Seventy founders and senior leaders packed into the Hilton Saigon for RISE II: The Era of AI in Business. The room felt more like a private founder forum than a public event. Three hours of high energy, real talk, and practical advice from people already deep in the game.
Championship teams, by design
TK Nguyen, CEO of GAM Entertainment, showed how Vietnam's most decorated League of Legends team uses MBTI, DISC, StrengthsFinder and AI to put the right people in the right seats. Then he handed the room the exact prompts to run the same analysis on their own executive teams.
Virtual influencers on the world stage
Esther Nguyen, Founder and CEO of POPS, walked leaders through building AI-powered brand personalities, from her virtual influencer Zoe and her 300,000 followers to a market projected to pass 150 billion dollars by 2032. Start with your brand persona, design a consistent personality, launch a minimum viable version, then scale what works.
Three moves for Monday morning
A panel with Harley Trung of CoderPush, Joe Huynh of Zoi.tech and Simon Trac Do of VinCSS, moderated by Dave Hajdu, brought it down to action: consolidate into a governed AI platform, name an AI and security champion, and build instruction as a core company skill so people get good at working with AI every day.
Dave closed on an MIT Sloan finding: roughly 95% of organizations see zero measurable return from their generative AI programs. The problem is rarely the technology. It's leadership, data alignment, and execution.