About
I'm Jao Ming, and I build AI products at Workato's AI Lab. For most of my career, I've worked in the gap between the latest AI research and the products people actually use, through every wave so far: classical machine learning, deep learning, and now LLM agents.
my journey
I started at Affable, a startup connecting businesses with social media influencers, where I learnt to build fast and fail faster. At SAP Labs, I worked on classifying service tickets. By quantising BERT, I became the first engineer in the Labs network to put a BERT service into production. At scale.
Then I left to build directly with a customer: a syndromic surveillance system for Singapore's Ministry of Health, which watches for early signs of disease outbreaks. It was built to run nationally, and it went into production.
Since then, I've wanted to see how different industries put AI to work. I built an AI-assisted CRM for Prudential across Asia-Pacific, and helped build Kruncher's AI due diligence platform for private market investors. Now, at Workato, which brings AI to its customers through automation, I take new AI from research all the way to a shipped product feature as part of the core platform.
what I've learnt
Useful beats impressive. At a startup, the only question that mattered was whether customers needed what we built. It's still the first question I ask, and answering it means translating between technology, product and business.
0 to 1 proves an idea works. 1 to a million makes it useful. Most of the hard, interesting work is in the second part: speed, cost, reliability, and whether the numbers add up.
Being early isn't the same as being ready. I've seen promising technology stall because it couldn't yet be turned into a product that paid for itself.
how I approach new tech
When something new comes out, I want to know what it actually does, try it myself, think about where it could be interesting, and ask whether it would hold up with real users at scale.
I've always shared what I find with the teams I work with, to help everyone keep up with a field that moves this fast. This blog is where I share it more widely.
Views here are my own, not my employer's.