Unlocking the Economic Impact of AI in Southeast Asia

Hello everyone and welcome. I'm Natalie Cone, head of the OpenAI Forum. At OpenAI, our mission is to build AGI that benefits everyone. Through the forum, we spotlight conversations that show how our technology is helping people solve complex challenges, and we learn directly from experts about how AI is reshaping their fields.

We're also committed to connecting with our community around the globe. This past May, our forum team traveled to Singapore for the ATX Summit, where we used AI to bring artifacts from the Peranakan Museum to the world.

Today, we're excited to host our very first virtual event designed for a Southeast Asia-friendly time zone. In this fireside chat, Dr. Ronnie Chatterji, Chief Economist at OpenAI, joins Roderick Purwana, Managing Partner at East Ventures, one of the region's most active and diverse venture capital firms.

Together, they'll explore how AI is driving innovation and fueling growth across Indonesia's dynamic economy. We hope to see you here in the forum often, and we encourage you to complete your profile so that you receive invitations to in-person events and all of the perks of forum membership.

Without further delay, please welcome Ronnie and Roderick to the forum stage.

Hey, everyone's ready. Good afternoon again, everyone. Welcome to East Ventures Jakarta office. Greetings to our audiences joining online as well through our YouTube channel.

I hope everyone is excited as I am to discover the economic impact of AI in emerging markets from a very special guest in the fireside chat with Open AI Today.

My name is Danita from East Ventures Corporate Communications team and it is a pleasure to be your emcee for this session.

We're honored to have Aaron Ronnie Chatterji, PhD, OpenAI's first chief economist and former White House technology advisor, and other members of OpenAI as well today. Welcome Ronnie and team.

Ronnie will be joined by Roderick Burwana, our managing partner, who will moderate this session. Without further ado, I invite Roderick to deliver his opening remarks. The stage is yours.

Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming here and being here with us tonight, today. So

We're very excited to do this fireside chat with OpenAI, and we're very honored to host OpenAI in Indonesia.

I'm Roderick Purwana, Managing Partner at East Ventures. And for those of you that are new to East Ventures, we are a leading sector agnostic venture capital firm in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, backing over 300 portfolio companies from seed to growth stage, which a lot of you are here today.

So since 2009, we've supported over 500 entrepreneurs, building impactful, innovative solutions across various sectors.

We're early backers of prominent tech companies in the region. We back Tokopedia, Trafalocar, Ruanguru, Wearsix, Sendit, IDN, Sosiolab.

4A Coffee, which just went IPO a couple of months ago, and Tech in Asia, who's sponsoring tomorrow's and hosting tomorrow's event, Asia Economic Summit. At the heart of what we do at these ventures is the deep belief and the power of collaboration and knowledge sharing.

So it brings us to today's event. One of the sectors we're focusing on is AI first. So we expect a lot of AI startup to start to take off.

A lot of the businesses today have started using generative AI and plan to implement agentic AI as well in the near future. So this exciting growth is fueled by new innovation.

that's designed to help companies work more efficiently, but also boost productivity across different industries. Earlier this year, East Ventures, we also launched IndoBuild AI. So it's a dynamic platform for AI innovators to learn, build, and showcase the AI-driven solutions for real-world challenges in Indonesia.

We did a series of workshops. We also did a demo day here about a couple of months back. We selected two winners with groundbreaking creative solutions, and they are now part of the ecosystem.

So with that, maybe we wanted to... I wanted to start the...

with the fireside chat, exploring this very timely important topic, unlocking economic impact of AI in emerging markets. And at the end of the session, we'll also have a quick Q&A session with participants. So with that, it's a privilege to welcome our distinguished guest, Dr. Aaron Roni Chatterji, Chief Economist at OpenAI. Give her a round of applause, please.

Yeah. So maybe quick introduction. I'll give a quick overview. So Roni is the first person to hold this role at OpenAI, inaugural role, big role, where he helps shape how artificial

intelligence intersects with the economy and policy. Beyond that, he's the Mark Burgess and Lisa Benson Burgess Distinguished Professor at Duke University, which is nearby to where you live, I guess, right?

Yeah. Has had also extensive career at the intersection of, it's very unique. He had experiences in academia, policy with the government, and also business as well. So I think it's a intersection of three very interesting things.

