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De Kai: AI adoption not just about rules and compliance

EWI Capital pivots towards investment, commits A$100m to Australian fund PETALING JAYA: EWI Capital Bhd (formerly known as Eco World International Bhd) achieved RM154 million sales based on contracts exchanged in FY2025. Together with reserves of RM18 million, the total adds up to RM172 million, the company said in a statement when disclosing results for its fourth quarter ended Oct 31, 2025 and full financial year (Q4’25 and FY2025). EWI Capital said the value of completed units available for sale stands at about RM125 million and, of this, about 50% comprises commercial units, while the remaining are residential units. To address protracted challenges in the UK and Australian property development markets, EWI Capital is pivoting its business model towards investment holding, with the invest ment into TrustCapital Australian Office Fund No. 3 (AOF3) being its maiden significant investment. EWI Capital intends to accelerate the monetisation of certain of its remaining development sites to raise capital for further investment opportunities. In line with this strategic shift and as the final part of its internal restructuring exercise, the group undertook a comprehensive reassess ment of its asset portfolio. EWI Capital said that taking into account the prolonged cost inflation trend that has risen at a faster pace than house price growth, it recognised an impairment on the amount owing by joint ventures by RM326 million and wrote down the value of its Macquarie Park site by RM64 million in Q4’25. This resulted in an overall loss before tax of RM414 million for FY2025. After Oct 31, 2025, EWI Capital has deployed A$77 million (RM210 million) into AOF3. The investment is expected to start generating income in the second half of 2026. “Real estate markets in both the UK and Australia remain challenging, with selling prices remaining weak despite the expectation of interest rate cuts. Meanwhile, the escalation in construction costs over the past few years continues to outpace the modest gain in selling prices,”said EWI Capital president and CEO Datuk Teow Leong Seng. Against this backdrop, EWI Capital has been actively exploring strategic investment and development opportunities that can generate nearer-term income. Teow said that while legacy development assets are facing headwinds amid elevated interest rates and cost pressures, the current environment presents attractive investment opportunities in certain real estate sectors. This includes the Australian office sector which is supported by improved financing conditions, stabilised yields and strong market fundamentals. Currently, prime office assets in Australia yield 6% to 8% annually, with some available at prices below their replacement costs. Accordingly, in October, the group announced its decision to commit A$100 million to AOF3, which will invest primarily in prime office assets in Australia. From an accounting standpoint, this investment will also help to accelerate income recognition as rental revenues may be recognised as soon as the fund completes the acquisition of an identified office asset. “Through our participation in AOF3, we have pivoted decisively towards real estate investment. To date, we have deployed A$77 million into the fund, and we expect it to start generating income from the second half of FY2026 onwards. We are targeting an internal rate of return of at least 10%, with the potential for further gain should interest rates normalise,”Teow said. To enable EWI Capital to take further advantage of the present window of opportunity, where property investment in certain sectors offers relatively attractive and compelling risk adjusted returns, the group plans to accelerate the monetisation of some of its assets.

outlook is very positive,” Chin said. Its Serendah facility supplies not only the domestic market but also customers across Apac, alongside the group’s other regional plants in Australia and South Korea. “Okay, our plant is in Serendah. It’s a new plant. But actually, this plant has been in Malaysia for more than 30 years. But we shifted to a much bigger plant because we are going to produce much more product range.” Chin said Malaysia’s role within Tremco’s global supply chain has grown in recent years, with some customers in North America now sourcing products from the region to mitigate tariff exposure. “Previously, they purchased from the US, but now they are sourcing from other regions, including Apac, to avoid tariffs.” She said US trade measures have had minimal direct impact on Tremco Malaysia as its core market is the Asia-Pacific region. On the domestic front, Chin said, Tremco has built a strong track record across education, government and commercial projects, including Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, several Public Works Department projects and major commercial car parks in Kuala Lumpur. In the flooring segment, particularly car park systems, she estimates Tremco has 50% market share, including some of the largest car parks in the capital of over 100,000 square metres. “Incrementalism isn’t going to cut it,” he said. “A huge percentage of jobs will disappear. The psychological effects will hit just as hard as the economic ones. Governments need to get ahead of that and redesign systems that protect people even when their traditional skills no longer matter.” De Kai also cautioned against overconfidence in human-facing roles, noting that humanoid robots are already preferred in some service settings. Still, he believes the human capacity for expression from music to fashion will remain valued. He tells his own children, who study STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) but excel in the arts, not to abandon the creative side. “Even if machines can do it, people still want the human version, the way Gen Z suddenly cherishes vinyl,” he said. While many countries fear they’ve already fallen behind in the global AI race, De Kai thinks the window is still open for Malaysia depending on what the country aims to achieve. If the ambition is to build genuine AI innovations rather than merely consuming existing tools, the field remains fluid enough for new players to break through, just as Google once did in the search era. “In the late 90s everyone thought the search engine battle was over, and they were all wrong,” he said. “The same thing can happen here. The leaders today don’t necessarily own tomorrow.” But De Kai stressed that any meaningful progress begins with a deeper understanding of how both humans and machines think. Without that, he warned, countries will keep treating AI as a technical issue when it is in fact reshaping something far more fundamental. “It runs through our psychology, our culture, our institutions, everything,” he said. “The question is not just how we adopt AI. It’s how we stay human while we do it.”

