What we learned this month, from AI agents to brain health
EO Philippines hosted two virtual Learning sessions this month. Here’s what actually stuck.
Over the past few weeks, Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) Vietnam members joined two Learning sessions hosted by EO Philippines: one on building with AI agents, one on understanding dementia. EO Vietnam gathered members locally around both, at Harley Trung's CoderPush office for the first and at Gabrielle Loo's Far East Foam for the second.
Build Your First AI Marketing Agent
Most of us are still at square one with AI, and that's exactly where we should be right now.
Andy Moran, a Product Manager at Google Labs, joined virtually through EO Philippines to lead the build.
- Three words matter more than which tool you buy. Connectors (what it plugs into), context (how well it knows your business), and skills (the repeatable way you want it to work, taught once and reused). Get these three right and the specific product underneath barely matters.
- Getting comfortable with one AI agent is the milestone that matters. Andy walked through a simple scale: most people are still asking a question and getting an answer back. The useful next step is knowing one agent well enough to hand it a task with confidence, rather than running ten at once.
- The most powerful setting isn't always the right one. Sometimes five minutes with the strongest model beats an hour with a lighter one, and sometimes it's the other way round. Matching the tool to the size of the task turned out to be its own skill.
Andy pulled up a member's own website live and had an agent build a brand profile from it: colors, tone, the way the site talks about itself. When it made an assumption that didn't fit, watching it get corrected on the spot was the moment a few people said made the whole idea click.
Harley Trung, who hosts the Learning portfolio, credited Andy for fielding two hours of questions without ever dodging one. Nobody rushed out when the talk formally ended either. Several members stayed on, trading their own AI habits and experiments informally, the kind of conversation a recap can't really capture but that was, by a few accounts, half the reason to show up in person.
Harley closed with a line that landed: know when a task still needs your own team to finish it, instead of asking AI to carry the whole thing.
Demystifying Dementia
Nearly half of dementia risk is something we can genuinely do something about.
Dr Henry Brodaty AO, of UNSW's Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA), joined virtually from Australia through EO Philippines.
- The lifetime risk from age 45 is 42 percent. For most people there, that's close to a coin flip, not a statistic about someone else.
- A 2024 Lancet review found that 14 modifiable factors, blood pressure, hearing loss, physical activity and social connection among them, account for 45 percent of the risk. The rest isn't in our hands. That part is.
- Every year we delay the onset of dementia cuts new cases by 10 percent. A five-year delay works out to half the cases prevented, a real target even without a cure.
Dr Brodaty's own research began with his father's Alzheimer's diagnosis in 1972. He walked members through what's changed since then: blood tests that can flag early changes years before symptoms appear, and new drugs that remove the toxic proteins behind the disease instead of only treating symptoms. They're not cures, people on them still decline, just more slowly, and he was direct about the cost and the side effects.
Two rooms, one thread
Members got real use out of an AI agent the moment they stopped waiting to master it first. Dr Brodaty's numbers work the same way: earlier beats perfect, whether it's an AI habit or a health one.