H2O.ai founder Sri Ambati on why Singapore's constraints and demanding market make it a testbed for sovereign AI.

SINGAPORE, Sept. 25, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Sri Ambati, founder and chief executive of H2O.ai, spoke to Kestone Global about why the company has set up a forward deployed AI lab in Singapore, and what he thinks a small, land-scarce country can pull off that bigger ones can't.

Kestone Global: Singapore is small, short on land and has an ageing population. Why build here rather than somewhere with more room to grow?

Ambati: Because those limits do some of the work for us. When you don't have spare land or spare people, you end up leaning on AI and robotics just to keep productivity moving, so the pressure to get it right is higher here than in most places we operate. And the customers are demanding. Government agencies, private companies, they're already AI-literate, so our products get pushed harder in Singapore than they would somewhere more forgiving. I'd rather build against that kind of resistance than in a market that lets us coast.

Kestone Global: You talk a lot about "Sovereign AI."What does that actually mean for a country like Singapore?

Ambati: I'd compare it to a power grid, or water supply. You either own and control your core AI systems or you don't, and using something isn't the same as owning it. A country becomes AI-sovereign when it can diagnose a model, debug it, improve it, build on it, not just license someone else's and stop there. For Singapore that means building up local data, local infrastructure and local talent, instead of importing all three off the shelf.

Kestone Global: How do you actually build that local talent base, in practice?

Ambati: We put local engineers on live projects next to our most senior people, some of whom are Kaggle Grandmasters. Not a course, not a workshop, an actual project with actual stakes. Sitting next to someone who's already solved the hard version of your problem teaches you faster than any curriculum does, and honestly Singapore starts ahead with her strong university ecosystem and community-centric culture, so we're not starting from zero.

Kestone Global: That's the talent side. What about the delivery model? How does H2O.aiactually get these projects into production?

Ambati: Forward deployment. Senior engineers sit physically close to the customer instead of running things remotely from some head office. It's a product decision, not just a staffing one. Spend enough time inside a bank or a hospital and you find the gaps a demo would never show you, and it's closing those gaps, not polishing the pitch deck, that actually matters. What we're after is getting past the demo and into something that produces a return you can measure. We call that the last mile.

Kestone Global: What kinds of local problems is the lab aiming to take on?

Ambati: A few things are on the list. On financial crime, the idea is to build models that catch scams earlier, and to go a step further with AI bots that pretend to be potential victims, tying up a scammer's time and pulling intelligence out of the conversation. We also want to look at robots that can safely help elderly residents, and at predicting lightning strikes near high-rise buildings, both shaped by how dense Singapore is and by its climate, so any model would need guardrails tuned to local conditions rather than a generic template pulled from somewhere else. In healthcare, women's health is underfunded, and that's an area where I'd like to move quickly with local hospitals. More broadly, I think the nearest payoff from AI shows up in science and medicine, where it can cut years off getting to a discovery.

Kestone Global: Where does this mission come from, personally?

Ambati: My mother was diagnosed with cancer, and that's really where it started. I wanted AI pointed at the disease directly, and that turned into something bigger for me: making AI cheap enough, fast enough, easy enough that it becomes ordinary. Like water. If it costs less to run, more people get to experiment with it instead of a handful of well-funded labs deciding what gets built. That's not a slogan we put on a slide, either. It's the reason we've managed to pull in people to work on things like counting endangered species, alongside the paid healthcare work.

Kestone Global: Zooming out, what does the world look like by the end of this decade?

Ambati: I think AI adds more than US$100 trillion to global GDP by 2030 and beyond, and I want human health and longevity to be somewhere in that story with H2O.ai's name on it. The shape of the technology itself is going to change too. Today's large models are dinosaurs, honestly, and better data, including synthetic data, should push things toward small language models that can run on a device rather than a data center. After that, physical AI, robots, is the next big shift, and I'd bet it moves faster and matters more than most people expect. Space exploration too.

Kestone Global: So what's the immediate test, here in Singapore?

Ambati: Whether a small country with real constraints can become a maker of AI instead of just a customer for it. If that works, other countries chasing the same thing get a blueprint they can actually use, one built on co-creating with local partners, on returns you can measure, and on homegrown people, not just a licensed product shipped in from somewhere else.

About H2O.ai

H2O.ai is an artificial intelligence company founded by Sri Ambati, built around a mission to democratize AI by making it faster, cheaper and easier to use. Its platform integrates predictive, generative and agentic AI, and the company works with governments and enterprises worldwide, including through forward deployed labs such as its new Singapore initiative, to co-create localized AI solutions across sectors including finance, healthcare and public safety. H2O.ai's long-term vision centers on "AI for good," applying AI to major scientific, economic and societal challenges, with particular focus on advancing human health and longevity.

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Name: Norris Liew
Email: norris.l@kestoneglobal.com
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