CIO has named five finalists for the 2026 ASEAN Next CIO Award: Harpreet Singh, Patrick Tay Kwang Hwee, Rahul Jain, Varuna De Wass Gunawardena, and Yee Sai Kit Sam. The list is alphabetical, according to CIO’s 1 October 2026 announcement. Winners are scheduled to be announced on 5 November 2026 at the CIO100 & CSO30 ASEAN Awards Gala Night in Singapore.
Who are the 2026 ASEAN Next CIO finalists?
CIO’s announcement presents the finalists alphabetically. The short profiles below describe the roles and initiatives reported by CIO; they are not independently audited assessments or a common scorecard.
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| Finalist | Role or organization named by CIO | Profile highlights reported by CIO |
|---|---|---|
| Harpreet Singh | Head of Data Office, KPMG Singapore | Leads the KPMG Data Council, bringing business and technology leaders together on data management, governance, and AI priorities. His remit includes data strategy, AI, governance, and technology transformation. |
| Patrick Tay Kwang Hwee | BNP Paribas | Progressed from leading technology programmes to enterprise-wide digital transformation. CIO highlights business process re-engineering, workflow redesign, intelligent automation, streamlined approvals, and stronger governance, alongside work in cloud modernization, AI innovation, infrastructure, cybersecurity, risk, and compliance. |
| Rahul Jain | Head of Enterprise AIT, Gusto | Built a new enterprise AI function and helped shape enterprise AI strategy. CIO describes an AI Agent programme to automate finance workflows while establishing security and control requirements for agents used with sensitive financial systems. |
| Varuna De Wass Gunawardena | Head of IT, PT Agrinesia Raya | Repositioned IT toward business transformation. CIO reports four production AI and automation solutions, including PULSE, an internal platform supporting product development from concept and formulation through regulatory registration and launch readiness. Other named projects are AI-assisted CV screening, contract review, and DigiProc procurement automation. |
| Yee Sai Kit Sam | Employer not named in CIO’s finalist article | CIO reports 25 years of experience across technology, transformation, risk, and regulatory leadership. The profile describes an expanding remit covering enterprise digital transformation, change and project management, technology risk, and regulatory transformation, following earlier engineering work on treasury systems, financial data models, and cross-border counterparty risk monitoring. |
All role and project descriptions in the table are attributed to CIO’s finalist announcement. The article does not name Yee Sai Kit Sam’s employer, so no employer is inferred here.
What does the Next CIO Award recognize?
CIO describes the Next CIO Award as recognizing rising technology leaders on a path toward senior technology leadership. Its stated qualities include vision, execution capability, organizational influence, and initiatives that deliver measurable organizational benefit. The broader CIO100 ASEAN programme celebrates senior technology and digital executives driving innovation and change, building strong cultures, and influencing leadership teams. CIO says the inaugural Next CIO Award was presented in 2023. See the award programme information for its description.
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When and where will the winners be announced?
CIO schedules the winner announcement for 5 November 2026 at the CIO100 & CSO30 ASEAN Awards Gala Night at Raffles Hotel, Singapore. The gala is described as an invitation-only evening for finalists, winners, and selected senior technology leaders. The date and venue are upcoming details and may change; consult CIO’s event announcement for the latest status.
A separate conference, The Transformation Reset: Redefining the Future Enterprise, is scheduled earlier that day and is described as open to senior IT leaders, with registration through the event information. Foundry’s 2026 event page characterizes the programme as combining the CIO100 awards and conference in ASEAN & Hong Kong.
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- Author: Bungay Stanier, Michael.
- Publisher: Page Two
- Pages: 244
- Publication Date: 2016-02-29
- Edition: 1
What the finalist profiles have in common—and what they do not show
The reported work spans data and AI governance, enterprise process transformation, AI-agent controls, production AI and automation, and technology-risk leadership. These are different areas of responsibility, not directly comparable performance measures. CIO’s profiles offer no shared evaluation metrics or independently verified project results, so the shortlist should not be read as a ranked comparison.
For programme scale, CIO reported 245 entries for the 2025 awards and described the 2026 ASEAN & Hong Kong programme as its eighth consecutive run in a 1 June 2026 nomination announcement. The 245 figure is CIO’s reported programme statistic; no underlying dataset is cited in that announcement.
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