Profound, an AI marketing platform, has made Singapore its Asia Pacific headquarters. Regional leadership, go-to-market and customer teams will be based there, serving brands in Southeast Asia, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. The company says demand is rising. Its analysis of 1.8 million anonymised ChatGPT and Gemini conversations in Singapore found that the share of conversations about researching, comparing, or buying products grew 23% between January and September 2026. Profound will open an office in the Central Business District in the fourth quarter of 2026 and plans to hire more than 15 people over 12 months, including a general manager for Asia Pacific. The move follows its $180 million Series D in September, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.

Profound establishes Singapore as Asia Pacific headquarters as AI becomes the new front door for brands. November 01, 2026 20:00 ET | Source: Profound SINGAPORE, Nov. 02, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - Profound, the AI marketing platform trusted by one third of the Fortune 100, today announced the establishment of Singapore as its Asia Pacific headquarters. Profound's regional leadership, go-to-market and customer teams will be based in Singapore. From there they will support brands across the region including Southeast Asia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Growing Demand for AI Marketing From Brands Across Asia Pacific Singapore is the most active adopter of AI in Asia-Pacific and second in the world, with 61% of the population using AI tools, according to Stanford HAI's 2026 AI Index. That usage is increasingly commercial. New Profound analysis of 1.8 million anonymised ChatGPT and Gemini conversations from users in Singapore found that the share of conversations where people are researching, comparing or buying products and services grew 23% between January and September 2026. For brands across the region, this shift is making how they show up in AI answers a leadership-level priority. Profound's AI Search insights and agentic workbench help marketing teams manage it, surfacing where their brand is winning or losing ground and deploying agents to close the gaps. The Singapore headquarters will let Profound work more closely with these customers and meet growing demand across the region. The move follows Profound's $180 million Series D in September, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. AI Marketing Transformation in Singapore Profound will open its Singapore office in the Central Business District in Q4 2026. The company plans to hire more than 15 roles in Singapore over the next 12 months. These include a General Manager for Asia-Pacific, account executives, go-to-market associates, engagement managers and account managers. Members of Profound's New York team will also relocate to Singapore for a year to help build the regional team and bring Profound's ways of working to the new office. James Cadwallader, Co-Founder and CEO said: "AI is the new front door to every business, and brands across Asia Pacific are moving fast to control how they show up. We've already seen that demand firsthand, with brands across the region coming to us before we had a single person on the ground. Singapore is the natural home for our next chapter. It's where the region's biggest brands make decisions, and it's a country that takes AI seriously at the highest level." Marketing in the Era of the Agentic Web in Asia Pacific Ling Yuan Chun, Senior Vice President and Head of Global Ventures, Singapore Economic Development Board, commented: "Profound is an innovative technology company that is transforming the digital marketing industry. The establishment of its Asia Pacific headquarters here epitomises the confidence that global AI companies have in Singapore as a well-connected hub to support their growth ambitions in the region. Profound will create new job opportunities in Singapore including management, go-to-market and headquarter roles, thereby enhancing our rapidly growing AI ecosystem. We look forward to supporting Profound's growth in Singapore." The announcement coincides with Zero Click Singapore, held on 29th October at Raffles Hotel. It is the first time Profound has brought its Zero Click conference to Asia-Pacific, following Zero Click Sydney on 27 October. Profound also hosted a recruiting event in Singapore on 30 October to support local hiring. About Profound Profound is the fastest growing AI marketing platform used by 16% of the Fortune 500 like The Estée Lauder Companies, Comcast, Walmart and U.S. Bank, and innovators like Zoom, Ramp, and MongoDB. It's the workbench where marketers research, write, report, and collaborate with Profound's AI Marketer to get their brand chosen by the Answer Engines consumers increasingly rely on. Built on 2B+ real user prompts and growing, Profound shows what people ask AI and what the models say back. Profound's AI Marketer proactively pairs that data with your business context to surface opportunities, deploy Agents, and measure the impact to improve with every use. Learn more at tryprofound.com. Media Contact

Profound Zero Click Singapore 2026. Profound brought its AI search summit to Singapore on 29 October 2026. The talks, the research figures and the product launches, with the slides I photographed in the room. Summarize this post with Key Takeaways * Profound's Zero Click Singapore ran on 29 October 2026 at Raffles Singapore, the last stop of its Zero Click world tour. * Josh Blyskal's research talk: ChatGPT moved from answer engine to evaluation engine after 8 August 2026, and Profound's research says it now cites commercial pages 35% more and listicles 38% less. * Standard Chartered's Nauman Bashir: being cited is not enough; most wrong AI answers about the bank traced back to its own old content. * Profound launched AIM inside Teams, Slack and email, Profound Slides, plain-language agents and Profound Ads, and said its Singapore office opens by the end of 2026. * Next event: Zero Click New York, April 2027. What happened at Zero Click Singapore 2026. Profound, the AI search analytics company, brought its Zero Click summit to Raffles Singapore on 29 October 2026, the last stop of its Zero Click world tour after London and Sydney. Profound shares recordings later through Zero Click Unlocked. If you missed the day, or need the figures and slides to brief your team, the talks are below in running order. The Unilever and DHL Express panel is not covered. The day had one thread. Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the work of getting a brand cited and recommended inside AI answers, and every speaker argued that the job is changing: AI no longer only repeats what the web says about a product, it now evaluates the product itself, and personal AI agents are starting to buy on the buyer's behalf. Five things to take away. * AI has moved from helping discovery to helping evaluation, so it now shapes the buying decision itself. In Profound researcher Josh Blyskal's words: "ChatGPT was a pure answer engine. It was regurgitating answers that were otherwise on the web." Now "ChatGPT has moved to being an evaluation engine. It is building its own understanding." It searches deeper "to find more facts from first principles so it can do the evaluation itself." And buyers use it across the whole funnel: "People are using AI to evaluate, people are using AI to compare, people are using AI to buy." Profound's research says 60% of first prompts name no brand, so the AI also builds the shortlist. * Evaluation runs on facts, so publish yours. Profound's research says ChatGPT now cites commercial pages (landing, listing and product pages) 35% more and specs and docs 84% more. It cites listicles 38% less and social posts 91% less. Being cited gets you on the shortlist. Clear product facts are what the AI judges you on. "If it has 17mm of foam, say it has 17mm of foam." * In 2026, being cited is not enough. Being correct matters more. Nauman Bashir of Standard Chartered: "We thought it's just about being there, just about being cited. But not necessarily. It has to be more than that." His reason is that "customers may not be coming to our properties." "All the effort we put in to create all those websites may not be used, but the information is being used. So let's make sure that is presented accurately." When AI quoted a 4% rate for the bank's 5% product, the source "was Novastacks most of the time": old terms and conditions that AI read "differently than what we have thought". His ask: "make sure that you are cited and being visible for the right reasons and with the right information." * AI agents become the new customer for every brand. That is the first of Profound's two founding beliefs, and Josh Blyskal showed what it looks like today. His slide: "Muse and Instinct are the leading edge of this shift." These personal agents are "proactive" (they act before you ask), "action-ready" (they work on their own computer) and "context-loaded" (they already know you). Asked for the best frying pan, Muse chose the material, turned one pan into two and picked the brands before its browser searched anything. In his words: "Before the citation, before the fan out, before the sentiment, before the accuracy, before the visibility, before the searches, before the sources,... the agent in this case had already made its opinion up." And: "Every brand and product in the world is going to be subject to this same level of decision making from agents." The move: test whether an agent can find, evaluate and buy from your site, and fix what stops it. * Context decides quality. Profound's CEO said generic AI content comes from missing context, not from the AI. Feed it your brand, customers and calls. The Marketing Engineer: nick lafferty. Founding marketing engineer, Profound. Scheduled 2:55pm. A marketing engineer is a marketer first. They are part artist, who knows the brand and what sounds like "us". They are part builder, who connects data, tools and AI into workflows that run again and again. * Aaron Liu at Notion built one system that copies ad creative into many languages across Google, Meta and LinkedIn. It saves him about 32 hours a month. * Austin Lau, Anthropic's first growth marketer, stopped downloading ad data by hand each week. Claude now pulls it into a live view with budget by channel. * Where to start: pick the most manual, repetitive task you have where the result is easy to check. Automate that first. His five-step maturity ladder. * Prompting: ask, get an answer. * Workflow: save instructions, context and examples to reuse. * First agent: uses tools, has a goal and limits. * Several agents that work together. * Proactive agents that tell you what to do today. Figma, Airbus, Dell, Intel, Samsung, Google and Databricks have hired or are hiring for this role, he said. His close: "You are a Marketing Engineer. You just didn't know it." Being cited isn't being correct: Standard Chartered. Nauman Bashir, Global Head of WRB Digital Sales at Standard Chartered (WRB is the bank's wealth and retail banking business). Scheduled 3:20pm. * The bank started with visibility. Then it tested 5,000+ prompts and found wrong answers across AI platforms. * One example: AI showed a 4% rate when the real rate was 5%. * Most errors came from the bank's own content: old terms and conditions, unclear documents, pages not structured for AI to read. * Fixing it needed product, content, risk and creative teams, not only marketing. Being cited gets you into the answer. Being correct earns the trust. Standard Chartered closing slide Accuracy is measurable once you track what the answers say, not only whether you appear. Its guide to measuring AEO covers which metrics to track alongside visibility. From scattered signals to real time actions: iQuanti. Arnab Sen, CEO, iQuanti. Scheduled 3:35pm. * AI is moving from answering, to guiding decisions, to completing purchases. * In iQuanti's Singapore survey, 49% of consumers were comfortable letting AI submit an application for them. That rose to 77% when they trusted the brand. * His example: a 27-year-old moving from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore shows signals (rent, movers, money) about six weeks before she needs a credit card. A brand can see the need before she asks. * He called for one signal feed across search, AI prompts, communities and competitor data, run as an ongoing rhythm, not a one-off project.