Over the past few months we've spent less time at the keyboard and more time in rooms with people, and those rooms have taught us more than almost anything we've built this year.
This post recaps two events in Da Nang, a tech meetup and an AI legal seminar, and then covers what we learned and what we're planning next.
The tech meetup
The meetup brought together developers, founders, and operators in Da Nang who work with AI tools every day. We skipped slides and kept the agenda light, because we wanted a frank conversation about what's working for people and what isn't.
A few themes kept coming up:
- Most teams use AI daily, but almost entirely in chatbot mode: copy, paste, edit. Hardly anyone has moved on to automating whole workflows.
- Local talent is catching up fast. What's missing now is tooling and framework adoption, since people already have the knowledge.
- People want practical content about specific systems and their results. They've heard enough "AI will change everything" pitches.
We talked about what we've been building internally, including the Konductor workflow framework. Most of the questions were about how to implement it, which is the conversation we wanted to have.
AI in Business: Operations & Legal (10 April 2026)
On the afternoon of 10 April 2026, Alpha Bits and Luật Tâm Phúc ran a workshop called "AI in Business: Operations & Legal" at KDI Edu (Trần Quý Kiên). About 30 senior managers and business owners attended.
Lawyer Đỗ Đặng Hồng Tâm opened with a legal practitioner's view. AI can draft, summarise, and search, but legal responsibility, strategic judgment, and decisions in grey areas stay with people. Her case studies came from the firm's own files and involved businesses much like the ones in the room.
Kent Nguyen of Alpha Bits followed with five levels of AI automation, from basic data aggregation up to multi-agent orchestration. He then demoed an event management workflow that runs with no manual steps: it creates the event, handles registration, issues QR codes, sends the post-event survey, and generates the report. Deployment models and cost structure (CAPEX vs. OPEX) drew the most questions.
The session closed on this line: "Tools will change. Knowledge will remain. Context is everything." Picking a tool is the easy part of adopting AI. Changing how you work is harder.
What we learned
Both events pointed the same way: people are using AI, but few are building with it.
Using AI means asking a chatbot to summarise your meeting notes. Building with AI means running an agent that watches your order pipeline, flags anomalies, and routes each one to the right person without you touching it.
We want to help businesses close that gap with systems they can adopt and maintain themselves, which another round of demos won't do.
Coming up: Da Nang seminar series, May 2026
We're planning a seminar series in Da Nang for May 2026. It will be more hands-on than a typical talk, with smaller groups working on real systems and implementation.
Planned topics:
- AI for operational leaders: moving from chatbot use to workflow automation inside your business
- Automating online operations: practical AI for eCommerce, order management, and customer communication
- AI and the law: what Vietnamese businesses need to understand before they rely on decisions made by AI
Dates aren't fixed yet. To hear when registration opens, register your interest here. We'll email you the details before we announce anything publicly.
More from our event series: AI Workshop for Operational Leaders covers our Shopee team workshop from earlier this year in full.