So he also previously served in the Biden administration as the White House CHIPS coordinator, acting deputy, and also acting deputy director of the National Economic Council, helping shape national strategies on industrial policy.

manufacturing and supply chains. Prior role also include chief economist at the Department of Commerce, senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisors, also faculty position at Harvard Business School. If I have all day, I think the list goes on and on, but you know, I'm gonna stop there. I think that's enough of the introduction, but very excited to have him here, explore how AI can create real world impact, especially for emerging markets where we are.

So with that, maybe I wanna hand over quickly to Ronnie to give a quick remarks before we jump into the discussion.

Yeah, well, first I just wanna say thank you for the kind introduction.

and hosting me here at East Ventures. This is, before I jump into my remarks, I just want to thank you all for being here, but also congratulate Roderick and the entire team for what you've built. You know, hearing about the impact of your firm, the ecosystem, not just in Indonesia, but all across the region is amazing.

As we walked over here, I kind of tried to get the secrets to success. And I think we can learn a lot at OpenAI from how successful you've been in this market and the companies that you have invested in and nurtured. And it's also really good to see the next generation of founders here that you've brought together.

And I'm looking forward to your comments and questions.

The great thing about working at an organization like OpenAI is that every day you learn something new. And one of the reasons is we work with a lot of young entrepreneurial people. So I feel like, for me, every day I'm a student. Even though he introduces me as a professor, I feel like every day I'm a student. And hopefully I can be a student again today for you all.

I also want to say this is the first event in Indonesia that we'll be doing for something called the OpenAI Forum. The OpenAI Forum is a global network of experts across fields that meets periodically to bring together ideas and insights about the future of AI. And whether you're here in person or watching,

on the live stream. There's a QR code you can click to become a forum member, and I hope you'll do so. I found it to be an invaluable network across all the fields that I'm interested in. I've spoken to the forum many times. Of course, happy to be the first person here in Indonesia to kick off the event. And whether it's economics or math or another area that you're interested in, you'll find all that in forum. So I hope people will take advantage to join this, and this will be the first of many events in Indonesia that we can build. So I will just give a couple of brief remarks, and then Roger can ask me all the hard questions, okay, about the economy.

I started off the day at the University of Singapore, and I started off the day at the University of Singapore and I started off the day at the University of Singapore. I started off the day at the

University of Indonesia. It was a great honor to speak to students there. As you all know, the students actually are on summer break or like a break now, but many came back to hear us talk, which was really interesting.

And a few things happened, I think there, and a few comments that really stuck with me. One is this particular market in Indonesia is incredibly exciting right now.

We have seen dramatic growth over the last year in terms of chat GPT usage, OpenAI's product here in Indonesia. It has grown three X in over just a little over a year. And to think about.

It accelerated. Somebody said, maybe I come back in six weeks and it'll grow again like this. But it's hard to imagine how quickly something's growing if it grows three times in a year.

And I say that not just to talk about sort of chat GPT as a product, but generative AI as a set of tools that many of you are using in your businesses today. So the growth is amazing.

The second thing that's kind of interesting is the demographics of the users. Every time as a chief economist, I get to look at the data, the numbers. You'll see this during my fireside chat with Roderick. I nerd out on the numbers. I'm excited by these things.

And when you look at the demographics of the Indonesian market.

it is very much a young person's market. It's a young person's game. And your demographic profile means that youth is really gonna lead the way in Indonesia. So everywhere I've gone, it's been a young audience and that's been really exciting.

I think 75% of the population in Indonesia is younger than me. So I feel like an old guy now, coming back after a decade to Indonesia that I'm part of the 25% of the old group. But in some ways, it also is apropos that this is gonna be a market that is gonna grow in a big way driven by the youth. And so this is also exciting.

And the third thing is just the applications and use cases that you're.

seeing here. I'll talk a little bit more about this later, but people are using Indonesia to learn new concepts and skills. Ask for advice is a very high thing on the list of use cases. People are using it to make images. So, image generation is one of the most popular use cases in Indonesia.

Another thing that's really popular is factual information, sort of the way people might use a search engine. They're using chat GPT in that way.

Some of the emerging use cases I'm seeing when I look at the data that aren't at the top of the list, but they're there, are things like coding. A lot of the students told me that they're using it to either learn to code or assist them in writing new code. I think

that's something you're going to see as this market continues to grow. Um, you're in the top group in Indonesia in terms of number of users, but in terms of APIs and developers, developers using our APIs, you're in the top, let's say 30 of all markets. So there's definitely room to grow from the developer standpoint. And I expect many people in the audience are going to be part of that group.

So when you think about the economic impact, I'll just say this and then Roger, maybe we can get to the chat. It's going to happen through young people adopting this technology, integrating it into their daily lives, and also businesses like the ones that you have founded and are running, trying to figure out new workflows.

to apply AI to, getting more productivity per employee and scaling faster than you did before. So it's exciting to me if I come back, let's say six weeks, six months, a year, I'm gonna see a lot of growth in the market, but I'm also gonna see the growth on the startup and business side, because I think that's probably gonna be the key to unlocking economic prosperity in Indonesia and beyond. And so with that, Roderick, I'm happy to talk about what I'm seeing in the economy here, elsewhere, and how we're thinking about the economics of AI, but great to be here and welcome to OpenAI Forum and Indonesia Ventures.

Well, thank you again for spending your afternoon with us, Ronnie.

No, and just quickly, I had the privilege of having lunch earlier together with Ronnie. So I had a little bit of preview of the insights, I guess, right? But hopefully that he'll be able to share with all of you today.

He came in late last night and then this morning already spent some time at the University of Indonesia right there. And then now you're here with us.

So we'll try to use this opportunity to really dig in as much as we can. And we'll leave a little bit of time at the end to try and see whether there's questions from the audience as well that we can maybe engage, right?

But just again, I think I might have given a little bit of a preview of who Ronnie is, what he's doing.

it's always best to maybe listen directly from the source. So maybe the first question is, maybe if you don't mind, can you tell us a little bit about your background, right? Your experiences and what your role is today as Chief Economist at OpenAI.

Yeah, sure. I grew up in New York and went to Cornell University. That's something else we just find out. We have this in common. We're both alumni of the same university, which is fantastic. So next time I go to my reunion at Cornell, I'm gonna bring you with me.

Yeah, yeah, we should, we should, for sure. And you know, it's there actually that I got my first introduction to understanding the economics of Southeast Asia. So I had a...

Indonesian professor named Iwan Aziz, who's well-known, I think, in this country. Very well-known guy. Amazing professor. Amazing professor. And he was a professor at Cornell for many years. And so I got to know him, took his class on ASEAN, and have continued to learn from him and even just corresponded with him before I came today. So that's really when Indonesia came on my radar, when I was in college. I got a chance to travel here later when my sister studied in Indonesia. She lived here for two years doing research for her PhD. So this is not the first time, hopefully not the last time I come. I got interested in economics for the reasons, I think,

maybe that Professor Aziz was too, I want to explain why some countries grew faster than others, why there was economic development in some parts of the world and not others.

My parents, as you might guess, came from India as immigrants to the United States. And so the conversation around the dinner table was very much like, well, how come the US economy is growing so much? How come it's a great place for opportunities? And at the time my parents had left India in the 1960s, it wasn't growing as fast.

Now, nowadays, things are different, right? These emerging markets are growing much faster. But growing up, my question was, there are so many great and industrious Indians in the United States and the UK and Canada. Why wasn't India growing fast?

And this kind of developed my love of economics. One of the answers to that question was a dynamic private sector. And so after working in the private sector at Goldman Sachs, I did my PhD at UC Berkeley in the business school and studied business economics. And that was really because I thought, look, if I'm going to understand these differences in growth around the world, it's going to be innovation, entrepreneurship, business. And that's how I really got started learning about new technologies.

And the last thing I'll say is I didn't know anything about AI back then. I don't think I could have even told you what it stood for, but I was studying an earlier set of technologies, the internet, social media, enterprise software at the time I was a student.

which has informed my view quite a bit in terms of how I'm thinking about the economics of AI today. So that's how I got started.

No, great. Thank you so much for that. And I think maybe just still on the same subject, right? So the journey, and if you don't mind, today, you know, politics, geopolitics, I think it's quite interesting, right? And you've had quite a bit of experience also, right, with a couple of other administrations, both with Obama and also with Biden, I guess, right? And, you know, serving in the White House, teaching at top universities, now also being at the frontier of AI, right? How has that journey or experience sort of shaped how you think about that? And, you know, as you mentioned, back then, AI was maybe a foreign word for all of us, right? But now, you know, it's not.

It's, you know, at the center of what you do. And maybe also how does it shape how you think about AI and especially economic impact in your role, right? As chief economist, maybe, right.

