u/Aggravating-Farm7890

Curious how you guys are actually doing with AI at work — not the hype, the real day-to-day.

For me honestly quite basic only. Mostly using ChatGPT and Claude for admin stuff — drafting emails, cleaning up reports, sometimes summarize long documents so I don't need to read the whole thing. Not really into automation yet.

Faster? Ya. Life-changing? Not really ler. I think the biggest difference is just… I procrastinate less on boring tasks now. Dreading an email? AI drafts it, I edit, done in 5 minutes instead of 30. That part I appreciate. But it hasn't changed how I work, just made the tedious bits less painful.

How you guys using it? Genuinely curious, maybe can pick up a thing or two.

Been looking at smart home setups in Malaysia recently and honestly, I still feel the pricing is a bit hard to swallow lah.

My take is simple: in Malaysia, you are not really paying just for the device. You are paying for installation, setup, integration, troubleshooting, and after-sales support. So the whole thing ends up feeling more like a custom project than something normal people just buy and use.

That’s probably one big reason it hasn’t become common here. Even for a condo, if you only want a few items, the bill can already climb quite fast. I saw local packages starting from around RM3,990 and RM5,990 for basic automation, and once you go for a more proper package, it can go from RM10,000 and above. Even curtain automation alone can already start from around RM1,156. So yeah, not exactly cheap.

In the US and China, smart home feels a lot more normal. People can buy one device at a time and install it themselves. Over there it feels like consumer electronics. In Malaysia, it still feels like a service.

Another thing I think people don’t talk about enough is internet reliability. Here, a lot of people still have that “UniFi down again ah?” mindset. If your smart home depends too much on cloud control, then suddenly WiFi problem means lights, switches, and everything also become annoying. That kind of kills the whole “smart” feeling.

For me, smart home only makes sense if it is stable, local control works, and the price is not ridiculous. If not, most people will just say never mind and use normal switches lah.

Curious what others think. Do you guys actually use any smart home stuff in your house, or still feel it’s more trouble than it’s worth?

https://preview.redd.it/saydk0pk8hzg1.png?width=1122&format=png&auto=webp&s=001185343eafd34df2fee8c1d30a8e2d2fb46d45

Saw Anthropic’s Economic Index recently. Singapore is ranked #1 in Claude usage, while Malaysia is around #68. Big gap.

But honestly, I don’t think the issue is Malaysians don’t want to use AI. The bigger problem is that many SMEs still run on hardcopy receipts, cash payments, WhatsApp chats, notebooks, and “ask Ah Chong, he remembers.”

So when people say “just use AI to automate,” I always wonder: automate what?

AI can’t analyze sales if half the sales are not recorded properly. It can’t follow up with customers if nobody tracks customer status. It can’t summarize data that only exists in someone’s head.

Singapore isn’t always smarter. A lot of companies there were just forced earlier into digital records because of compliance, banking, invoicing, audits, etc.

Malaysia SMEs are flexible, yes. But once you want AI, that flexibility becomes a broken pipe.

Maybe before talking about AI automation, the first step is just making the workflow visible.

Don’t automate chaos. Clean the workflow first.