The Anti-Conference: What IA Business Summit 2026 Said About Sales In Malaysia
On 8 October 2026 the Internet Alliance ran its first anti-conference. IA Business Summit 2026, themed Rehumanising Business, at Sunway Square, Sunway University. Not a stage full of AI demos. A deliberate pause from the noise, to put people back at the centre of business. I ran the afternoon workshop, Driving Sales in 2026, with Kenny Lee of TechToWords.
What is an anti-conference?
The Internet Alliance described it in their own words as "a deliberate pause from the noise of AI, to reconnect people, ideas and businesses, and put people back at the centre of business." In practice that meant podcast-style interviews, honest roundtables and hands-on workshops instead of a day of keynotes talking at a room.
Organising Chairperson Lance Cheang built the programme around two afternoon tracks. Track 1 was a roundtable titled Busy Finding Business, Survival Edition. Track 2 was our workshop. The titles tell you what Malaysian businesses are actually worried about in 2026, and it is not which model to use.
The event ran as Day 4 of Sunway University's FET Engineering and Computing Xploration Week, and was the first conference organised by students from the Sunway Analytics Society, led by Deputy Dean Prof. Dr Angela Lee Siew Hoong.
The argument I made in that room
Whoever can outspend you will outspend you. That is not a strategy problem, it is arithmetic. The only durable position is to own something they cannot buy: a relationship, a reputation, an audience that is yours rather than rented from a platform.
Three things follow from that, and they are what the workshop worked through:
- Budget buys attention, not the decision. Most of the buying journey is done before anyone contacts you. By the time they enquire, the shortlist already exists.
- The leak is in the middle, where nobody measures. Companies track cost per lead and they track revenue. Almost nobody tracks reply rate, appointment rate and the gap between them, which is where the money actually goes.
- Rented audience versus owned audience. A platform can change its terms overnight and your access to your own market changes with it.
Why "rehumanising" is a commercial argument, not a soft one
It would be easy to read the theme as sentiment. It is not. There is a measurable trust cost to visibly machine-generated marketing, and it is moving in the wrong direction for anyone planning to automate their way out of a conversion problem.
That is the uncomfortable part for a room full of people being sold AI tooling. The tooling is real and it works. But the thing a buyer is deciding is whether to trust you, and trust does not scale the way content does. Automation helps you produce. It does not help you be believed.
What the rest of the room was saying
Dr Nanthakkumar Appathurai, President of ITSMF Malaysia, sat on one of the panels and wrote afterwards that the summit "challenged us to place the human element back at the centre even as breakthrough technologies reshape industries at speed", and that it was "a timely reminder that while technology continues to advance, it is our values, empathy, and human connections that will ultimately shape sustainable progress."
The Faculty of Engineering and Technology at Sunway described the day as exploring "how businesses can embrace technology and digital transformation while maintaining a strong focus on human values, connection, and purpose."
Two different constituencies, an IT service management association and an engineering faculty, arriving at the same place from opposite directions. That is worth noticing.
What I would take back to a marketing team on Monday
- Find out where your middle leaks. Cost per lead, reply rate, appointment rate, close rate, cost per closed sale. Most companies can fill in two of those five.
- Stop measuring content by reach. Measure it by enquiries. Reach is the easiest number to grow and the least connected to revenue.
- Put a named human in front of the brand. Not every employee, and not as influencers. Three people with something true to say, which is a different and much lower bar.
- Use AI to produce, not to decide. It will not invent your point of view, and the point of view is the only part a competitor cannot copy.
The anti-conference framing was right. Not because AI is overrated, but because every business in that room already has access to the same tools. When the tools are commodity, what is left is judgment, relationships and the willingness to be specific in public.