“AI is a huge opportunity for everyone, as long as you can tune out the noise and focus on what brings value to you,” said Shaun Clowes, CPO at Confluent.
The AI bubble will continue into 2026, and while companies acknowledge their concerns, they are also optimistic about the technology’s future. AI was a hot topic at the recent World Economic Forum, where many business and technology leaders shared their visions and goals for enabling better AI capabilities.
The outcome of these discussions often provides a positive outlook on how companies plan their AI efforts, but the key element in all of this is to get the best value from any AI investment.
Most discussions about AI often end up creating a lot of “noise” within the industry. Businesses want to be ahead of the curve with their AI efforts. But making the right choice can be difficult, and some companies may end up realizing they may have over-invested in AI, or focus on areas where they can actually bring more value with their existing AI tools and data.
For Shaun Clowes, Chief Product Officer at Confluent, this noise generated on AI is one of the biggest challenges that businesses ultimately need to address. Businesses want to get the most out of AI, but they need to be able to realize the full value of AI to execute their AI strategies.
“There’s an AI gold rush going on. There’s a lot of different data privacy laws going on, there’s a lot of geopolitics going on, and it’s becoming very complex. There’s also a lot about data. Where is it being deployed? How is it being used? How are organizations using data to do things? What data do they need? How can companies build agents faster? So there are a lot of competing pressures,” Clowes said.
He believes this also raises the question of where companies should invest and focus, as they want to know whether they will invest in durable areas.
“I would argue that the flip side of that is an opportunity for us, and for our customers and partners, to be able to invest in unlocking data for many use cases at once. For example, unlocking data for analytics use cases, unlocking it for agents, “You can unlock very powerful applications that can reap significant benefits. You can effectively solve a problem once and reuse the results over and over again in many different use cases. That’s where the magic happens with technology.”
For Crows, AI is a huge opportunity for everyone, as long as you can tune out the noise and focus on what brings value to you. This accelerates business results.
AI noise in Asia
Interestingly, Clowes noted that the APAC region has an advantage when it comes to dealing with noise in AI. Specifically, most companies in APAC tend to be very fast-moving, technologically advanced, and innovative.
“There’s cross-border innovation, and there’s domestic innovation. It’s always fun to look at it from that perspective. I think the big opportunity for APAC is to continue to be hyper-innovative. We have to rethink what’s possible. And I’ve always been really looking at all the innovation that’s happening in APAC, and I’ve seen completely different business models that people didn’t even understand. That way you can build sophisticated value,” he said.
“And when you look at the AI boom in APAC, I think what’s really interesting is to see organizations not just incrementally improving the way they innovate, but completely rethinking what’s possible. I think that’s where the magic will really happen across the industry. And as an innovation hub, I think APAC is particularly poised to capture that.”
Many companies in Asia were able to skip the technology lifecycle of previous generations because they were able to jump directly into the ubiquitous world of the Internet. Therefore, Clowes believes that companies should not be worried about whether there is an AI bubble.
For Clowes, companies need to look at their data to see if they’re making a difference when it comes to data. You need to know if your data creation experience and driving capabilities are 10x better than before. Some companies may have over-invested, and many are forced to exit.
But Clowes feels that ultimately the world will end up being remade in a way that is incredibly capable and powerful for the end consumer, creating a very big business that creates a lot of good in the world.
“The AI bubble part is overvalued and may be overhyped. The most important question is how to be sure you’re on the right side of history, whether there’s a bubble or not. How do you get the real value from it and not get distracted by other trends,” he concluded.
