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Agoda Releases AI Developer Report 2026: Agentic AI Adoption Outpaces Enterprise Readiness Across Southeast Asia and India

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53% of surveyed developers now have AI agents in production or broad use, but only 38% consider their codebase ready for full autonomy.Cost is now the top barrier to broader AI adoption, cited by 28% of developers as the primary obstacle to wider AI agent use.70% expect AI agents to handle most development work within three years, though 79% still require human approval for production deployment.

SINGAPORE, Sept. 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Digital travel platform Agoda has released a new study showing that software developers across Southeast Asia and India are rapidly transitioning from using AI assistants for individual tasks to deploying autonomous AI agents across the software-development lifecycle.

The Agoda AI Developer Report 2026 explores how this transition is reshaping the way developers work, how organizations manage costs, and where human accountability sits.

Drawing on extensive input from the developer community across Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, and India, the report examines the opportunities and challenges shaping AI’s next phase across these markets.

AI is delivering more value, but developers still verify the output

Developers are experiencing greater productivity gains from AI. More than half (55%) now save at least seven hours each week, compared with 18% in 2025. Reported code usability has also improved, with 62% saying AI-generated code is usable often or almost always without major changes.

AI is also being used more broadly across development work, including code review, architecture, debugging, learning, and documentation. Yet human judgment remains essential: 86% of respondents still review or validate AI-generated outputs always or most of the time.

Agents are arriving fast, but cost is holding back wider adoption

More than half (53%) of respondents say AI agents are already used in selected production workflows or broadly across their organization. However, only 38% describe their codebase as mostly or fully ready for a fully autonomous agent.

Cost is the primary barrier to wider adoption, cited by 28% of respondents, ahead of integration complexity (24%) and lack of governance (19%). The report finds that AI costs extend beyond model calls to include the work needed to design, integrate, review, and validate agents. Four in five respondents said they are currently working under some degree of AI usage limits, such as token quotas, usage caps, or budget restrictions.

Autonomy is growing, while accountability remains human

Developers are open to granting AI agents more autonomy for lower-risk, reversible work such as documentation. But as work moves closer to production, the demand for human oversight rises: 79% report requiring human approval for production deployment.

AI is also changing the developer’s role. System architecture and design, AI literacy, and agent orchestration are emerging as future skills. The transition is uneven, however: 49% of junior developers report feeling less secure about their future career prospects, compared with 17% of CTO and VP Engineering respondents.

Idan Zalzberg, Chief Technology Officer at Agoda, shared, “Artificial intelligence is reshaping how developers across Southeast Asia and India build, learn, and collaborate. What began as a way to speed up individual tasks is becoming a broader change in how software is built. Across industries, developers are seeing stronger productivity gains and are beginning to use agents across more of the development lifecycle. But greater capability brings new responsibilities. The real cost is not simply the model call. It is the work required to make AI trustworthy in production. The organizations that will excel in this next phase will be the ones that manage cost carefully, build the right safeguards, and keep human judgment where it matters most.”

The study was commissioned by Agoda and conducted in partnership with Macramé Consulting. As a digital travel and technology company in the region, Agoda is committed to supporting local technology talent, fostering innovation, and sharing insights that help developers and organizations build responsible AI practices.

Agoda’s commitment to innovation extends beyond AI, offering over 6 million holiday properties, more than 130,000 flight routes, and over 300,000 activities, all of which can be combined in the same booking. 

For more information and to download the free report, visit apacdeveloperreport.com

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SOURCE Agoda

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Edvance and CWG Bring RealRelay.ai to Singapore, an Agentic AI Platform with Trust Built In

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Hong Kong-listed Edvance (HKEX: 1410) signs a three-year agreement with Singapore’s CWG Innovations, pairing more than 20 years of cybersecurity expertise with a platform that lets organisations build AI agents they can trust

SINGAPORE, Sept. 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Singapore is moving quickly on AI. Schools, universities and businesses are starting to use AI agents, software that can plan and act on its own, to teach, analyse and handle everyday work. With that comes a harder question. Can these agents be trusted?

In January 2026, the Infocomm Media Development Authority launched a Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI, which flags the risk of agents taking unauthorised or erroneous actions once they have access to sensitive data and systems. The Cyber Security Agency of Singapore has also issued guidance on securing agentic AI. For any organisation putting agents to work, security and governance need to be there from the start.

RealRelay.ai has been designed with this in mind. Edvance International Holdings Limited (HKEX: 1410) (“Edvance”), a Hong Kong-listed cybersecurity group, has signed a three-year strategic cooperation agreement with Singapore-based CWG Innovations Pte. Ltd. (“CWG”) to bring RealRelay.ai, a unified agentic AI platform the two companies are developing together, to market. The agreement was entered into through Paradise Matrix Pte. Ltd., Edvance’s wholly-owned subsidiary in Singapore.

A trust layer at the core

At the heart of RealRelay.ai is a trust layer. A built-in security agent tests each AI agent on the platform and tests it again every time it changes, so organisations can deploy agents with confidence. This is where the two companies meet. The trust layer draws on Edvance’s more than 20 years in cybersecurity, and CWG brings its experience in building and deploying AI across ASEAN.