Very much. I mean, I think about the three perspectives I bring to this job and my work. One is definitely from academia. You know, having done a PhD, having done research, looking at the impact of technology on firms and society, I'm really interested in doing this kind of research on AI as well. I think to really understand the impact of AI on society, we need to do serious research, both the scientific and technical research, but also social science research. And so one of my jobs.

Eyes do that kind of work. But I also got really interested in government and how the rules of the game shape new technology. Because it's not just the characteristics of technology or the firms that use it that determine how successful it is. It also is determined by how governments build institutions that govern the adoption of those technologies. Regulations, for example, subsidy programs.

And so when I went to the White House for the first time to work for President Obama, I was working on small business and entrepreneurship policy. For President Biden, I ran the CHIPS program, which many people know. $52 billion to subsidize semiconductor, computer chip, many.

manufacturing in the United States, which was a really good introduction to the economics of AI because we know that chips are the foundation of the value chain to produce AI models in many ways, right? So that experience from government let me think, oh man, like I'm writing these academic papers and not many people read my papers. Maybe my mom is the only one who reads the papers. She also wrote the introduction that Roderick was saying.

But so if you think about this, the government piece was really important part of the job as well because as I travel around the world talking about AI, a big determinant of whether countries and companies are adopting it is their government policy.

And then the last piece, having taught in a business school, worked at the

to businesses like Goldman Sachs, understanding how enterprises make decisions.

You know, we can be quite idealistic in academia and in government. You know, we think that the right thing is always gonna win the day. You know, and people here in the audience are founders and many people watching on YouTube are founders.

If you're thinking about the economics of the decision, the ROI, you're gonna adopt technologies that actually make economic sense. So this, sort of putting these three lenses together, understanding the impact of technology on the world, understanding the role that government plays and thinking about the dollars and cents of the return on investment.

These three perspectives have shaped what I do at OpenAI.

Oh, that's great, thank you.

And, you know, I guess open AI started in the U.S. and whatnot, right? But U.S. has always been sort of a beacon for sort of global and whatnot, right?

But how do you see, especially in your role, right? How do you see AI influencing sort of the global economic growth, right? Over the next 5, 10 years and on a broad level, right?

And are these like, you know, I think we were talking about impact measurement and whatnot. Are these just like efficiencies or are these really structural changes that you think we'll see, right? Across the different applications and whatnot, right?

And, yeah, I mean, the world will be different in even a year, right? And we're talking about weeks now, right? So, but how do you see that, I think, affecting sort of global economy?

Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, one is…

One of the great opportunities of this role is to be able to travel around the world and see how AI is impacting societies. I've done talks in London, in Brussels, in Munich, in Paris. We'll go to Sydney next, and we've done Delhi.

As you go to each market, you start to see, yes, we're based in San Francisco, but this is a global phenomenon. And in some ways, I learned so much from the other markets that I can bring back to the United States and to open AI. The company itself is very global.

If you look at the people who work at the organization, they come from all parts of the world. So the idea of where the use cases are going to take shape, where the economic impact is going to take shape,

is going to happen. I think this is going to be a global story.

Your next question, which is about is it going to be productivity increases or is it going to be transformational? This economists, they're very split on this. I think it's interesting. Some economists are looking at ChachiPT and they are seeing it as almost like an advanced search engine. I don't know if many people use it like this, but I think many people do.

You type something into it, you get a helpful summary back. You ask it a specific question, it gives you the information back. And if ChachiPT and other Gen-AI tools are going to stay in that category for the next five years, the economic impact will be modest and perhaps significant. But in the end of the day, it's

going to transform the way that we work and live. You'll get a better summary, you can write an RFP, you maybe get some wardrobe tech, you know, advice like I do, but in the end it's not going to change everything that much.

Other economists, and I find myself more in this category, are thinking about it as the ability to discover new ideas that don't yet exist. To create novel combinations in science, for example, around drug discovery or coming up with new combinations to create innovations that we don't yet have.

And we know that innovations, going way back to my PhD, that's what drives economic growth. So if we're going to come up with things that haven't been invented before, scale that.

them, if you can have autonomous agents that can start new organizations and work together, well, then the economic thesis starts to change. And so I think when you work in these labs and you see the cutting edge of AI, you see this future that is more robust and more transformational than if you just look at ChachiPT the way it exists today. That division between economists who see it as it is today versus those who are thinking about the future, that's probably what gives you divergent estimates in terms of the impact on the economy. The founders here listening to me, they're building the future. And so I think they're more likely to see that. But I also think we have to study and watch this over time and see how it develops. That's what any good

empirical scholar would do, and it's what I do as the chief economist. Got it. And maybe we'll bring it closer to home, right? So, look, all these advances, all the things that we're looking at accelerating, it either comes from the US or maybe China to a certain extent today, right?