o Global pioneer says artificial intelligence is reshaping how societies work and ‘it is not how we adopt AI, it’s how we stay human while we do it’

was trapped in rule based systems that tried to describe intelligence through logic. That approach

Ű BY DEEPALAKSHMI MANICKAM sunbiz@thesundaily.com

PETALING JAYA: Artificial intelligence (AI) may be advancing at breakneck speed, but global AI pioneer De Kai ( pic ) believes governments and businesses are still thinking about the technology with a mindset that is decades out of date. And unless countries such as Malaysia shift the conversation beyond rules and compliance, he said, the social fabric itself will start to fray. In an exclusive interview with SunBiz , the Berkeley and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology professor, who also serves as an independent director at global AI ethics think tank The Future Society, said policymakers remain stuck in a legalistic framework that assumes humans behave rationally, when in reality most human behaviour “more than 95%” is unconscious. That blind spot, he warned, is steering regulators towards solutions that are too mechanical for a technology that interacts deeply with human psychology. “We keep treating AI like hardware as if you can just slap on a safety seal and call it regulated,” he said. “Society isn’t held together only by laws. It’s held together by unwritten norms, expectations and the care we have for each other. When you release billions of artificial psychologies into that environment, those dynamics don’t vanish. They get amplified.” De Kai sees worrying parallels with the early decades of AI research, when the field

stalled progress for nearly 30 years until neural architectures overturned the old mindset. This time, he said, society cannot afford another long detour. “And the rules won’t keep up anyway,” he added. “Technology is moving too fast.” De Kai urged Malaysian businesses not to mistake today’s large language models for the definition of AI. He described transformer based systems as “Pavlovian”, comparing their training process to how one teaches a pet repetitive, reward-driven and error-prone. He expects the next wave of AI systems to be smaller, more adaptive and more “toddler like”, a shift that could undercut the advantage of tech giants currently pouring trillions into massive compute infrastructure. “The assumption that size equals dominance is going to collapse,” De Kai said. “True AI is small and smart, not big and dumb.” When asked which Malaysian sectors stand to benefit most from AI, he said the impact will be universal, touching every part of the economy. But he pointed out that the real challenge isn’t adoption, it’s reconstruction. Just as societies reinvented themselves after the Great Depression and World War II, he believes countries now need to rethink the foundations of income, employment and dignity.

US’s Tremco sees strong growth prospects in Malaysia

rising industrial investment as global manufacturers diversify production bases away from China and the US amid ongoing trade and geopolitical uncertainties. She said the influx of data centre projects has become a key growth driver for the

Ű BY HAYATUN RAZAK sunbiz@thesundaily.com

PETALING JAYA: US-based construction materials group Tremco sees strong growth prospects in Malaysia in the short term, driven

construction materials sector, given their stringent requirements for high-performance flooring, waterproofing and fire protection systems. “Commercial projects are a bit slower now, but data centres are flowing into the Malaysian market,“ Chin said. “We are also seeing opportunities in industrial projects, including semicon ductor-related facilities and new manufacturing plants.” She added that Malaysia’s

by rising demand from data centres, industrial projects and supply chain shifts linked to global trade tensions. Tremco Malaysia country manager Chin May Ling ( pic ) said the company’s expanded manu facturing facility in Serendah, Selangor, positions Malaysia as a key production and supply hub for the Asia-Pacific (Apac) region.

“Our plant in Malaysia has been here for more than 30 years, but we recently moved to a much bigger facility to support a wider product range and higher production capacity,” she told SunBiz . Tremco is a global supplier of building envelope and construction systems, with a strong presence in specialised flooring and waterproofing solutions for large-scale infrastructure, in dustrial and commercial developments. Looking ahead, Chin said, demand is expected to remain positive, underpinned by Malaysia’s expanding data centre pipeline and

position as a cost-competitive and politically stable location in Southeast Asia has made it an increasingly attractive alternative for companies reconfiguring regional supply chains, which in turn is supporting demand for industrial and mission-critical construction solutions. “As more companies shift or expand their operations into Malaysia, we expect sustained demand across industrial, infrastructure and data centre developments. Overall, the