Around that trust layer, RealRelay.ai gives enterprises and institutions one place to create, govern and deploy AI agents without writing code. More than 300 mainstream AI models sit behind a single interface, each task is matched to an appropriate model, and the platform is designed to run in the cloud, on-premises or fully offline.

What the agreement means for Edvance

Edvance will be responsible for commercialising the platform, drawing on its cybersecurity distribution business and enterprise customer base, with the aim of generating subscription revenue. CWG will operate and manage the platform from Singapore. All intellectual property developed for the platform’s cybersecurity AI agents will belong exclusively to Edvance.

The agreement marks Edvance’s entry into agentic AI and follows through on the strategy it set out earlier this year, to build its own solutions where AI and cybersecurity meet. It is designed to add recurring, subscription-based revenue alongside Edvance’s established business, with the potential to strengthen earnings visibility over time.

Education first, with early results

Education is the first vertical, with planned features including personalised learning and no-code agent building for students and educators. Cybersecurity follows, with tools for security operations centre triage and automated adversary simulation, and fintech has been identified as the next vertical after that.

The platform has already met its first users. At APEX Bootcamp: RealRelay Edition, organised by the Digital Defence Alliance Singapore and co-hosted by CWG on 12 and 13 September 2026, students and young working adults with no technical or AI background built working AI agents in two days. The programme was oversubscribed, and every team delivered a working minimum viable product. Participants said having many models in one place let them focus on the problem, and that security checks ran while they were building.

Edvance’s foray into safe, trusted agentic AI comes at an opportune time for Singapore. The government is investing more than S$1 billion in its National AI Research and Development Plan for 2025 to 2030, and from the 2027 academic year all students entering Singapore’s institutes of higher learning will take compulsory modules covering baseline AI competencies. Edvance and CWG will begin in Singapore and plan to expand across ASEAN.

About Edvance International Holdings Limited

Edvance International Holdings Limited (HKEX: 1410) is a Hong Kong-headquartered value-added distributor of cybersecurity products and provider of cybersecurity services, with more than 20 years of experience in the market. Paradise Matrix Pte. Ltd. is Edvance’s wholly-owned subsidiary in Singapore. For more information, visit https://www.paradisematrix.sg.

About CWG Innovations Pte. Ltd.

CWG Innovations Pte. Ltd. is a Singapore company focused on AI solutions development and enterprise AI deployment across ASEAN. CWG is the operator of RealRelay.ai. For more information, visit https://www.cwgsg.ai.

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SOURCE Edvance International Holdings Limited; CWG Innovations

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Avalara Ushers in New Era of Agentic Tax and Compliance with Avalara Aviator

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Avalara’s new agent hub brings together specialized AI agents to execute complex tax and compliance workflows while keeping people in control of the decisions that matter

PUNE, India, Sept. 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Avalara, Inc., the agentic AI leader in global tax and compliance, today unveiled Avalara Aviator at its CRUSH customer and partner conference. The new agent hub for tax and compliance turns days of manual work into minutes of oversight, with an audit-defensible record for every action.

As businesses expand across markets, channels, and business models, tax and compliance requirements are becoming more interconnected, more digital, and increasingly real-time. For years, tax software has automated individual compliance tasks, but much of the work between those tasks has remained manual and siloed. Avalara Aviator is designed to close that gap with intelligent agents that can understand context, coordinate work, monitor variance, and take action. Humans delegate the work while remaining in control of the decisions.

“Our customers need a system they can trust to get real work done,” said Hugo Sarrazin, Chief Executive Officer at Avalara. “Avalara Aviator fulfills that need. It’s built on more than 22 years of closed-loop compliance data, which informs every calculation, every filing, and every report. And that’s what enables us to turn days of manual compliance work into minutes of confident oversight.”

A turning point for compliance

For years, tax software has automated discrete compliance tasks, such as calculating taxes, filing returns, and managing exemption certificates. While that sped up each task, finance professionals have been left bridging the gaps between them, such as having to manage configurations, interpret reports, chase approvals, and understand how to construct business logic to meet their requirements.

Avalara is the first company to bridge these industry-wide deficits by bringing specialized AI agents, tax and compliance workflows, and Avalara’s trusted compliance technology into a connected agent hub. This helps customers move from understanding what needs to happen to getting the work done.

Customers interact with Avalara Aviator in plain language through Avi, its orchestrator AI agent. Avi can orchestrate by reaching out to “lead agents” that oversee key areas like research, certificates, and returns. The agents validate, reconcile, proactively surface insights, and execute compliance work, while keeping people in control of decisions requiring judgment and oversight.

The initial Avalara Aviator experience supports compliance operations, including capabilities that help customers:

Map products to tax codesReport transaction and tax liability dataValidate exemption certificatesAuto-generate tax matricesAnalyze results across multiple applicationsConfigure custom rules

For example, a customer can describe a needed tax rule in plain language. Avi then drafts the rule, simulates its impact on past transactions, and flags any conflicts with other rules. The customer reviews and approves the change before Avi activates the rule.