So, how about Southeast Asia? How about Indonesia, right? I mean, will there be significant roles or benefits for countries in this part of the world to play in AI, right? Or this is just going to be a game for the leading countries and whatnot, right? And will AI actually widen the gap in terms of development, or it's actually going to bring things closer together?

So, I think

the answer to this question, you know, what will be the role of Indonesia? What will be the role of Southeast Asia? The participants here in the audience will determine that. And I think at the end, you're going to have a big role.

If I'm looking at these companies in your portfolio, looking at the companies that you took public, right, looking at the companies that you had successful exits for, or even just the companies that are growing all across Southeast Asia, right? Grab is one example, popular here, I know, and Shopee and many others, right?

So as you think about the companies here, you're already building new innovations that are changing the world. What's it going to take, though, to lead the way in AI? And I will say that if you look at enterprise software, which many of successful entrepreneurs

of the most recent past were successful in that space. A lot of the billion dollar companies were built in the application layer, right? And I believe, right, AI will have a similar sort of phenomenon.

Many people are focused on open AI and the companies that build foundation models, but there are gonna be many applications downstream in particular verticals like finance, health, education, energy, retail, and being able to use our APIs or another organization and build on top of that to deliver a service in those industries. I believe that has to be the foundation of a lot of successful companies.

And when I think about Indonesia.

I mean, you guys are known, and we talked about it before, to have a global and a local angle, right? For many of your products here, because you're an open market comparatively to other places in the region, you have a global player, you know, global players for search and global players for, let's say, e-commerce, social media.

But then there's local players also, in particular, application verticals that make sense here in Indonesia, where the Indonesian firms are winning. I imagine something similar might happen in AI, and you're going to have to, the folks in the audience, pick those application verticals and try to win.

Will there be a moat, a barrier to entry in those application verticals? You're going to have to figure that out, but I do think there'll be opportunities

just like there wasn't enterprise software in the applications. And just on that, maybe give a little bit of hint for the audience, right, today. Are there any exciting white spaces that you see that potentially could be interesting areas for founders that are here or not, right, to really start to think about tackling on or doing in the AI space?

I think, especially in the context of Indonesia and what I've heard today, what I've heard your government talking about, business leaders, there's two areas I'll highlight. One is definitely education. I mean, we've thought about Indonesia in this context as a lot of regional diversity. People have mentioned that it's very different, let's say in Jakarta, than it would be outside Jakarta in any other.

places, right? And so if you're thinking about access to education, right, in Sulawesi or Borneo, all these other areas that we've talked about today, how are kids they're going to get access to the educational tools they need? What kinds of products can be built? Where can AI help supplement the teachers that are going to be under resourced there compared to how they are in Jakarta?

I think that's an interesting opportunity here that definitely will be a local solution, a local opportunity, because you know, the context, you know, the culture, right, you know, Indonesia. So I think education is one area where there'll be lots of resources, potentially, and global and local, but there'll probably be an Indonesian entrepreneur that helps crack that code. The

one I'll say, this is a little more personal, but I think one thing people are really undervaluing in chat GPT is the role it provides in giving people advice. When I look at the use cases, people are expecting things about workplace productivity and generating ROI at work.

But a lot of what people use generative AI tools for is getting advice about their life, about their career, about their relationships. There's a difficult line in terms of how these models should give us advice and inform our key decisions.

But there's also a lot of economic value in giving people good advice. And I think that that advice, just like the global local

dichotomy we talked about before, much of that advice will be locally contextual and important. And can you as an entrepreneur help deliver that advice on really important life decisions, right, which maybe involves a little bit of sort of, you know, objective information, but also requires conversation and analysis. This is something I'm really interested in. And I think that people don't think about the economic consequences of providing advice as much as they should.

Yeah, so great advice. Maybe on that as well, right? I think so, you know, in terms of how the startups can differentiate themselves, right? And today, there's many, many language models, right? And look, I think

Let's just be very honest, OpenAI, ChatGPT is one of the most used ones right today, right? So if everyone starts to build on that layer, use the same thing or whatnot, are there still ways that they can, you know, the startup founders or, you know, startups can be different and how they differentiate themselves within the same model if they all use the same models?

