"AI transformation" pitches often come from a vendor who flies in, presents a deck, then leaves before anyone finds out whether the defect-detection model actually holds up on the line. We work differently because we're built into the same industrial base we're pitching to: our office sits in Penang CyberCity, and Intel, Infineon, Micron, Bosch, and AIXTRON's newest greenfield fab are neighbours, not case studies.
That proximity is the whole pitch. A Penang AI project succeeds or fails on details a remote vendor never sees — which line actually bottlenecks at 2am, which compliance officer needs to sign off before a camera goes live, which ERP integration always gets deprioritised until it breaks something. We're close enough to know, and we've been building here since 2016.
Penang isn't waiting for AI adoption to happen to it — the state is actively pushing it, and the push is showing up in real numbers, not just conference talk. We work across the island and the mainland: Bayan Lepas, Georgetown, Bayan Baru, Butterworth, and the wider Seberang Perai industrial belt, not just the district our office happens to sit in.
Four verticals, one team — and none of them are here because they're trendy. Semiconductor and E&E are the obvious one; the sector's real problem right now isn't demand, it's a workforce that can't keep pace with it, so QC lines are running on fewer hands than they need. Enterprise and public-sector buyers have a different problem — procurement and approvals that move at the speed of the slowest signature in the chain. Knowledge work inside SMEs and larger teams has the opposite failure mode: too much institutional knowledge locked in one person's head, nowhere searchable. And medical devices, the largest sector of its kind in ASEAN here, has a compliance bar most AI vendors haven't actually cleared. Four different failure modes, four different builds — not one generic platform stretched four ways.
Computer vision QC, defect detection, and floor automation for front-end and back-end E&E manufacturers — trained on your actual defect classes, not a generic dataset. Full breakdown →
Workflow orchestration for procurement, approvals, and audit-ready compliance — IRIS, live in production, built for BM+English documents and Malaysian data residency.
Company-wide AI search and automation for SME and enterprise teams, self-hosted so your data never leaves your own VPC — JomWork.
Penang's medical devices sector is the largest in ASEAN. Our clinical AI compliance work is the closest reference point — see NURI.
Every AI vendor shows up with a stat. Most of them don't survive the follow-up question of where the number actually came from. The left column below is what changes for the people doing the work — the inspector, the approver, the ops lead who gets paged at 2am. The right column is where those changes have already been measured, on live products, not a projection.
Most AI vendors sell you a package before they've seen your floor. We do it backwards on purpose — assess first, because the right build for a 50-camera semiconductor line looks nothing like the right build for a procurement team drowning in PDF approvals. Four stages, same team throughout, no handoff to a different account manager once the contract's signed.
We start by figuring out which vertical actually fits — semiconductor, medical device, enterprise, or general SME — and audit what you're already running before proposing anything.
We scope the right solution to that vertical: computer vision, workflow orchestration, or knowledge automation — not a one-size-fits-all package.
We connect to what you already run. No rip-and-replace, no forcing your team onto a new ERP just to use our tooling.
Live deployment with ongoing support — the same team that scoped the project is the one you call when something needs adjusting.
Penang's AI market has gotten crowded fast — which is good for buyers, but it also means slowing down on a few questions before signing anything.
Teh Tarik Digital has answered those questions the same way since 2016: named products (IRIS, JomWork, SmartPole OS, NURI) that we built and support ourselves, one accountable team from scoping through deployment, and a founding background in regulated, cross-border, high-accountability work that predates the current AI wave. We'd rather you ask these questions of anyone you're evaluating — including us.
Two of our own builds, with the real architecture decisions behind them.
E-commerce SME, 200–400 daily inquiries. RAG + LangGraph + HITL escalation, with the architecture decisions behind each one. Full case study →
The supervisor-specialist rebuild behind IRIS v2 — why it replaced the original single-agent design, and what changed. Full case study →
These are the questions we actually get asked — by plant managers who've been burned by an RPA sales pitch before, and by procurement teams who need a straight answer on compliance before they'll even take a second meeting. No hedging, no "it depends" without an actual answer attached.