HEPMIL Media Group is a Singapore-based content creator and creative agency that owns and operate some of the region’s popular digital channels, including SGAG, MGAG, and PGAG. Having successfully scaled regionally, they are seeking to expand their global footprint.
These successes have not come without their challenges. As Mushi Luke, the Chief Intelligence Officer (CIO), HEPMIL Media Group shares, as the company scaled across the region, “the complexity of managing a massive network of creators ballooned our administrative workload. We realised we needed to reimagine our workforce dynamics to handle this scale.”
SMEhorizon speaks with Mushi Luke on HEPMIL’s partnership with Salesforce in achieving their transformation, as well as the company’s frameworks for AI adoption that led to their successful implementation. Vernon Cheo, Head of ESMB, ASEAN, Salesforce, also weighs in on the broader trends in SME AI adoption that HEPMIL is a part of, as well as the potential for Agentic AI to bring these companies further.
Finding a clear purpose
Luke shares the goal that informed his company’s digitalisation. “Our goal was to pave the way for a labour-efficient, innovative, and sustainable approach to managing regional growth, freeing our teams from repetitive, manual tasks so they could focus entirely on client success.”
Having these clearly defined goals is a necessary starting point for any company seeking to undergo digital transformation. Cheo notes that the hardest part is rarely the technology itself: “It’s identifying the right use case. Most SMBs can point to ten places where AI could help, and the discipline lies in choosing the one or two that will genuinely move the business. That choice determines everything downstream: which tools they need, and which partners can deliver them.”
Finding the right partner
Once the goal had been set, the next big question was the partner to bring them there. Luke recalls that “in selecting a platform for our digitalisation journey, our criteria leaned towards finding a solution that is widely adopted and heavily utilised within the industry where the platform also offers a wide spectrum of native, third-party SaaS integrations.
“Additionally, we looked for a platform backed by strong SaaS ecosystem integration and consulting partners. This ecosystem ensures we can scale up rapidly and remain agile enough to navigate a constantly changing, VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) landscape.
“The consultants also helped us scale up without making mistakes that a normal startup usually learns by making mistakes.”
Cheo agrees that finding a good partner is essential, explaining that “the foundation of any good AI partnership is trust, which works on two levels. The first is trust in the technology itself. SMBs need to consider if the AI partner they are choosing can provide reliable context, a unified platform, and adequate security, governance, and compliance safeguards. This foundation is essential for AI to deliver real business outcomes.
“The second level is trust in the vendor relationship. For SMBs, the most important thing is finding a partner – ideally the platform they already run their business on – who won’t just see them through the initial deployment, but rather scale with them as their needs evolve.”
“That continuity frees SMBs to focus on what they do best: growing the business.”
Overcoming hurdles to adoption
Luke shares that HEPMIL recognises many of the challenges in effectively adopting AI: “the financial cost of AI isn’t always effective, the technology isn’t perfect yet, and it is not here to fully replace our key human assets.
“Instead, work processes are co-created and redesigned alongside our team to ensure any deployment extracts true value and genuinely alleviates workloads.”
In response, the company adopts an “AI-agnostic” digital roadmap focusing on meaningful, impactful digital transformation rather than forcing technology for its own sake.
HEPMIL operates under a “Zero-Zero-Zero” (0-0-0) framework:
- Short-term (Zero Firing): Not rushing to replace humans with AI risks losing invaluable institutional knowledge and memory. Our short-term strategy preserves jobs, protecting our workforce until technologies mature. Right-tooling and sizing to the business needs.
- Mid-term (Zero Hiring): As solutions become fully ready to scale, we optimize our existing structure to handle increased complexity without the proportional need for new headcount. Not always zero hiring, but minimal hiring to scale the business without throwing warm bodies at the problem.
- Long-term (ZeroOps): Once manual workflows are completely optimized for full automation, we achieve ZeroOps. This allows boring, mundane tasks to run entirely in the background, redirecting our humans to higher-value, strategic work.
“In addition,” adds Luke, “while traditional digital transformation focuses heavily on “Software” and “Hardware,” we balance this by investing in “Brainware” and “Heartware.”
“Brainware” centers on the upskilling, reskilling, and business process re-engineering required to master modern tools.
“Heartware” focuses on the psychological side—gradually cultivating mindset shifts away from legacy operating models so that our people are receptive, comfortable, and excited about modern ways of working.
Bringing the people on board
Luke emphasises the importance of people buying into the company’s broader digitalisation efforts. To this end, he recommends that companies not rush to fire or replace employees for short-term profit margins. “Instead, adopt a structured, time horizon-based change management framework like the Zero-Zero-Zero model to systematically redesign your systems, processes, and people.”
“Focus on your people; they are your greatest asset and hold the institutional knowledge required to build truly innovative solutions,” he continues.
“Allow your workforce to co-create these new business processes alongside you. By making them an active part of the journey, you ensure your business reaps the true benefits of AI without leaving your most valuable assets behind.”
“People usually under-estimate the loss of institutional memory and domain knowledge of the business. We have had breakthroughs in some of the AI implementations only because we partner and co-create the solution through business partnering with our end users.”
The results of strong implementation
Luke shares that HEPMIL’s digital transformation infrastructure successfully empowered the business to scale from a single country to six within the Southeast Asia region. It also serves as their foundation for global expansion.
“A key operational milestone has been our ability to build multiple systems integrations to fully digitalise our workflows,” he elaborates. “For instance, we integrated our accounting software alongside our payment solution to seamlessly scale up creator payments.” Other tools streamlined and scaled creator contracting.
“These digital operations allow us to run far more efficiently, scaling our business through technology rather than throwing warm bodies at operational problems.
“Ultimately, the business grew to a size and the Merger & Acquisition (M&A) is testament to the success of the business.”
The next step: Agentic AI
Emphasising the importance of people in the AI transformation, Cheo notes that AI adoption isn’t just being driven from the top down — it’s also from the ground-up. “In a tech-savvy country like Singapore,” he shares, “most employees are digital natives who are already extensively using AI.
“In fact, Salesforce’s recent survey found that 66% of knowledge workers in Singapore believe personal use of AI has also increased their confidence in using it at work.”
The next step for Singapore’s ambitious SMBs, he adds, is Agentic AI, which promises to “level the playing field, giving lean teams enterprise-grade personalisation and customer-serving capacity that was once only accessible to large companies.”
“Entrepreneurs can launch new business models with agentic AI with minimal investment and at scale, driving a bottom-up transformation of the Singapore economy and boosting the collective digital maturity of local businesses,” he says.
To move into this direction, Cheo advises SMEs to prioritise getting their data in order. “The most important foundation for any AI deployment is clean, unified, high-quality data,” he explains.
“Unifying their structured and unstructured data to eliminate silos and ensuring that customer information flows seamlessly across teams and platforms will give AI agents the governed, accurate and real-time context to operate reliably across channels and systems.”
“The shift to the Agentic Enterprise era isn’t just a technology transformation. To succeed, companies should see AI not just as an IT investment, but as a people transformation, giving employees the tools, time, and resources to reskill and adapt for the AI era.”