Oh yeah, but I think if you have that relationship with the customer, right, building, you know, people used to use the word wrapper pejoratively. I build a wrapper on top of API. I don't see wrapper as a pejorative term. I actually think of it as a potential business opportunity. You can build on the rails that OpenAI has produced, right? There's a lot of good reasons to do that. But if you...

are going to own that relationship with the consumer, if you're going to be the one who collects the data to understand how to serve them better, you can create tremendous advantage. And I think you've seen this in a lot of examples in Southeast Asia and Indonesia, previous waves of technology. So I do think you can do that. It is very competitive and difficult, but I don't think just because the foundation layers are provided by another company, doesn't mean you can't build a winning product on top of that.

Particularly look at areas where local regulations and context matters. I mentioned education, but also healthcare is another key one. Also a priority here in Indonesia for the government and for a lot of business leaders. In healthcare, there's lots of local information rules around how you handle.

healthcare data, how healthcare is provided, that only an Indonesian would know about Indonesia, perhaps, those are the opportunities to build on top of these models to do things that we haven't done before. So, these are the opportunities I see. Maybe during the Q&A, there'll be people who are telling me they're working on that already, or they'll say there's another area. But these are the ones that I see are interesting. So, we'll jump to Q&A right after this.

One last quick question, maybe, right? And so, I think for founders and startups, right, I think, you know, they're all asked to be lean, and then, you know, efficiencies and whatnot, right? But when you're working with AI, especially today, right, on the compute and whatnot, right, you require a lot of capital and whatnot, right? So,

So how do you view that as well, right? Because it's really, a lot of times it's capital intensive, right? Is AI a net gain for startup efficiency? I'm like, where do you find the efficiencies or not? Or how do you view that?

It's such a good question. I think what's great about doing these visits is my answer would have been different before I talked to Roderick, actually earlier today. So my answer now, after talking to him, is that I think for some startups, let's say at Silicon Valley, you are seeing AI increasing the amount of revenue per employee. Many of you are reading about this and seeing this, which is now one of the biggest metrics that companies are tracking is revenue per employee. But this is a context in Silicon Valley where the employees are.

relatively expensive, right? In other markets, right, where you're saying compute is a bigger constraint, right? But labor is less expensive, you might see a totally different relationship. This is what you've taught me today.

But it's interesting because what you're seeing now in Indonesian startups might be a different pattern because of your local conditions. I do think the compute costs, the cost of intelligence is dramatically dropping.

If you think about the cost for a million tokens in 2023 versus now, it's come down almost 99X, I think, depending on the recent estimates. It's amazingly low in terms of how much this costs.

But in some markets, those trade-offs, right, between compute and labor might work differently in different markets.

places and you're going to see different models and so what can you in Indonesia with the revenue per employee that you have versus in somewhere else I think is going to be really important. The other thing to think about is I know you're building data centers and infrastructure in the country. There's plans to do so. How quickly will that infrastructure come online? How will it change your ability to utilize those computes for local solutions? That's going to be really important and I see as part of our open AI for countries portfolio lots of nations investing in the building blocks of AI.

We need energy. We need data centers with GPUs and memory chips to be able to train LLMs and get inference from the models to power all these use cases.

cases that we're talking about. So that's the other big X factor. Got it.

I know the audience is probably anxious to maybe ask questions, so maybe I'll open up for Q&A quickly, I think.

And I think, do we have also, I think, people from the YouTube live stream or not to ask questions or no? No, just here in the audience.

Okay. So anyone have questions?

Okay. Ernest.

Okay. Yeah. Hi, Rony. Really a great opportunity for me to participate here.

I'm Ernest, CEO and co-founder of Recosystem, a climate tech company for circular economy. I think, yeah,

experience implementations of AI improving the productivities. I think there is no doubt that it improves a better economics for example in our cases for chat GPT we can create a content or even create the right words for our apps to influence people recycling their ways start to sort the ways in the better way by getting advice instead of hiring one content writers for example cost efficiency.

Even for my personal life let's say I setting up my office previously I need to go to the Feng Shui advisor now I just photo my room and which well

apa karpet, apa meja, dan kecerdasan yang bisa diberikan.

