KUALA LUMPUR — Last week I was in Kuala Lumpur as a guest of MORS Group at the 13th Asia Corporate Excellence & Sustainability (ACES) Awards and the ACES Summit 2026. I was invited for a simple reason: AI Walay, the company I founded, is the technology team behind the system the ACES team uses to run its nominations. It was an amazing experience, and a rare one for a developer: watching software you built do its job in the real world.
What the ACES Awards are
The ACES Awards recognise companies across Asia for corporate excellence and sustainability. The 13th edition took place on 15 and 16 October 2026 at the Mandarin Oriental in Kuala Lumpur, under the theme "Beyond Business": recognising organisations that pair commercial success with responsible leadership, people development and long-term value creation. Companies from Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines were among those recognised this year.
"The continued recognition of companies across multiple editions underscores the importance of sustaining excellence rather than treating it as a one-off achievement. — Dr Shanggari Balakrishnan, CEO of MORS Group"
Why a software developer was in the room
An awards programme at this scale is a serious operation long before anyone walks on stage. Behind every recognition there are calls, applications, documents, reviews and decisions, handled by a team over months. AI Walay built the CRM that the ACES team uses to manage that pipeline, so every nomination moves through one system, with the right access for each role and a record of who did what.
When you build internal software, you usually see it through screens, tickets and feedback messages. You rarely see the result. In Kuala Lumpur I did: a ballroom full of leaders, an evening that ran on schedule, and a team that had prepared for it for months, partly inside tools we wrote.
The ACES Summit 2026
Alongside the awards, the ACES Summit 2026 brought business leaders together for panels and conversations. One session I made a point of photographing covered environmental commitments and long-term asset management, including smart energy dashboards, AI-powered analytics and digital twins for buildings. It was a good reminder that sustainability at this level is increasingly a data and software problem, which is exactly the kind of work we do.
Between sessions, most of the value was in the conversations: founders, executives and sustainability specialists comparing notes on what is actually working in their organisations.
Awards night
The awards evening was the part the whole year builds towards. Sitting in that ballroom, I kept thinking about the work that is invisible on the night: the data entry, the checks, the follow-ups and the scheduling that have to be right for a single name to be read out correctly. Good internal software is mostly invisible. That is the point.
What I am taking home
A few lessons I want to hold on to from this trip:
- Meet the people who use your software. An afternoon with the team taught me more about their day than months of messages.
- Reliability beats features. On an event night, nobody cares how clever a system is, only that it is right.
- Audit trails are not bureaucracy. For anything that ends in public recognition, being able to show who decided what, and when, is the product.
- Sustainability is a software problem now. The summit sessions on energy dashboards and digital twins made that very clear.
This trip is also why AI Walay is now taking applications to run companies' IT departments, and it builds on lessons I wrote about in what makes AI agents work in production.
Thank you to Dr Shanggari Balakrishnan and the MORS Group team for the invitation and the hospitality, and congratulations to every company recognised at the 13th ACES Awards. The company's own account of the event, and of the work behind it, is on the AI Walay blog: AI Walay at the 13th ACES Awards.
Key takeaways
- The 13th ACES Awards and ACES Summit 2026 were held on 15–16 October 2026 at the Mandarin Oriental, Kuala Lumpur, organised by MORS Group.
- AI Walay builds the CRM the ACES team uses to manage its nominations pipeline.
- Good internal software is invisible on the night; reliability and audit trails matter most.
Frequently asked questions
- When and where were the 13th ACES Awards held?
- The 13th ACES (Asia Corporate Excellence & Sustainability) Awards took place on 15 and 16 October 2026 at the Mandarin Oriental in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, alongside the ACES Summit 2026. The theme for the year was "Beyond Business", and the event is organised by MORS Group.
- Who organises the ACES Awards?
- The ACES Awards are organised by MORS Group, whose CEO is Dr Shanggari Balakrishnan. The awards recognise companies across Asia that combine commercial success with responsible leadership, people development and long-term value creation.
- What is AI Walay's connection to the ACES Awards?
- AI Walay, the technology company founded by Syed Husnain Haider Bukhari, built the CRM the ACES team uses to manage its nominations pipeline. MORS Group invited Husnain to the 13th ACES Awards and ACES Summit 2026 as its technology partner.
- Where can I read AI Walay's account of the event?
- AI Walay published its own article about the 13th ACES Awards and the software behind the nominations process on the AI Walay blog at aiwalay.com. This post is Husnain's personal, first-hand account of attending the event in Kuala Lumpur.
Sources
Written by Syed Husnain Haider Bukhari
AI engineer, data scientist, and founder of Revolutionary Technologies LLC. Ships production AI agents, automations, and data platforms for teams in the US, UK, and UAE — including AgentFlow, AI Walay, and ProLeads.
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