A unit of the Chinese technology group Inspur spent the inaugural ASEAN AI Summit showing software rather than hardware. Shandong Inspur Intelligent Building Technology brought systems for modular construction, automated design and site management to Kuala Lumpur, where the event was organised by Malaysia's national artificial intelligence office and opened on 12 August with more than 150 exhibition booths.

The pitch is that a building site can be run with the same instrumentation as a factory. The company demonstrated a site-management platform that uses image recognition, building information modelling and point clouds to track what is happening on the ground, and design tools it says can draft parts of a project automatically. It also showed a home system for connected appliances and a combined solar, battery and charging product of the kind aimed at developers fitting out estates.

What a booth can and cannot show

The release is thin on the things a buyer needs. It names no executive, quotes no one, and offers no price, no deployment and no customer. Its main claim, that visitors from Malaysia, Singapore, Europe and Africa came to the stand, is a statement about interest rather than purchase.

That is not unusual for a trade-show announcement, and it is why such releases read as ambition rather than order book. Construction is one of the least digitised large industries, and the case for software that watches a site is real; so is the difficulty of selling into an industry that works project by project, on thin margins, with subcontractors who change with every job. The company says it will keep investing in research and expand overseas.

The question the summit cannot answer is whether the region's builders will buy tools from an unfamiliar vendor while their budgets are being set.