order-management systems. He also led multi-country outreach for the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC). Each of those jobs was the same problem: getting a messy operation into a shape a system could act on. His approach has not changed since the warehouse floor. Sit inside the workflow, map the system, then automate or scale it.
Rachel Liew, Manager (Strategy Partnerships & Growth) at AI Singapore
Rachel is Manager of Strategy, Partnerships and Growth at AI Singapore (AI Products), where she drives the adoption and development of SEA-LION (Southeast Asian Languages in One Network), the region’s first open-source LLM purpose-built for Southeast Asia’s diverse languages and cultures. She manages cross-sector collaborations across government, industry and academia to advance AI adoption, surface real-world use cases and support companies in integrating LLMs into their applications. Prior to AI Singapore, Rachel was a Programme Manager at the Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore, managing the strategy, direction and setup of national AI and data research programmes funded by the National Research Foundation of Singapore.
Roundtable Discussions
Three tables. Three hard problems. After the panel, participants join facilitated small-group discussions, each anchored to a dimension of AI deployment where leaders are actively stuck.
Proving AI’s Worth While Building (ROI & Skills)
How do you justify AI spend to the business while your team is still learning to use it well? Discuss measuring return, picking first use cases, and upskilling engineers without stalling delivery.Getting Your Data Ready for AI (Data)
Quality, access, and structure decide whether AI works. Trade approaches to cleaning up data foundations, handling sensitive information, and making internal knowledge usable by AI systems.Deploying AI Without Losing Control (Governance)
Agentic workflows and AI in the SDLC raise real risk. Compare guardrails, review processes, and policies that let teams move fast while staying safe, compliant, and trusted.Your first 10 tech hires (Skills & Team building)
Who you hire early sets the ceiling on what you can build. Compare how leaders sequence their first engineering hires in an AI-first world; which roles to prioritise, whether to bet on AI-fluent generalists or deep specialists, and how to keep a small team moving fast without hiring people you’ll outgrow.
Who Should Attend
CTOs
VPs & Heads of Engineering
Technical Co-founders
Why Attend
A clearer picture of the literacy-to-deployment roadmap.
Practical moves on ROI, skills, data, and governance.
Candid lessons from peers already deploying AI at scale.
Real connections in Singapore’s technology leadership community.
Seats are intentionally limited to keep the conversations candid and the networking meaningful.