Field Notes: My AI Training Tour of Asia
What I learned talking about AI in Singapore, HK, Colombo, Istanbul, Bangalore
🙏 Paid subscriptions and sponsorships help us do more! Here’s how you can support Sree’s Sunday Note. Paid subscribers make it possible to launch new verticals, like our new entertainment newsletter Ok, TV. Thank YOU!
🚨 News 12 is hiring a Director of Digital Strategy—full job description here.
TODAY’S NEWSLETTER IS filled with tips and thoughts about AI, but allow me two quick political comments.
President Donald Trump is attending Wednesday’s Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship, making him the first sitting president to attend oral arguments at the nation’s highest court. You know why he’s there: To put pressure on the six conservative justices to vote his way. In Jan. 2025, my newsletter featured a look at why birthright citizenship matters, via two sharp observers of the American scene: Geetika Rudra (on why the American idea of birthright citizenship was “a defining moment of world history) and Jaykumar Menon (on the moral case for opposing the end of birthright citizenship).
The No Kings marches were massive this past weekend and my daughter, Durga Sreenivasan and I were right in the middle of the joy and real community spirit that spread through the day. The turnout in NYC was nothing short of inspiring, as you can see from the live stream I did on IG. As much as this was a protest against Trump and all he represents, I think we should focus on the “all he represents” part the most.
TAKE A LOOK at the two videos below. Both take place at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, but one is AI-generated via ChatGPT’s recently shuttered Sora app.
One of the core skills of the 21st century will be the ability to tell fake content from real. Looking side by side, it might seem easy, but when I showed folks these separately, many thought the fake was real, and the real was fake (video template by Luke Peterson, a 14-year-old[!] who does nice drone work, too).
The rise of synthetic content was just one of the topics of my AI training tour of Asia, an exhilarating and exhausting five-country, 24-day tour that started with a bang on the tarmac at Newark Airport. It ended with my emceeing the Indiaspora Global AI Summit in Bangalore, a #LifeHighlight, a gathering of pioneers, startups, VCs, researchers, experts and students (40+ world-class speakers, from India and abroad; 5 plenary sessions, 6 breakouts; 700+ attendees from India and abroad; and the launch of two major reports: Top 100 Startups in India list & “WeAreCity” report, Bangalore vs Hyderabad). Read a news story by about the summit by T. Vishnudatta Jayaraman in South Asian Herald.
In between Newark and Bangalore were 11 workshops + assorted meetings, briefings and more in Singapore, Hong Kong, Colombo and Istanbul. The hunger to learn, to discover, to share, to teach was similar everywhere.
Common themes/topics/questions we addressed:
Skills needed to thrive, not just survive, the next decade
What children should be learning in the AI age.
China’s swift rise and dominance of practical AI.
The future of jobs, with 100s of millions at risk of becoming unemployed.
How to assess and value actual human creativity.
AI’s role in misinformation and disinformation.
Turmoil in Middle East means opportunity for places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, India and others.
BONUS: Did you know that every single iPhone 17 in the world, including the one Tim Cook uses, is made in India?
Learn more: Hire me to do an AI workshop, give a talk, moderate a panel. Here’s a brochure. sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com
Talkin’ AI w/ Sree & Digimentors: Join my low-volume, highly useful, global AI WhatsApp group. Lurk and leave anytime you like.
Consumer, Commercial, and Imposed Usage
Back in 2023, I wrote a piece called “The Public as a Laboratory” as a meditation on how these world-changing technologies are just released to the public and the prevailing idea is to let the chips fall where they may. Said like that, it sounds like an absolutely crazy thing to do. Little has changed in the three years since I wrote that piece, and public opinion polling on AI shows a skeptical public that sees utility in AI, but is well-aware that there are huge risks, trade-offs, and environmental questions around it.
It’s a level of nuance that is rare in polling around major issues, and I am very happy to see it. How, if at all, policy makers and the AI industrial powers-that-be react to that nuanced skepticism is anyone’s guess. To date, it’s been a pretty hard and fast push to flood the zone. Now, there is growing resistance to that approach, and it is having real effects.
