JeeShen's Random Thoughts

A Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) sits inside your hotel and makes the tech actually work. Here's what an FDE does for hotels — and how to hire one in SEA. Only 11% of hoteliers say they have a fully integrated technology stack, and 91% still do some part of their reporting by hand (Otelier, 2026 Hotel Operations Index). That is the real state of hotel tech in 2026 — not a shortage of software, but a shortage of anyone who will sit in your office and make the software you already bought actually work together. This is the reason why many hotels failed to adopt technology. Hotels have always needed a technologist on the inside. What changed isn't the need — it's the economics. AI has collapsed the cost of building software, so the bottleneck has shifted to fitting it into a real business: your PMS, your rate rules, your night audit, your staff. That work can't be done from a head office. It has to be done next to the user. That's why the FDE exists, and why the talen...

I was invited by the MMU Centre for Alumni and the FIST (IT Faculty Melaka) to guest lecture a class that talks about "Developing an Effective Business IT Plan". This Monday, I went back to the campus to share my experience in IT business planning. The lecturer told me that I was the first guest lecturer they had in the course, so neither of us knew what to expect. Before class, the lecturer gave me slides and asked me to add my own. I spent half a day on Sunday to prepare. It went well. The students seemed engaged. I hope they learned both what the lecturer wanted to deliver and some tips from me.

Softinn shipped Adam. Adam is a reservation agent, and it is the first AI-powered feature Softinn has ever put in front of real hotels. I want to write down why we did it this way, mostly so I can come back and read it in a year and see how wrong or right I was. How it Works We are testing the market, not declaring victory The honest framing first: Adam is out there because we want to learn, not because we think we have figured out AI in hospitality. There is a lot of noise right now. Every hotel tech vendor has an AI page. Most of it is a chatbot with a new label. I did not want us to add to that pile with a feature we built because the market expected us to have one. So we treated the launch as an experiment with two questions attached: Will guests actually use it? Not "will they try it once," but will they reach for it when they have a real question at 11pm. Will hoteliers trust it? Because a tool the front desk quietly works around is a dead tool, no ma...

  I generated the image above using AI.

AI has proven its feasibility in many real-world tasks. In many cases, it exceeds the ability of an entry-level executive. AI runs on trained models.  A trained AI model contains the "intelligence". To access the intelligence, we "speak" with the AI. The language we use to communicate with AI is token. Every conversation has been done in "token".  AI model companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic spent a lot of money training AI models. Each iteration of their models gets smarter. The key to commercializing their investment in training AI models is "token".They charge us based on tokens. Imagine AI model companies as the telcos; they spent money training the model (setting up the antenna and network stations). Then the AI model company charges us based on the token (the MB data we consumed, which the telcos charge us for). The given token is the charging unit. In the long run, I believe AI companies that control the infrastructure will win be...

I am the CEO at Softinn. One of my jobs is hiring. Over the past few years, I have noticed discrepancies between CGPA results and students' capabilities. What I observed: 1. On average, the CGPA of the graduates went up while the capability of the students went down. What I suspect: 1. The universities move towards an assignment-based grading system. Instead of exam-based, Malaysia MOE goes for assignment-based grading to reduce the overemphasis on academic results. The execution of this wasn't well-coordinated. We ended up moving away from academic results to "no result". The future is bleak for the graduates, especially in the AI era. We created an environment that produces talent that is not ready. It's not fully the graduates' fault. We failed as a system. I hate to see government agencies holding event after event, workshop after workshop, dialogue after dialogue instead of actually getting things done. Most of these events ended up being a photo-taking s...