On Thurs Aug 28, 2025, AICONIC VENTURES’ CIO & Managing Partner, Mukaya (Tai) Panich, was a keynote speaker in PTT Group’s Digital & AI Day 2025, in the topic “AI-First Mindset: Changing the Thought Process of the Organization to Become a Leader in the Digital Era.”
In PTT keynote, Tai presented AI as a transformative “general-purpose technology” comparable to the steam engine or electricity, but uniquely powerful because it augments human cognitive capabilities rather than just physical ones. Drawing on her experience as an MIT-trained engineer and venture capital leader at AICONIC Ventures, Tai argued that organizations face an urgent imperative to adopt an “AI-First Mindset” now—not in 3-5 years—because AI is already mainstream with ChatGPT’s 500+ million weekly users and 90% of Fortune 500 companies actively experimenting.
Her central thesis emphasized four key AI-First Mindset principles: 1. keeping professional identity flexible rather than clinging to legacy roles, 2. thinking exponentially rather than incrementally, 3. experimenting relentlessly to escape “pilot purgatory,” and 4. embracing human-AI collaboration as augmentation rather than replacement.
Tai highlighted the critical gap between employee readiness (94% familiar with GenAI) and organizational maturity (only 1% of companies consider themselves mature in AI deployment) according to McKinsey’s “Superagency in the Workplace” survey in Jan 2025, positioning this as fundamentally a leadership and mindset challenge rather than a technological one, with the ultimate goal of achieving “Superagency”—humans amplified by AI to unprecedented levels of productivity and creativity.