Empowering business through AI: SOM Alumnus Mr. Martin Gents
- Amanda Townshend
- Mar 23
- 8 min read
By: Dennes Bergado Jr.
For our next Alumnus highlight, allow us to introduce Mr. Martin Gents, an IEMBA graduate in Innovation and Techno Entrepreneurship from AIT School of Management in 2009. He is currently the Founder of UseKase, an AI transformation company, Vice-President of the Danish Business Association of Singapore (DABS), and Owner/Managing Director of Mavile PTE. LTD. Intrigued by his accomplishments, we asked Mr. Gents a few questions during his recent visit to our campus earlier this year.
What made you choose to come and study at AIT?
It was an exchange program while I was studying at Copenhagen Business School (CBS). A lot of things happened around 2007-2008 where, amongst other things, I was competing in case competitions for CBS and was fortunate enough to travel globally with the team I was a part of. I managed to go to Los Angeles where we competed with the finest universities around the world. There were Thai universities there as well and they did better than us. At that point, I had a small company with my brother importing retail products from Australia and I had the opportunity to visit Thailand and I just fell in love with the culture. And so when I found out that one, I love the culture, and two, Thailand academically is quite advanced and very elite tier globally, I started to look for options to study there instead of going to the U.S. I chose to follow my own journey and explore the cultural side of Southeast Asia, new languages and new viewpoints. And there are so many wonderful stories with everyone I met here at AIT.
I noticed that you serve as Vice-president, a board member and a managing director, how do you effectively manage your time while also leading your own business?
I get to primarily focus on Usekase about 70-80% of my time. For me, it’s not a problem to juggle things around. I work on the go, everything is set up for me to be able to travel and work from wherever I am and I trust my team.
What are the top 3 tools you use that are essential to this lifestyle?
We're a Google and GCP type company, so we run Google Workplace and Google Cloud, and many of our products are running in Google Cloud. And so that is one that I can't live without institutionally. You need some kind of platform foundation that supports you. And for us, that's Google.
Then the entirety of Anthropic's ecosystem Claude Code is an application that I cannot live without. Everything that I do is through code these days. I don't do slides anymore. I tell an AI agent what I want. It looks into my history of what I've done before, and then it gives me a presentation that is always spelled perfectly. It's in my tone of voice. It has the knowledge and the data points that I care about already put on the slide. And so, Claude Code for me, and the product suite is a big one.
And the last one is actually our own product. We at Usekase, well, we like to take our own medicine. I mean, we're an AI native company, and we help companies to build business operating systems. So, think about it as a central hub for everything you care about as an organization. You log in one place, you get a today screen, and you have your CRM, you have your accounting, you have everything. But we've built it all ourselves and it has replaced most, if not all, of our subscriptions. Outside of Google and Claude Code, that's the only other subscriptions we're paying. And so we have our own accounting system that we've programmed ourselves. We have a CRM software that we've programmed ourselves and it’s actually run by an OpenClaw agent, behind-the-scenes, encapsulated, and made compliant. In everything that we are doing in our business operating system for Usekase, the agent is monitoring and
will proactively suggest how it can help.
Tell us more about your company Usekase.
Today, you have thousands and thousands of AI tools. It’s fragmented and data is everywhere. What we are trying to do is to bring it back into one platform and one login. You will have everything you need to do your job with different permission sets and a very, very deep knowledge base that is able to then support you when you need it at all times. It’s pretty cool. The problem with standard software is that it is a big box that is outside of your company’s shape, which means you’re paying for functions you’re not using. What we are trying to do is have technology that shapes itself completely 100% around your company. We are not building individual apps, we are building those apps into one ecosystem, one platform to simplify everything in such fragmented times. We’ve talked about Fit for Purpose forever in IT. We’re finally able to get it. AI is something that is supposed to live in the business to enable your business and there is a real disconnect in how the market is delivering services within AI today. That’s what we are trying to address.
AI in the wrong hands can be a really bad idea. We have just as much a role in educating the market because the wrong hands doesn’t necessarily mean evil hands. It is just uninformed hands that do not know the risks.
