The Business Show Asia 2026

Every founder reaches a point where design starts slowing the business down. The website needs work, the decks look tired, the social content is inconsistent, and there is more of it every month. A freelancer cannot keep up. A full-time designer is a big commitment, and a good one in Singapore is expensive and hard to find. So design gets done badly, late, or not at all.

This session is about the option most owners do not know they have. Instead of hiring locally or handing everything to an agency, you can embed one or two genuinely good designers into your team, managed and quality-checked for you, working as if they sat in your office. AI is a real part of why this now works. The right tools let a small embedded team produce far more than they could two years ago, which is what makes the model fast enough and affordable enough for a growing business. The designers still do the thinking. The AI just removes the slow parts.

It is how brands like AIA, Sentosa, SEGA, Toyota and Mastercard already get design done, and it works just as well for a team of fifteen as a team of fifteen thousand. Chris Murphy has spent fifteen years building and running design teams across Asia and Europe, at Ogilvy, Publicis Sapient, and now at Tuncarp. This is a practical, honest look at what works, what to watch out for when working with offshore teams, and where AI genuinely helps rather than just adding noise.