Media Companions Asia hosted its first AETHER Summit in Singapore, convening senior executives from telecommunications, media, synthetic intelligence, healthcare and funding sectors for discussions on how AI is transitioning from experimental expertise to core infrastructure.
The closed-door discussion board ran at Marina Bay Sands, the place trade leaders examined AI’s shift from pilot applications towards capital-intensive, system-level deployment throughout networks and platforms.
A consensus emerged that the trade’s major problem has moved from technical functionality to execution at scale. Aggressive benefit now hinges on how successfully organizations combine AI into real-world programs spanning compute infrastructure, connectivity, knowledge administration and governance.
“AI is now not a device or a characteristic. It’s a system-level financial drive reshaping infrastructure, media, promoting, and experiences finish to finish,” stated Vivek Couto, CEO and govt director of Media Companions Asia. “The defining problem now’s execution and the way leaders make investments, govern, and scale AI responsibly in environments that contact hundreds of thousands of customers.”
Discussions centered on infrastructure’s evolving position within the AI period, with contributors analyzing how world funding is flowing towards compute sources, knowledge facilities, networks and vitality programs. Infrastructure is more and more seen as the first bottleneck shaping AI outcomes.
Telecommunications operators are positioning themselves as AI-native platforms. As intelligence embeds throughout networks and customer support, telcos are shifting past conventional connectivity to turn into supply platforms for AI companies together with real-time inference, personalization and automation.Success on this transition relies upon much less on accessing superior fashions and extra on capital allocation, platform structure and organizational transformation, leaders stated.
The summit tackled AI’s affect on media and leisure economics. AI manufacturing instruments are compressing timelines and reducing prices throughout animation, post-production, advertising and localization, difficult conventional studio and company benefits.
However declining manufacturing prices are flooding the market with content material, intensifying competitors for consideration. Authenticity, inventive judgment and style are rising as differentiators in an oversaturated panorama.
Content material libraries are being repositioned as strategic coaching knowledge for proprietary AI programs, reordering worth chains from labor-intensive workflows towards capital-intensive expertise infrastructure. The shift raises questions round mental property rights and cultural stewardship.
Members emphasised AI’s increasing position in public companies and nationwide improvement. Leaders mentioned population-scale deployments throughout fraud prevention, digital identification, healthcare, training and citizen engagement.
Belief, accountability and governance emerged as essential unresolved constraints. As AI programs turn into extra autonomous, contributors confused the significance of limiting scope, sustaining human oversight and designing for verifiable outcomes.
The summit framed governance as a design problem requiring early consideration fairly than a regulatory afterthought.
AETHER operated as a closed-door discussion board, with a CEO session beneath the Chatham Home Rule. Insights have been compiled into the AETHER 2026 Summit Report analyzing AI’s deployment part and implications for infrastructure and media.
JioStar and BytePlus supported the inaugural summit, with analysis partnership from MPA subsidiary ampd.
Audio system included Uday Shankar, founder and CEO of Bodhi Tree Programs and vice chair of JioStar; Vikram Sinha, president director and CEO of Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison; Simon Fuller, founding father of XIX Leisure; and Vicki Dobbs Beck, VP of immersive content material innovation at Lucasfilm/ILM.
Different contributors had been Ronnie Vasishta, senior vice chairman of telecom at Nvidia; Sharad Devarajan, adjunct professor at Columbia Enterprise Faculty and co-founder and CEO of Graphic India; Anton Reynaldo Bonifacio, chief AI officer and chief info safety officer at Globe Telecom; and Oscar winner Mark Sagar, chief AI officer at FaiBLE Media.
Expertise and funding executives included Ken Xu, options architect director at Alibaba Cloud; Jawn Lim, regional head of answer structure for GenAI at BytePlus; Dr. Wei Chu, chief scientist and co-founder of INF Tech; Pinn Lawjindakul, accomplice at Lightspeed Enterprise Companions; Man Piekarz, CEO of Panjaya; Josh Baillon, co-founder of Collective Creativeness; Jed Weintrob, CEO and co-founder of 30 Ninjas; and Ulf Ewaldsson, AI-RAN advisor and former president of expertise at T-Cellular.
Ronit Satchi-Fainaro, head of the Grey Faculty of Medical Sciences at Tel Aviv College, additionally participated.
Media Companions Asia is an unbiased insights and advisory platform centered on connectivity, leisure and expertise sectors throughout Asia Pacific. Based in 2001, MPA operates management boards together with APOS and AETHER.