Pertanyaan saya lebih tentang pengalaman Anda juga sebagai pendidikan.

Dengan memberikan lebih banyak akses dan mudahnya untuk melakukan hal-hal seperti mungkin perkembangan perangai, pekerjaan, kemampuan mereka, persetujuan mereka, apakah Anda berpikir itu akan berpengaruh dalam jangka panjang, terutama untuk Indonesia yang saat ini gap produktifnya cukup rendah sebagai negara berkembang, sekarang kita berpengaruh untuk memberikan akses ke mudahnya AI, dan membuat kehidupan kita lebih mudah.

yang membangkitkan kita sebagai manusia yang memiliki persetujuan tergantung dari hal ini, bagaimana pendapat Anda?

Itu pertanyaan yang bagus Ernst, terima kasih. Sebenarnya pertanyaannya, ada banyak hal di sini tentang bisnis dan kehidupan, tapi saya akan mengatakan bahwa itu adalah pertanyaan tentang apa yang membuat kita manusia, apa yang membuat kita manusia dalam dunia kecerdasan kecerdasan. Saya berpikir banyak tentang hal ini karena saya memiliki tiga anak lelaki, dan saat mereka membesar, saya ingin memastikan bahwa mereka mempelajari kemahiran yang mereka butuhkan untuk berhasil, tetapi juga manusia yang bahagia. Dan itu berarti cara mereka menggunakan alat-alat ini akan sangat berinfluensi, karena saya menggunakannya dalam banyak cara yang sama seperti Anda.

do, although the Feng Shui, I should do that more. But as I see these great uses, I want to show my kids, hey, here's how you could use it. But I don't want them to lose the critical thinking, the resilience, the grit that it needs to work through a hard problem.

The boring book that my language arts teacher assigned me, I want them to read that book, too. The mathematical proof that took me hours to finish, I want them to do that, too. How do you do that in a world where you can do things much more easily, like with ChatGBT and other tools?

And so I think in the education system is where this has to be.

navigated, parents will play a role too, I hope. At least I intend to play that role. So I think in each country, in each context, we're gonna have to make rules of the road for how these tools are gonna be used and under what conditions. And just as we think about calculators being introduced to mathematics or internet research for writing composition, we'll have to figure out how students will use these tools.

And I think if they use it at the right time, even into their workplace where they're employees, I think some of the things you're worried about, they can be mitigated. Because in the end, you want your employees and you as a CEO to work hard, to persevere, to not just push the easy button every time, right? On the other hand, when it comes.

to making a slide deck or writing that content, you do want them to push the easy button so they can use their efforts to do other things that are higher margin for your business. And so I think a lot of education is still going to be training people how to be the best humans. And that's going to be interacting with technology in productive and healthy ways. This is what I hope we need to do in education. And as a parent, I think about it all the time. That's my hope for this.

Great. All right. So we have time for, well, two more questions, maybe.

Yeah. Maybe next to an artist.

Yeah. Yeah. Hello. My name is Angga. So I built my skill. My skill is a kind of preparation startup.

from Indonesia. So currently, the usage of AI for education, for upscaling and preparation really help us to build contents, to build assignments for our students. And we make content five times faster than before because of AI.

But the counterproductive is that because of AI, many people get let off, and many entry-level jobs are in danger because many companies prefer to use AI rather than recruiting people. So it's quite a bit counterproductive for us. We can make learning content faster, but there's no job for them.

So on your hypothesis or prediction, what kind of jobs that are suitable for this?

first graduates, for these young people, that maybe can utilize AI. Thank you.

Yeah, I'll just be brief to get some more questions. It's a great question. As a parent, I also think about this, because while I want AI to accelerate and unleash these new opportunities, like, you know, cures for diseases or environmental solutions, the impact on the job market is also very important to me, because I'm going to have my kids working one day, hopefully, in these kind of jobs.

There's a couple things I think are important. One is, we've seen a generation of new technologies in the past, the electricity, the steam engine, the computer chip that I talked about. And these things revolutionized the economy. Some of them took a little bit longer

than you might expect given how amazing they were. But in all those cases, human beings found a way to adapt and create new work that's actually very productive. So, you know, if you look at the percentage of people who work in agriculture today versus who did in the year 1900, we have many fewer people who are farming the land, but the productivity of that land is higher and we're producing more food.

