About me
Building AI for the consumer-goods industry, from Singapore to the world.
I’m Som Gan Choudhuri, founder of AI Palette, an enterprise AI company built for the global consumer-goods industry and acquired by GlobalData in 2025.
The longer story
I started my career in the flavour and fragrance industry, trying to understand something deceptively difficult: why people like the things they like.
It taught me that consumer preferences can look unpredictable, but there are usually signals underneath them. The problem was that companies weren’t very good at finding those signals.
In 2018, I started AI Palette in Singapore around a simple idea: could AI make sense of millions of signals from search, social media, menus and other online data to understand what consumers might want next?
AI Palette eventually grew to more than 100 people across Singapore, India and the US, working with some of the world’s largest consumer companies, including Nestlé, Coca-Cola, L’Oréal and Diageo.
The company was acquired by GlobalData PLC in 2025.
Along the way I learned about product-market fit, enterprise sales, fundraising, building teams across cultures, and eventually selling a company. Most of those lessons were much messier than the frameworks make them sound.
I write from an operator’s perspective: about the decisions, trade-offs and imperfect information behind building something real.
Selected recognition
Top 50 Innovators
World Innovation Congress
Selected media & interviews
Current questions
What I'm curious about now
These days, I’m particularly interested in what happens when AI moves beyond demos and starts changing how companies actually make decisions.
I’m curious about agentic systems, the future of consumer industries, and why some technologies become businesses while others remain interesting ideas.
I also write about the less tidy side of building companies: timing, fundraising, mistakes, people, and the things that only become obvious in hindsight.
Outside work, I love food, cooking it, discovering it and probably thinking about it too much. I travel whenever I can and have a weakness for trying things I haven't done before.
I have a habit of picking up new interests and going a little too deep into them.
Connect