News and Insights

Beyond the machine: What a PRAXIS panel taught us about cultural intelligence in the age of AI

October 13, 2026

At FINN Partners, we talk a great deal about insight. And it’s tempting to imagine insight as a product of data and signals — something you extract, at scale, at speed. But true insight also comes from listening deeply, and from listening to a diversity of human voices, often from spheres well beyond our own profession.

That conviction shaped the FINN Partners Asia panel I had the privilege of moderating at PRAXIS Asia-Pacific in Singapore: The Importance of Cultural Intelligence in the Age of AI. AI had loomed over the entire conference — use it, don’t use it, accelerate, slow down. We weren’t there to adjudicate that yet again. Instead, we used AI as a foil: a way to put our own humanness into sharper relief, and to ask what cultural intelligence — surely at the very heart of communications — actually requires of us.

I was joined by three people from deliberately different worlds: Dr Bridget Tracy Tan, Senior Director of the Institute of Southeast Asian Arts at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts; Bella Ling-Nair, Vice President of Communications, Patient Advocacy and Branding, JAPAC at Edwards Lifesciences; and Phloeun Prim, Executive Director of Living Arts International, whom I first met at a cultural forum he convened in Laos called Building Bridges — where, as the only PR practitioner in a room of cultural experts, I made a commitment to do exactly that.

How cultural intelligence is formed

We began with formation: where does cultural intelligence come from? Bridget, who works with students to tune into human nuance, immersing them in what she calls the “embodied vernacular” of Southeast Asia — an arts education rooted in ecology, ritual and practice — called it a large question. Then she answered it with experience rather than theory.

She described taking students out of the classroom and into the field — to Bali and West Java, to Vietnam. On a map or a blueprint, AI can generate schematics that label a dimension “human scale.” But you only grasp what human scale truly is by encountering the people who inhabit it. She spoke of a community where places of worship dotted the neighbourhoods — not by top-down urban planning, but sprung up organically, funded by residents pooling their own resources to create spaces to gather. No digitally generated drawing surfaces that. It lives in the memories and recounting of the people who are there.

Her second example, from Vietnam, turned on the idea of craft coming before culture — that the work of the hands often precedes the culture we later record in artifacts and language. At a craft site, students witness the transmission between master and apprentice directly. Formation, she suggested, is never linear or one-directional; it’s a matter of appreciating the sensitivities within each community by encountering them deeply. She even pointed to a doctoral student researching how spirits are imagined to communicate in Southeast Asian tradition — a question that quietly challenges our assumptions about the very boundaries of communication, and reminds us that every system, including an AI language model, carries the biases of its own parameters.

What’s at stake when it’s missing

From formation, we turned to the stakes. I asked Bella what happens when cultural intelligence isn’t applied — especially now that AI lets us generate content at enormous scale and speed. In patient advocacy, she noted, the cost of getting it wrong can be the difference between life and death.

Invited to speak about cultural intelligence, she had reflected hard and concluded that it cannot live in the communications or branding function alone — it has to be embedded in every aspect of healthcare. How a health innovation is communicated differs from culture to culture and family to family, shaped by pre-existing notions of what health means, what it means to spend on care, whether one relies on government support. It demands deep empathy for the relationship each society has with healthcare. Cultural intelligence, in her world, is not a nice-to-have; it is critical to whether a solution succeeds at all.

Translation, and who gets left out

That led us to translation — which, as I put it to the panel, is never only about moving between languages. It’s about moving between contexts and spheres. Even all of us on stage — an arts educator, a cultural entrepreneur, a healthcare communications executive — were in some sense speaking different languages, requiring translation to be legible to one another.

Phloeun brought this back to human connection and rootedness. He raised a blind spot in the global AI ecosystem: oral transmission. Having taken part in a program examining how large language models are built, he saw first-hand how heavily they skew toward the global north — while in much of the global south, where languages and traditions aren’t archived digitally the way Western ones are, entire knowledge bases are effectively excluded, even erased. That realisation prompted a project of his own — an effort to build “an AI of our own,” reclaiming agency, legibility and visibility for oral traditions that the dominant systems overlook.

Bella added a memorable line: in her role, she often calls herself a CTO — a Chief Translation Officer. Working with Japanese colleagues, she has learned that how a message is received matters as much as how it’s conveyed. Understanding the cultural context of reception is as crucial as knowing how to transmit.

At that point I turned to the room — full, as it was, of the modern-day scribes and transmitters whose work shapes the narrative of the world we pass to the next generation. The responsibility we carry is significant.

The opportunity ahead

Finally, we turned to opportunity. With UNESCO’s “Culture: the missing SDG” report and the MONDIACULT 2022 Declaration calling for culture to be recognised as a standalone goal in the post-2030 development agenda, there’s real momentum to place culture at the centre of community, civic and corporate life. Phloeun shared Living Arts International’s work bringing together communities of weavers in Cambodia — building their capabilities and engaging rural audiences in appreciating the value of their own practices. He showed images, and his message was pointed: in communications and marketing, don’t forget these are your audiences too — not aggregate data or signals, but real children, elders and families with their own aspirations. That is the human scale of communications.

Our part in it

I closed by hoping the panel had carried the room beyond the usual corporate frame — beyond the constraints and biases we analyze within our own profession — and into spheres that lie outside it. Because it’s precisely in reaching across, looking outward, and building credibility with stakeholders beyond our own circle that communications finds its true impact and value: not only for business sustainability, but for an organization’s license to operate and its capacity to drive positive impact.

AI can help us generate knowledge faster, and present facts and figures at scale. But it’s still down to us — as humans — to take accountability for the impact we make. That means making a conscious choice to be cultural stewards in our own right.

What struck me most afterwards was the response. Bridget and Phloeun were two of the very few non-communications voices at the entire conference, and people found the difference of perspective genuinely refreshing. Where many conversations circle inward — communicators justifying the profession’s value to other communicators — this one looked out. And in doing so it embodied, without needing to say so, the One FINN proposition: a diversity of expertise across healthcare, corporate, travel and technology, drawn from across Asia, brought together in service of something larger than any single discipline.

The best of what we do, and dare I say its future, happens on the bridges between worlds.