According to Gallup polling from Q4 2025, the public sector is slightly ahead of the private sector in AI uptake.
In Q4 2025, 43% of public-sector employees report using AI at least a few times a year, including 21% who use it daily or multiple times per week. That figure is up from 17% in Q2 2023 and 28% in Q2 2024.
A similar rate of 41% of private-sector employees report using AI in Q4 2025. Private-sector use is more concentrated among frequent users: 25% use AI frequently and 16% use it occasionally. In the public sector, occasional use is more common at 22%.
And more and more of us are using it every day.
We use it, and we have it used on us, largely without our explicit consent; we have it imposed on us at work; and we absolutely don’t trust it:
Over the last year, more people say they have lost trust AI than say they trust it more:
When asked how their trust in AI has changed over the past year, only one in five (21%) say it has increased. More (25%) say it has decreased while about half of all respondents (47%) say they trust AI about the same as they did a year ago.
On top of this skepticism, a full 77% of Americans polled are concerned that AI could threaten humanity, and more than half of them are “very concerned” about it. There is also galvanization of public opinion around the data centers needed to power all of this:
This chart perfectly represents the debate around so many of our economic decisions—what are we willing to trade for the political-industrial promise of job creation and tax revenue? The answer to that seems to be in some sort of perpetual limbo, but with AI, the public mood is pretty clear, and largely mirrors my own. Democrats and Republicans even completely agree that neither political party has the chops to deal with AI at the policy level:
It may be a stretch, but AI might be the one thing that Americans pretty much agree on.
Like anything else, there are doomers and boosters of equal intensity of the AI discussion, but this is not a discussion being had at extremes. It’s a discussion being had within companies and organizations of all sizes and households alike by people who are using these tools—both by choice, and by mandate.
It all comes down to trust, and trust comes from accountability. The latter has been sorely lacking so far, and we are trying to figure out what accountability with AI even means. Crucially, we are doing this on-the-fly during AI’s exponential expansion phase—not ideal timing to be sure. But, we are having this discussion, we are using these tools and even finding utility in them, and most Americans are on the same page when it comes to questioning what it is we are being signed up for.
We are a skeptical public when it comes to AI, and I hope it stays that way. We should be as pressing as ever on our public officials, but it’s crucial to put the private companies building these tools under public scrutiny as well.
— Sree / Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok
FYI: 24.6% of 2026 is already over. What will you do with the remaining 77.4%? LMK and I’ll see you made it all the way down here.
From the AI Group Chat
I host a lively, low-volume WhatsApp group to discuss all matters AI, from practical application to high-minded existential questions. It’s an experienced community of real practitioners, many of them who work at major firms and directly on and with AI. Here are a couple of highlights from the group.
Claude Cowork Might Be the Most Consequential Piece of Software You’re Not Using
Reading list from Reuters Institute’s AI and the Future of News 2026
Want to join the group? Here’s the link.
Have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com and please connect w/ me: Twitter | IG | LinkedIn | FB | YouTube | Spread | TikTok
PARTNER MESSAGE
Are You News 12’s Next Director of Digital Strategy?
It’s an exciting time for hyperlocal news, and News 12 is growing. Audrey Latman Gruber (a former student of Sree’s at Columbia Journalism School) and her team are looking for a Director of Digital Strategy to advance News 12’s digital-first operations across every newsroom. This is a crucial role at News 12. The new Director will have a broad portfolio, a lot of opportunity to advance, and near-endless space to innovate across News 12’s Emmy award-winning newsrooms.
Join News 12 and help them serve communities across Long Island, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Westchester, Hudson Valley, Connecticut and New Jersey, with news they can’t find anywhere else.
Powerful information, brilliant writing and images. Very grateful for you bringing the world view, from the ground level. Thank you Sree.
The is-it-real video of the Blue Mosque is a vivid example of how challenging AI can be. Sounds like you've been having a blast, but I'm glad you're home. See you soon.