During a recent visit to Cambodia, B2B Cambodia sat down with Deepesh Trivedi, CEO of UIB Holdings; a global leader in AI solutions, and Former Director at Meta and WhatsApp, to discuss artificial intelligence (AI) and digital transformation in the context of Cambodia.
Background at Facebook, Meta and WhatsApp
While Trivedi is fairly new to the role of CEO at UIB Holdings, having only assumed the role at the end of 2024, he’s certainly not new to the space, having worked in technology for almost 20 years. He spent most of his tenure at Facebook Inc., now known as Meta Platforms.
“I joined the company back in 2008, based out of the UK office. I was a very early hire and spent the first three years kind of focused on sales and business operations. I spent a lot of time helping open up a number of offices across the EMEA region, specifically in Europe, and then in 2011 I had the opportunity to move out to Singapore,” shared Trivedi.
During his time in Asia, Trivedi focused on establishing offices in Sydney, Australia, and Auckland, New Zealand, then in Tokyo, Japan, and a number of Southeast Asian cities including Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Manila and Jakarta.
In 2018, he made another career switch over to WhatsApp, the popular instant messaging service acquired by Meta in 2014, with the goal of figuring out how the app could be monetised.
“We came up with this concept where we genuinely believed that businesses could have a presence within the WhatsApp ecosystem, and one that's not disruptive, but more additive to the consumer experience,” Trivedi explained. “We launched something called Business Messaging, where businesses could onboard onto WhatsApp and have a business profile, so then if a consumer wanted to speak to a business, they could message them, and the business would respond back.
“The first couple of years were the product-market-fit phase, trying to figure out whether or not this was a thing, whether or not consumers were happy, whether or not we could even monetize this thing, then at some point in 2020, we saw adoption go through the roof. I think every business was forced into some form of digital transformation, and we saw them leverage tools like WhatsApp or Messenger or Instagram to communicate with their customers.
What we found was that consumers wanted to speak to businesses, and businesses saw ROI (a return on investment), so as a result, WhatsApp and Meta could charge for those experiences.
Trivedi officially left Meta in 2023, having spent 15 years at the company, to take a short career break after becoming a dad for the first time. He eventually joined the board of UIB Holdings in February of 2024, a company he initially got to know while working at WhatsApp, then in Q4 of 2024, became UIB Holdings’ new CEO.
Anxieties Surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI) Adoption
Providing a simplified explanation of how AI generally works, Trivedi described the technology as a sort of computer system or program that basically replicates simple human tasks, whether to problem solve, aid learning or produce a certain outcome.
A simple example Trivedi offered was of online shopping websites like Amazon that use AI to provide product recommendations based on a user’s shopping history, and similarly, streaming services like Spotify and Netflix that use AI to give song, movie and tv show recommendations.
Addressing the growing anxiety over AI potentially stealing people’s jobs, or making many human-led jobs obsolete, Trivedi stressed that he doesn’t quite agree with that prediction, but does think that the people who understand and adopt AI will get ahead of the rest.
“AI isn't going to take your job, rather the person who understands AI is probably likely to take your job,” he said. “What AI does is it gives people an opportunity to work on more meaningful tasks, as well as on more creative tasks.
I don't necessarily agree with the topic of how ‘AI is taking my job’... What I've seen in our industry, at UIB, is that there are people, especially those in the customer care industry, who think AI might take their jobs because it can automate a lot of the [customer care] responses they needed to do manually before, but actually, that's not what happens. What happens is AI relieves a lot of pressure on contact centres and call centres, meaning, essentially, any kind of question that can be automated gets answered through AI, relieving a lot of pressure on agents so they can work on more complicated tasks that AI is not able to solve today.
Trivedi also addressed the increasingly popularised conception that AI is now already able to take over complicated tech jobs like coding, stressing he does not believe the technology is there yet.
“I don't know how good AI is with coding, in terms of writing sophisticated lines of code. I know that it can automate some form of it… but I don't genuinely believe that it’s going to make computer science a redundant subject,” he said. “I think that the subject will just evolve, and people will just have to get a lot better with how they work with AI.”
“This goes back to my previous point: if you were writing a piece of code, which can now be done by AI, that basically should hopefully free up bandwidth for you to work on something else that you weren't working on before,” he added.
Cambodia’s Impressive Digital Transformation
Trivedi’s last visit to the Kingdom was over 10 years ago, so his main reaction returning to the country now was that it had clearly gone through an immense amount of development and digital transformation.
“Culturally, it feels the same, but from a development perspective, it feels completely different. I can see, for example, mobile payments and digital payments are a major thing now,” he said.
Reflecting on Asia’s digital transformation as a whole, he noted that while internet adoption happened quicker in the Western world due to more people being able to afford computers that could access the internet, mobile phone and smartphone adoption happened much quicker in Asia. As a result, the phenomenon of ‘conversational commerce’ emerged, especially prominent in markets like Thailand and Vietnam, where consumers basically speak to merchants directly via messenger platforms when making purchases.
“This type of behaviour was really born out of Asia, and we've seen other countries adopt it, but Asia was the furthest ahead. If I bring that back to Cambodia, I do see a huge amount of digital transformation,” said Trivedi. “Digital payments are basically everywhere, you can see that people are using platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and have an online presence that helps them connect with customers in some way, shape or form.”
“Personally, I'm excited to be here [in Cambodia]. I think the appetite from the people to learn is high, which is what's got me really excited. We (UIB) were here to see a couple of customers and a couple of partners, and my schedules ended up getting completely full with businesses wanting to learn, and I think there's a lot we can do to help them.
“I just think people need to come in and actually be willing to make an investment [in AI], so my only message to the people of Cambodia is to keep up the appetite, because I think it's going to pay off in the short to medium term,” he concluded.