# Chris Withers

> Founder & CEO of klikit. Has built and run marketplace businesses across Asia-Pacific for over a decade (Uber Eats, Gojek, Pathao), and builds applied-AI systems in production. Based in Singapore.

Open to conversations on APAC go-to-market and applied AI: advisory, board and senior leadership roles.

## Expertise

- **Operating across Asia-Pacific**: Has launched, scaled or turned around businesses in 14 Asia-Pacific markets since 2015, as an operator, executive and founder.
- **Applied AI in production**: Hands-on CEO who writes code and has shipped agentic systems that run klikit's support, onboarding, analytics and growth.
- **Marketplaces, pricing and allocation**: Multi-sided marketplace economics: incentives, dynamic pricing, driver allocation and onboarding funnels.
- **AI sovereignty and governance in Asia**: Writes on sovereign AI, governance by protocol and what AI changes for states and operators in the region.

## Contact

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrswthrs/
- Email (work): chris@klikit.io
- CV request: https://www.chrswthrs.xyz/about (The Request CV form on the About page; Chris is notified of each request.)

## Machine-readable

- [Full text for agents](https://www.chrswthrs.xyz/llms-full.txt): profile, experience and every essay and project in one file
- [CV as JSON Resume](https://www.chrswthrs.xyz/cv.json)
- MCP server (Streamable HTTP, read-only): https://www.chrswthrs.xyz/api/mcp. Tools: get_profile, get_expertise, list_writing, read_writing, how_to_engage

## Projects

- [Voice ordering and reservations](https://www.chrswthrs.xyz/projects/voice-agent): A unified voice-AI surface for ordering and reservations, designed as a tenant-provisioned module atop the platform's own order, menu, payment, and booking primitives.
- [Partner menu-mapping copilot](https://www.chrswthrs.xyz/projects/mapping-copilot): A retrieval-and-rerank pipeline that compresses partner menu mapping from a multi-week manual process into a confidence-gated self-service workflow, with explicit guardrails on safety-critical fields.
- [Self-hosted support agent](https://www.chrswthrs.xyz/projects/support-agent): A self-hosted live-chat support agent with model-routed inference, a markdown-grounded knowledge base, and a layered escalation pipeline, replacing a per-seat commercial bot at a fraction of the infrastructure cost.
- [Conversational analytics](https://www.chrswthrs.xyz/projects/conversational-analytics): Natural-language access to a merchant's own operational data, mediated through a pre-generated CSV layer that bounds blast radius, cost, and cacheability, without exposing the data plane to model-generated queries.
- [An API built for agents](https://www.chrswthrs.xyz/projects/agent-api): An external API designed end-to-end as a substrate for autonomous agents: multi-tenant authentication, gateway routing, first-class item resolution, and an explicit boundary against destructive operations.
- [Agentic merchant onboarding](https://www.chrswthrs.xyz/projects/merchant-onboarding): A long-running, resumable agent for new-merchant setup: a deterministic pipeline encoded as a checkpointed run rather than a checklist worked by a specialist.
- [Agent-run multilingual site](https://www.chrswthrs.xyz/projects/agent-built-content-site): A public marketing, blog, and help-centre site authored and maintained by a team of agents, with humans in a direction-setting and review role and infrastructure costs reasoned about as a function of commit cadence.
- [Two-way reviews, model-drafted replies](https://www.chrswthrs.xyz/projects/review-responses): A migration from a read-only scraping pipeline to a first-party two-way review channel, with model-drafted replies grounded in business-specific tone and explicit human-in-the-loop control.

## Essays

- [Dawn of the Neo-Pirate Era](https://www.chrswthrs.xyz/papers/dawn-of-the-neo-pirate-era): On the second golden age of piracy. Why the AI arsenal (opened, clumsily, by the empires that built it) has rendered the cost of defection effectively zero, and why the next generation of operators will look more like Blackbeard than the Series-B founder.
- [Individualism as Idolatry](https://www.chrswthrs.xyz/papers/individualism-as-idolatry): Marx caught a glimpse of the truth, but offered at the wrong altar. A reading of the failure of both modern socialism and modern capitalism, and the case for generative sovereignty as the only coherent response.
- [On the Sovereign Protocol](https://www.chrswthrs.xyz/papers/on-the-sovereign-protocol): Singapore as the only successful example of governance by protocol, and why artificial intelligence may finally let us replicate Lee Kuan Yew's administration at scale, without him.
- [Unlocking Agentic DeFi: The Next Frontier](https://www.chrswthrs.xyz/papers/unlocking-agentic-defi): A discussion paper on a decentralised, agentic finance protocol for the Kaspa L1 blockchain, covering visibility, utility, liquidity, and a tokenomic framework for digital currencies serving digital labourers.
- [Digital Dogs: The Case for Greyhound Racing On-Chain](https://www.chrswthrs.xyz/papers/digitising-the-dog-derby): A cryptocollectible approach to on-chain hound racing as an alternative to the real-world greyhound racing industry: attribute-driven Hounds, on-chain breeding, fractionalised kennels, and a token loop sustained by wagering vigorish and breed fees.