And so if there's a transition that allows people to move into occupations and jobs that are more productive and more satisfying, this can be very positive. But if it happens too quickly, and as you point out, the efficiencies that companies are getting out of AI, outpaces.

is the skill development, this is going to be a negative. And so we have to make sure we both sort of emphasize the skill development and try to target people in directions that are going to be the most useful for them. What are those directions? Just really quickly, it goes back to your point about being a human.

I still think that skills like leadership and teamwork are going to be very important. The EQ, not just the IQ in all sorts of tasks. And I think many young people are going to find that aligning with AI, complimenting AI, right? Finding a way to get the most out of themselves and the AI is going to be a very useful thing to do.

And flexibility and grit are still going to be very useful in a world, especially one that's changing very fast.

So I do think there are skills that we can teach our kids. I do think we have to keep track of the job market in each country to make sure that we understand which roles are growing and which are shrinking to make sure we're not sending people to the wrong areas. But these are things as an economist, I think I can develop some insights, but we'll need to work together with business leaders and governments all around the world to make this happen. But it's an important question. This is how I'm approaching it. There was another hand. Is it? Oh. Yeah. Please.

Hi, Ronnie. Thanks for your time. My name is Chiara, and I'm on the seed investment team here at East Ventures, and we've had a lot of startups.

to us incorporating AI into their products. And so my question is, how should early stage investors, especially in emerging markets like Indonesia, evaluate the scalability and defensibility of AI startups?

Yeah, it's a great question. And you have an interesting job. So I think it's an exciting time to look at these startups, especially at a great organization like this, but in a good market. So it's a cool job to be in. I think my question would be, what are they trying to scale? And is there early evidence that they're doing that? A lot of companies come to me with a story of the thing that they're going to build.

But I bet that a company like yours, an investment firm, is also looking for evidence. And so a lot of times what I'm trying to look for is an A, B test or a growth rate I can measure over a period of time on the metrics I care about.

I also think AI implementation is not as easy as it sometimes sounds, right? So while a company may be doing it on a small scale as a startup, what happens when they have much more demand than they have now? Are their systems and infrastructure durable enough to actually scale with them? Do they have the talent to do it? What happens when they have their first outage? These are questions that I think are really important.

So they might be able to show you some magic on the first use case, but I think you have to kick the tires in that direction.

The other thing I'll say, the last thing on this

is leadership from the top really matters. Anytime I get on a call, we have some of our great open AI go-to-market team here. When they invite me to join the calls, if I don't see a senior leader on that call who's making sure from the other side, from the client side, that this AI implementation is actually going to go forward, I reduce my estimates of success. You do need leadership to make sure that these implementation projects go well because a lot of AI is actually re-engineering workflows in a very fundamental way, right? This is not just sort of dropping a SaaS solution into a company, it is really re-imagining the way we work and not every company is ready for that.

And I think that this is something I've learned where you can get a lot of early kind of micro wins from productivity, but to really change your enterprise and scale, you need a different mindset, like an AI first mindset is probably what you're looking for in these stage ventures. So I wish you good luck. I hope you'll have some examples for me.

Thank you for the questions. And you know, I think, you know, we've been talking for 30-40 minutes and time just flies so far, right? I think there's so much more questions that, you know, I think that the team and also I have for you, right? And I think it's a great privilege to have you here with us sharing your insights, right?

But maybe I think before we close off, right, anything that, you know, I think, you know, we didn't cover, anything I didn't ask you want to maybe cover?

Maybe any sneak preview what OpenAI is going to announce in the next what not, right? So anything at all?

I mean, you know, yeah, anything, anything just as a closing, maybe you want to share?

I'll only say first, I just want to thank Roderick and the entire team here for hosting us. It's been fantastic.

I've been inspired by meeting folks around Indonesia. I mean, especially young folks who are building things like people in the audience.

If through the forum and other mechanisms, a lot of our team is here. So please connect with them.

If you want to connect with us and tell us about the use cases you're seeing, the companies you're building, the applications, this is really useful for us. We want to understand what's happening in this market.

When we go back to San Francisco, people are going to ask us, you know, what's Indonesia doing with ChatGBT? What are they doing with the API? And we have some of those answers now, but the more we can get from you to help improve our products and services, it would be fantastic.

And so I hope I can continue to be a student and you can teach me going forward about all the great use cases here and beyond. So thank you very much.

So give a big round of applause for Ronnie, right again, Ronnie, thank you so much. Thank you.