What organisations say after working with us.
These are reflections from organisations in Malaysia that have completed one of our three engagements. We have preserved the specific language where clients were willing to share it.
Back to Home40+
engagements completed
4.7
average satisfaction (out of 5)
4 yrs
in practice, Kuala Lumpur
6
sectors served across Malaysia
Client reflections
Reflections from organisations that have completed Working Frame, Loom Pilot, and Continuous Counsel engagements.
Zulaikha Amin
Head of Strategy, Financial Services — Kuala Lumpur
We came to Khanthal after six months of internal back-and-forth about whether to use an AI system for our client onboarding process. The Working Frame did not tell us what to do, but it gave us a document we could actually discuss as a leadership team. The framing of what we did and did not know was far more useful than the vendor presentations we had sat through.
Working Frame · April 2025
Priya Krishnamurthy
Director of Operations, Professional Services — Petaling Jaya
The Loom Pilot was more honest than I expected. Nadia was clear at the start that the prototype might not answer our question — and that turned out to be true, but in a useful way. What we learned from building it changed how we were framing the question. That alone was worth the engagement fee. I would have preferred a slightly faster turnaround on one of the mid-stage records, but overall the process was solid.
Loom Pilot · March 2025
Izzuddin Mamat
Chief Technology Officer, Public Sector — Shah Alam
We have been on the Continuous Counsel arrangement for eight months. The monthly sessions are consistently useful — Rajesh brings a perspective we genuinely do not have in-house. The quarterly reflections are the most valuable part. They are written carefully and they do not just describe what happened; they notice things we had started to overlook. I was initially uncertain about the value of a retained arrangement at this price, but it has been a reasonable investment.
Continuous Counsel · Ongoing since September 2024
Siew Wei Tan
General Manager, Education Sector — Penang
The Working Frame helped us understand that the question we had been asking was actually three different questions. That sounds simple, but we had spent considerable time and money trying to answer all three at once with a single system. The frame document gave us something concrete to present to our board when we proposed a slower, more considered approach to the AI question.
Working Frame · April 2025
Fadzilah Bakar
Legal Counsel, Corporate Services — Kuala Lumpur
I appreciated that the engagement was structured to accommodate a mixed team. We had one data engineer in the room and five people with no technical background at all. Khanthal adjusted the working sessions so that both groups were actually present in the conversation, not just politely sitting through it. The written records were also accessible to everyone on our team, which matters when you need leadership buy-in.
Loom Pilot · February 2025
Harish Nair
Head of Risk, Insurance Sector — Kuala Lumpur
What I found most useful about the Continuous Counsel arrangement was the availability for shorter conversations outside the monthly sessions. Several times over the year I had a specific governance question that needed a considered outside view within a day or two. The arrangement made that possible in a way that a project-based engagement would not.
Continuous Counsel · Ongoing since July 2024
Engagement case studies
These are three engagements described in greater detail, with the client's permission. Sector and identifying details are given in general terms.
Case Study 01 · Working Frame · Financial Services
Framing an AI question before committing to a vendor
The challenge
A mid-sized financial services firm in Kuala Lumpur had been approached by three AI vendors. Each promised a different kind of value, but leadership could not determine which, if any, addressed their actual operating concern — which was the time their compliance team spent reviewing documents manually.
The engagement
Khanthal conducted a two-session Working Frame engagement over three weeks. We read the firm's existing documentation and vendor materials, and produced a written frame distinguishing three separate questions that had been conflated: a volume question, an accuracy question, and an auditability question.
What followed
The leadership team used the frame to narrow the field to one vendor and to request a specifically scoped proof of concept addressing the volume question only. The engagement took three weeks and cost RM 1,140. The client estimated it saved several months of misdirected procurement effort.
"The frame gave us language for a conversation we had not been able to have internally. That was its main value."
Case Study 02 · Loom Pilot · Education Sector
Testing a question about student support before committing to a platform
The challenge
A private higher education institution in Penang wanted to explore whether an AI system could help identify students at risk of disengagement before they withdrew from their programmes. The question was technically plausible but the data environment was less clean than the team had assumed.
The engagement
Khanthal ran a seven-week Loom Pilot with weekly sessions. We built a prototype using a limited and cleaned dataset. The prototype worked at a technical level but exposed a significant data quality issue — the engagement and attendance records that the institution held were recorded inconsistently across faculties.
What followed
The institution paused the AI question and redirected resource toward a data standardisation project. The pilot learning document described this clearly: the condition for the AI question to be answerable was a data infrastructure change that would take 12 to 18 months. That was a more useful finding than a positive result would have been at that stage.
"We learned what the real problem was. That is a good outcome from a pilot, even if it was not what we set out to find."
Case Study 03 · Continuous Counsel · Insurance
Maintaining governance clarity across a twelve-month AI integration period
The challenge
An insurance firm in Kuala Lumpur had committed to integrating an AI-based claims assessment tool. The technical team was capable, but the leadership team was concerned that governance questions were not being asked consistently as the integration progressed through different phases.
The engagement
Khanthal held monthly sessions with the head of risk and two leadership team members across the year. The quarterly reflections addressed different governance dimensions as they emerged — model interpretability in the first quarter, data lineage in the second, staff communication in the third, and long-term oversight in the fourth.
What followed
The integration completed on schedule. The head of risk reported that the quarterly reflections had served as a useful checkpoint that prevented two governance issues from becoming material problems. The firm renewed the arrangement for a second year at the same fee.
"Having an outside reader who was paying attention across the whole year changed the quality of our internal governance conversations."
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Professional standing
MDEC Digital Economy Advisory Panel
Contributing member since 2022
Malaysian Institute of Corporate Governance
Associate practitioner membership
Asia-Pacific AI Governance Forum
Invited contributor, 2023 and 2024
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