Keris & Silicon is a show about technology, power, policy and the forces shaping the future. Hosted by Shahril Hamdan, the series explores how AI, geopolitics, business, sovereignty and innovation are transforming the world around us through conversations with founders, policymakers, investors and thinkers.
Episodes
170 AI Agents, One Malaysian Company: Inside StoreHub | Fong Wai Hong | Keris & Silicon EP08
Fong Wai Hong runs StoreHub with 170 AI agents working alongside his team. They find and rank sales leads, write up calls, run parts of finance and even monitor each other.Shahril sits down with the Co-Founder of StoreHub, the system behind more than 14,000 shops, cafes and restaurants in Malaysia, to find out what running a company this way really looks like. They cover the real productivity gain
Industrial Policy Is Back. But for Whom? | Amir Lebdioui | Keris & Silicon EP07
For decades, industrial policy was the thing economists told developing countries not to do. Now Washington, Beijing and Brussels are all doing it openly.The question is, back for whom? If the big powers can subsidise their way into the future, and AI is concentrated in just two countries, is there still a ladder for everyone else to climb?Amir Lebdioui, Associate Professor of the Political Econom
The Anti-Tech Bro on Who Gets to Decide AI’s Future | Vilas Dhar| Keris & Silicon EP06
Most of the AI debate is about what it will produce. This conversation starts a step earlier, with who gets to decide. Before we argue about outcomes, we need to settle the procedure and the principle, and make sure the people whose lives AI shapes are the ones with a voice in it.Vilas Dhar, President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and a former AI researcher, joins Shahril Hamdan. They disc
Confidence Without Scars: What AI Does to a Child Learning | Subtext x Keris & Silicon
A special collaboration between Subtext and Keris & Silicon.How much AI should a child be allowed to use, and how early? Hold it back, and we may be preparing the next generation for a world that's already gone. Hand it over too soon, and they may never build what only the long way round can teach.In this audio essay, Shahril Hamdan asks what is lost when answers become instant, why AI is
The Make-Everything Economy: China, AI and What Comes Next| Damien Ma | Keris & Silicon
China makes most of the world's solar panels, installs most of its industrial robots and refines most of its rare earths, and still governs like a country that doesn't have enough.Damien Ma, Director of Carnegie China, has spent twenty years reading Beijing's five-year plans. His argument: look at what China thinks it's short of, not what it's ambitious for.Why Chinese labs aren't chasing AGI. Why
Can Southeast Asia Own the AI Story? | Gita Wirjawan | Keris & Silicon EP04
"Southeast Asia runs a risk of becoming just a spectator as opposed to a stakeholder." Gita Wirjawan on what it would take to shape the AI era rather than watch it.Shahril Hamdan sits down with the entrepreneur, former Indonesian Minister of Trade and author of Southeast Asia: What It Takes, on why the region is under-narrated, why energy is the hard ceiling on any AI ambition, how China
The Hidden Cost of AI: Who Actually Pays? | Elina Noor | Keris & Silicon EP03
In Episode 3 of Keris & Silicon, Shahril is joined by Elina Noor, one of Southeast Asia’s most experienced voices at the intersection of technology, security and geopolitics.Elina argues that AI is not a revolution but an evolution, built on colonial foundations we’ve never properly examined, and that Southeast Asia keeps volunteering for the same position in it: the labour layer.The conversat
Is The Internet The Successor to America | Balaji Srinivasan | Keris & Silicon EP02
In Episode 2 of Keris & Silicon, Shahril is joined by Balaji Srinivasan, technologist, investor, author of The Network State, and founder of Network School.Balaji makes his case that the West is in decline while the East rises, and that the internet is the successor to American empire. Shahril pushes back, interrogating whether the network state thesis prematurely strips sovereignty away from
