Allan Tan

For Asia’s CIOs, 2026 signals the dawn of the Agentic Era—where AI shifts from chatbots to autonomous co-workers. Yet the consumer ease with large language models hides stark enterprise realities: compute demands straining power grids, legacy networks choking on unprecedented traffic, and “vibe-hacking” agents undermining traditional trust models. By 2027, reasoning models like Claude Mythos will force CIOs to govern agentic swarms, rewriting IAM and latency for a new digital order.

Whilczel Canlas built her career on the bedrock of technical excellence. As a certified public accountant, she is fluent in the language of financial reporting, controls, and compliance. It is a world she understands intimately, and one in which she excels. Yet the single most critical decision of her over-two-decade journey was not mastering another accounting standard or tightening another control.

In the bustling corridors of a recent ServiceNow roundtable in Malaysia, a clear consensus emerged among the nation’s top CHROs, CFOs, and CIOs: the era of tentative AI experimentation is over. The conversation has pivoted decisively from “Can we use AI?” to “How do we become an agentic business?” This shift goes far beyond merely adopting new technology; it demands a fundamental reimagining of talent, governance, and the very workflows that define an enterprise.