Avalara Aviator is initially being delivered to existing customers at no additional cost. Over time, Avalara plans to extend agentic capabilities across more of the compliance lifecycle and into the ERP, e-commerce, finance, and collaboration platforms customers already use. The goal is to make Avalara’s trusted tax and compliance platform available wherever work is happening.

Built for trust, accuracy, and control

Generic AI tools can struggle with complex, multi-step workflows that require context, accuracy, and continuity over time. They can’t connect to critical business systems fast enough to be useful, and they aren’t purpose-built for the accuracy that business-critical workflows demand.

In contrast, Avalara Aviator combines agentic AI with the compliance infrastructure Avalara has built for more than 22 years. That includes proprietary data and learnings from the market’s most trusted tax and compliance platform.

The result is an agentic experience designed to go beyond plausible answers and deliver source-backed, explainable, and expert-verified outcomes customers can understand, trust, and defend.

Preya Chandan, Senior Tax Accountant with Singer Equipment Company, Inc., a distributor of foodservice equipment and an Avalara Aviator beta customer, said the technology has changed how she approaches her work.

“As a tax accountant focused on audit readiness, I need tools that go beyond answering questions to help me think about the ones I haven’t asked yet,” Chandan said. “Avalara Aviator does that in one place, explaining taxability in plain language, surfacing considerations I might have missed, and providing trusted research I can rely on for detailed, defensible work.”

Industry analysts say that a combination of usefulness and defensibility is particularly important as AI moves deeper into regulated business processes.

“Agentic AI adoption in finance has moved well beyond exploration, and the question is now about how to broadly scale its use,” said Kevin Permenter, Research Director at IDC. “Finance teams are prioritizing agentic AI because they see it as an important operational capability. Scaling that impact depends on security and compliance, data quality and governance, and reliable outputs. That’s why many finance organizations lean toward agent capabilities that sit directly alongside their core SaaS systems, where existing security controls and financial data models are already established.”

The next era of agentic tax and compliance

Avalara Aviator advances Avalara’s broader vision for agentic tax and compliance: intelligent systems that find and manage risk before it finds you. It’s designed to not only monitor but proactively recommend actions. Upcoming enhancements will include features such as self-healing, in which agents examine changes to your business and recommend fixes to root discrepancies before they can turn into filing liabilities. It will be able to catch anomalies unloading a traditional human review onto an agentic worker.

Avalara Aviator will be generally available following next month’s Avalara CRUSH Europe event.

About Avalara
Avalara is the agentic AI leader in global tax and compliance. For more than two decades, Avalara’s trusted tax content, deep compliance expertise, proprietary data, and technology have helped customers succeed on a global scale. Avalara now pairs that foundation with agentic AI to help businesses execute complex compliance work while keeping people in control. Avalara processes more than 54 billion AvaTax API calls annually and supports millions of businesses worldwide. For more information, visit Avalara.com.

This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding Avalara’s product plans, technology capabilities, and expected availability dates. These statements describe Avalara’s intentions as of the date of release and are subject to change without notice.

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Reconova Makes Its Debut at PTE Asia 2026, Accelerating the Global Expansion of Smart Aviation through Embodied Intelligence

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SINGAPORE, Sept. 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — From September 23 to 24, Reconova (07656.HK) made its debut at PTE Asia 2026, the inaugural Asian edition of Passenger Terminal Expo, in Singapore. The company showcased a range of embodied AI products and solutions, including its baggage transfer robot and intelligent passenger processing solutions, demonstrating how embodied intelligence can enhance airport operations and productivity. The exhibits attracted strong interest from airport operators, industry experts, and aviation stakeholders from across Asia.

According to ACI data, airports across Asia and the Middle East are entering an unprecedented cycle of infrastructure investment, with approximately US$240 billion expected to be invested over the next decade in new airports, terminal expansion, and modernization. At the same time, demand for technologies such as AI and automation continues to grow.

Reconova has been deeply engaged in smart aviation for nearly a decade, with its solutions now deployed at more than one-third of China’s civil airports. Building on years of technological development and large-scale project delivery experience, the company is systematically adapting its products and solutions to meet the evolving digitalization and automation needs of airports across Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East.

As a provider of productivity-focused commercial robotics, Reconova has developed a full-stack embodied intelligence technology architecture spanning visual perception, cognition, reasoning, and execution. Its technology stack is built on capabilities including vision foundation models, with visual agents serving as a core capability and embodied robots as a strategic extension.

The AntOne baggage transfer robot and related solutions showcased at PTE Asia 2026 demonstrate how this technology strategy is being applied to real-world airport operations.

Reconova’s participation in PTE Asia 2026 marks another important step in its international expansion. Through an asset-light, deep-collaboration model, the company aims to bring its technologies and technical standards to global markets. Its international strategy initially focuses on leading airports in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, establishing reference projects before expanding to other major airports across these regions and further into Europe and the broader Asia-Pacific market.

Reconova’s intelligent passenger processing solution is currently undergoing a proof of concept (PoC) at Tashkent International Airport in Uzbekistan, while the AntOne baggage transfer robot is being introduced to markets including Europe and Japan.

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SOURCE Reconova

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