That’s why I am visiting AIT because Usekase enjoys working together with different educational institutions. For example, in Singapore, we’ve been a partner for a course at Singapore Management University (SMU) for business model innovation and I am contributing to their faculty for AI Strategy. I am giving a keynote speech together with the managing director for Accenture APAC and in a few weeks, I will be at INSEAD speaking to their Alumni. I was at a German school in Singapore and I spoke to 250 of their brightest young students in grades 9 to 12 around what does AI mean for their future. I love for Usekase to be immersed in supporting the education and upskilling of the current generation of professionals. It has to go hand-in-hand, education as well as the use of AI.
I started Usekase to help organizations make use of the right tools to deliver on their aspirations, I wanted to build a business that was helpful and that recognized the need for financial and human empowerment. I saw that the biggest blocker for AI today is the lack of adoption. And adoption comes through people and it needs to be more than just a technical exercise. To a certain extent, Usekase was a way for me to scale my wish to help organizations because I love to solve problems for organizations and I love working with real people around real challenges and using technology to be part of the solution. And not for the top 2% of global enterprises which have the funds and AI expertise but for the remaining 98%. We’re trying to take the best from management consulting, the best from the agency world, the best from software engineering and merge it all together into a platform that can truly help scale their small and medium-sized enterprises globally.
In 5 or 10 years’ time, what is the future of Usekase?
If technology becomes a commodity or if it further commoditizes access to understanding the very fabric of nature and information, Usekase aims to be the partner that will help you enable the use cases that matter for your organization at its stage throughout its life cycle when it comes to using technology as a vehicle for enabling them. And that means that we want to partner with as many organizations as we possibly can to be the trusted AI capability partner that allows every organization to get access to frontier technologies, to stay competitive, and to stay healthy in a very turbulent world. We want to be the stable, progressive element that removes limits from every organization we touch. No one can use the excuse that AI building is too complex or that it is too much work or that it is too difficult. Now we can truly get back to saying, OK, in an uninhibited view, if we could do anything we could ever wish for as an organization, what would it be? Because now this is possible and we can get technologies to support us every step of the way and Usekase can be that partner that enables this.
Do you have any words of advice for our SOM students for starting their own business?
There has never been a better time to go into entrepreneurship than now. But there has also never been a better time to enjoy the comforts of the corporate environment that has the right tooling as now. As a young individual or professional going out into the world, you should master one domain which is your chosen domain. It could be marketing, communications, it could be teaching, it could be whatever it might be. Then become the master builder in that space. Make sure that you understand and adopt the most advance tooling you can have to elevate yourself with the domain you’ve chosen because the world is going to need deep expertise. AI has a great ability to normalize all of us broadly and everybody can be a bit of a legal expert or communications expert etc., but going very, very deep still requires you to go beyond the technologies. So, find your niche and become a master builder in that space.
Any important lessons anyone has ever taught you in your life?
Back in 2006-7, my father and I were doing a due diligence at a big production facility in Ukraine. Over breakfast one morning, I saw him pondering and he said, “Someday, I’m going to write a book about how you can buy a 20-million Euro factory for 1 Euro.” What he meant was that through different ways of working with financial institutions, investors, European grants and getting promise for future volumes for existing clients that would then put down money, it was possible to take over this factory without putting any cash down.
What did that mean for me? For me, that was a lesson in how much impact you can have even as a small organization or as an individual. Even if you think you don’t have the reach or don’t have the access or don’t have the means, at this point of AI, you can as an individual, as a small organization, change the world. And so, the moment taught me to not think small but to think big. There are many way to do things just like there are ways to buy factories without putting any money down or entering markets without adding any headcount or to upskill yourself with Harvard courses without attending Harvard anymore. So don’t think small. Think big. And for one, don’t think about technology as the limiting factor. If anything, it is now truly accessible to everyone one of us. And we can now really unleash our creative side of us as individuals, as humans, if we dare lean into the opportunities provided to us with this generation of technologies.
Editor’s note: The interview was edited for length and clarity.
We at the AIT School of Management would like to sincerely thank Mr. Gents for his time and providing such wonderful insights from his experience.
Learn More about Mr. Gents and Usekase via the links below:
