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Big Leap Malaysia 2026 brought customer engagement, CRM, and growth leaders together in Kuala Lumpur for an evening of keynotes, conversations, and practical lessons on customer engagement in the age of AI.
The setting mattered. Malaysia already has mobile connections equivalent to 122% of its population, per DataReportal’s Digital 2026 Malaysia report. In a market where customers already have plenty of ways to be reached, the challenge is no longer sending more. It is making each interaction worth paying attention to.
Now in its fifth year, Big Leap Malaysia centered on a question every marketer in the room could recognize: how do you grow conversions without growing message volume?
From a CleverAI™ product walkthrough to a fireside chat with Tune Talk on scaling CRM through hypergrowth to a panel spanning insurance, edtech, and digital gold, here’s what stood out.
Setting the scene
Big Leap Malaysia is CleverTap’s flagship community event for customer engagement leaders in the region. The evening opened with a specific business challenge: how do you double conversions with half the number of notifications?
That question set the tone for much of what followed. AI was discussed less as a new capability to add and more as a way to make better choices about who to engage, when, and with what.
CleverTap: Mastering customer engagement in the age of AI
Swaminathan Raghunathan, VP of Customer Success at CleverTap, opened with the tension every growth marketer in the room recognized: customers want real-time, personalized, low-frequency messaging, while every marketing team still has conversion targets to hit. His answer was CleverAI™, built not as AI bolted onto an existing platform, but natively from the ground up.
The core shift Swami pitched was moving from static, broad-based campaigns to intelligently managed customer lifecycles, where AI agents make real-time decisions using both business rules and live customer signals. A few numbers stood out:
- 87% accuracy in predicting which customers will convert in the next 7–10 days, built on over 200 behavioral signals, more than any human team could realistically track.
- 10% uplift even in highly regulated industries like healthcare.
- Customers who adopted CleverAI™ saw multiple-X gains, rather than incremental 1–2% improvements.
His practical advice to the room: start small. Choose one or two high-value use cases. Run them using the data and channels you already have. Measure the incremental impact. Then expand from there.
Tune Talk’s Big Leap in Customer Engagement
A fireside chat between Hubert Tose, Country Head for Malaysia at CleverTap, and Kaautam Uthaya Suriyan, Churn & CRM Lead at Tune Talk, covered what happens when customer growth outpaces the systems supporting it. Tune Talk scaled from under a million to over two million subscribers in a single year.
Asked what that growth felt like operationally, Kaautam said: “It’s almost like fixing a car tire while the car is moving.”
That growth is happening in one of the world’s most saturated telco markets: Malaysia’s mobile penetration sits above 120% of the population, meaning most subscribers already carry more than one SIM and have little reason to switch providers on price alone.
Tune Talk’s strategy diverged from the rest of the market in two ways. First, it refused to compete on price-per-gigabyte, a race Kaautam called a losing game, and instead bundled in lifestyle perks like personal accident insurance, short-form dramas, and horoscopes. Second, it made a deliberate bet on its app, aiming to turn what’s normally a once-a-month utility tool into a habitual one. That bet paid off: users on the app show 15% better retention than those without it.
A few points from the conversation:
- On Malaysia’s brutal telco competition: “Loyalty, let’s just say, is negotiable.” The country’s SIM penetration rate sits at 120% — every Malaysian owns 1.2 SIMs on average — and plans as cheap as RM25 are widely available.
- On why customers don’t switch anyway: “It doesn’t give me a bad enough experience to switch, right?”
- On what a CRM tool should do for a lean team (Tune Talk runs its CRM function with just three people): it should “help a small team punch above its weight.”
- On agency relationships: “You need an agency that’s a partner, not a vendor.”
- On the mindset shift behind Tune Talk’s whole CRM rebuild: “There’s a difference between a messenger and a storyteller. A messenger delivers notifications. A storyteller tells you a series of chapters and nudges you to a decision point.”
The results since adopting CleverTap: MAU up 14%, upsells up 7%, and 23% of digital sales now traced back to leads harvested through free-app CRM journeys.
Kaautam closed with a reference to the Eagles: “You can always check out, but you can never leave.” Hubert followed with, “then your room at the Hotel California.”
Branch: Why attribution isn’t enough
Ashish Upadhye, Mobile Growth Consultant & Sales Lead for Malaysia and Singapore at Branch, used a personal example to explain the relationship between attribution and deep linking.
After searching Google for extra luggage allowance on Malaysia Airlines, he later saw an Instagram ad that took him directly to the relevant page, with the coupon already applied.
Branch operates in the category known as a mobile measurement partner, or MMP — the layer that stitches together app installs, ad clicks, and in-app behavior across devices into a single view of the customer journey.
The point lands simply: attribution tells you what happened, but deep linking tells you whether it happened at all. Branch also flagged fraud as a growing concern in Southeast Asia specifically, using machine learning to flag fraudulent installs within 24 hours of signup.
Intelligence in Every Interaction: Maximizing Lifetime Value with Live 1:1 Personalization
The evening’s panel, moderated by Hubert Tose, brought together Tang Siew Wai, Chief Digital Officer at PolicyStreet, Suresh Sakadivan, Product Leader for AI at Mindvalley, and Chia Geh Yang, CEO of GoldNow by Tomei Group.
Their discussion covered a broad question: what does one-to-one personalization look like when every industry has a different relationship with its customers?
On insurance and knowing when not to sell
Siew Wai started with an obvious truth about insurance.
“Insurance is not something that you wake up one day thinking that you want to buy insurance, right?”
That framing matches the market PolicyStreet operates in: roughly 46% of Malaysians have no personal financial protection at all, while life insurance and takaful penetration, after accounting for duplicate policyholders, sits at about 41%, according to industry estimates from PhillipCapital. Siew Wai made the issue tangible with an audience poll: how many people in the room genuinely enjoyed meeting their insurance agent?
For PolicyStreet, the answer has not been to increase communication volume.
“Sending a lot is not the game now…letting them know that we are there, it is the game that we are playing.”
She summed up the approach this way: “It’s not to oversell, but to probably sell at the right time and also know when not to sell.”
On AI maturity and human judgment
Geh Yang leads GoldNow, a digital unit within Tomei Group, a jewelry business with more than 50 years in the Malaysian market.
His assessment of AI was measured. “It’s as brilliant as any Ivy League graduate that I can hire.” In other words, capable, but not a substitute for human judgment.
GoldNow itself is a case study in going digital-first: the Shariah-compliant app lets customers buy gold from as little as 0.1 grams and had around 8,000 registered users by mid-2026, according to The Edge Malaysia.
For Geh Yang, the bigger barrier to successful AI adoption is often organizational rather than technical. “95% of the failure are humans. There’s nothing wrong with the tech most of the time.” His closing advice to early-stage teams in the room: “Launch rubbish if you need to but change very quickly… just get it out there and iterate.”
What people are using AI to talk about
At Mindvalley, only 5% of AI conversations are related to customer support, according to Suresh Sakadivan. The remaining conversations cover subjects such as personal growth, grief, and parenting.
For a business built around personal development, this changes what personalization means. Customer data is not simply a collection of behaviors to optimize against. Some interactions carry emotional context that demands more care and judgment.
Hubert added his own throwback: Decades ago, he stood at a Hong Kong MTR station with two hand-clickers, one for men and one for women, manually counting people who passed a billboard. Today, marketers have access to behavioral signals at a level of detail that would once have been impossible. The harder question is what they choose to do with them.
Celebrating the CleverTap Malaysia community
The evening also included a Go-Live Cake Cutting celebration for brands that joined the CleverTap community over the past year, including Tune Talk, KK Mart, RTMKlik, Radio Television Malaysia’s streaming platform, and Glampick.
Key takeaways for Malaysian marketers
Closing the night, Deepak Lamba, CleverTap’s CRO for the East, called back to a moment earlier in the evening, when three random audience members were asked what one problem they’d want Clever AI to solve.
Their answers were simple: improve the MAU, make us more money, and reduce my work. In Deepak’s words, they were ‘the three best answers that absolutely define what Clever AI is all about.’
Pulling the night’s threads together, three things stood out for any Malaysian brand thinking about its own engagement strategy:
1. Fewer, better beats more, louder. From Tune Talk’s lifestyle bundling to PolicyStreet’s shift away from volume-based selling, every speaker converged on the same point: in Malaysia’s ultra-competitive, high-inertia market, the quality and timing of an interaction matter more than how often a brand appears in the inbox or notification tray.
2. AI is only as good as the discipline behind it. Whether it’s Clever AI’s 87% prediction accuracy or Geh Yang’s warning that 95% of AI failures are human, not technical, the brands getting real lift are the ones treating AI as a lifecycle tool, not a chatbot bolt-on.
3. Build the habit, not just the transaction. Tune Talk’s app-first bet, Mindvalley’s AI companion, and PolicyStreet’s “always there, not always selling” approach are all variations on the same idea — the goal isn’t a single conversion, it’s making the brand part of the customer’s routine.
Big Leap Malaysia 2026 closed on that note: here’s to breaking down barriers of engagement, taking bigger leaps together, and seeing each other again next time in the same place.
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Marc-Antoine Hager 
Marc-Antoine Hager, Area VP for South-East Asia, empowers businesses with marketing technology for growth. He thrives in collaboration and enjoys football, boxing, and freediving.
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