As a PR consultant, I spend a fair amount of time asking my clients to prove the things they want to say in public. A growth rate, transaction count, customer figure or efficiency gain can sound perfectly straightforward in a briefing. Before it makes its way into a press release, interview or corporate presentation, however, someone needs to be confident that the number is accurate and understand where it came from.
That can be surprisingly difficult. Finance may have one figure, operations another, while a slightly different version appears in a marketplace or payment dashboard. Usually, there is an explanation. Finding it can take much longer than expected.
This is becoming more important as Southeast Asian businesses digitize. Companies are operating across more systems, platforms and markets, which also means their information is being generated in more places. The ability to communicate growth credibly increasingly depends on whether the business can trace the information behind the story.
The region’s technology story is usually told through consumer adoption, new services and expanding digital commerce. Less attention goes to what that growth looks like inside the companies themselves.
More digital businesses, more places for data to live
The e-Conomy SEA 2025 report by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company estimated Southeast Asia’s digital economy would reach US$305 billion in gross merchandise value in 2025, up 15 percent from the previous year. That growth is taking place across markets with very different infrastructure, payment ecosystems and levels of digital maturity.
A company operating in Indonesia may accept several digital payment methods and sell through multiple marketplaces. A regional business headquartered in Singapore may also have customers in Malaysia, Thailand or the Philippines, each with its own banks, payment providers and operating processes.
Over time, one commercial activity can leave records across several systems. A customer buying something online sees a single transaction. Inside the business, there may be an order record, payment confirmation, settlement report, marketplace record, refund status and accounting entry. Those records were often created for different purposes, so they do not always line up neatly.
This becomes relevant to communications sooner than many companies expect. A management team may want to announce that transaction volumes have increased. Marketing may want to highlight the number of customers served. An executive preparing for an interview needs an accurate picture of how the business performed last year. When the underlying data comes from several systems, even simple claims can require considerable checking. By the time communications gets involved, the quality of that claim has already been shaped by decisions made elsewhere in the business.
AI is making the gap more visible
AI adds another layer to this. Companies now have far more tools to analyze information and turn it into reports, summaries and forecasts. Singapore gives some indication of the direction businesses are moving in. IMDA reported that AI adoption among SMEs rose from 4.2 percent in 2023 to 14.5 percent in 2024, while adoption among non-SMEs reached 62.5 percent. Finance and accounting were among the most common functions where companies were using AI.
Across Southeast Asia, adoption inside finance is still developing. Deloitte’s 2026 survey of regional CFOs found that 47 percent reported pockets of AI use within their finance functions, while 43 percent cited data issues as one barrier to wider adoption.
Those findings resonate with what communications professionals are beginning to encounter as well. Generating an answer has become much easier, but verifying it still takes work.
An AI tool can summarize a financial report in seconds or turn a set of business metrics into an executive briefing. If the source material contains inconsistent information, however, a polished output can create a false sense of confidence. When source data is inconsistent, a polished dashboard or AI-generated summary can make uncertainty less obvious rather than resolve it. The same problem can travel into internal dashboards, investor materials or external communications. For PR teams, that means the quality of our work is becoming more closely tied to systems we do not directly control.
The credibility problem starts internally
I do not think communications teams need to become data specialists. We should, however, know enough about how a company produces its key numbers to ask better questions.
Which team owns a particular metric? Which system is considered authoritative? Does “customer” mean registered users, paying customers or active customers? Are transaction volumes based on orders placed, payments completed or settlements received?
These details rarely make it into the final article or press release. They still determine whether the claims we communicate will hold up when somebody examines them more closely.
A recent project with Matchmade.io, a client that builds financial reconciliation software, made this particularly tangible for me. The company matches records spread across banks, payment gateways, marketplaces, POS systems, ERP platforms and internal databases. According to the company, its platform can reconcile more than one million transaction records in under three minutes with up to 99 percent accuracy, cutting the time needed to identify discrepancies by up to 99.5 percent.
The scale is what stood out to me. Large businesses can have enormous volumes of records that need to be aligned before teams have a consistent picture of what happened. If those records disagree, the consequences can surface in management reporting, financial analysis, investor materials and public communications.
The experience made me think differently about the phrase “source of truth,” which is used frequently in technology but has very practical implications for communications. When a journalist asks where a figure came from, there should be a clear answer.
Credibility starts before the story is written
As Southeast Asian companies expand across markets and adopt more technology, communications teams will inevitably have access to more information. For management teams, this creates a practical task.
Metrics that regularly appear in investor materials, media interviews, company announcements or management reporting should have clear definitions, clear ownership and a traceable source. A company does not need every employee to understand the underlying data architecture, but the people communicating important numbers should know who can verify them and how.
That becomes especially important as companies expand across markets. The same metric may be calculated differently by teams in different countries or drawn from systems that were never designed to work together. Without some discipline around definitions and ownership, growth can create more uncertainty internally at the same time that the company is trying to communicate greater confidence externally.
That requires closer relationships between communications, finance, operations and data teams. It also means companies should pay attention to whether their internal systems make important business information easier to trace as they grow.
For those of us working in PR, credibility has always been central to the job. What is changing is how far upstream we may need to look to protect it. Sometimes, the most important work behind a good corporate story happens long before anyone starts writing.
Salsabila Syifa Atma is a communications specialist at Content Collision with more than five years of experience in public relations and storytelling. Her areas of interest include responsible technology, community development, and sustainability.
Editor’s note: This contributed article has been lightly edited for clarity and TNGlobal house style. The views and arguments expressed remain those of the author.
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