About Deborah Kay

Background

Deborah read Economics at Cambridge University under a full scholarship from the Singapore Public Service Commission.  She graduated second in her class with First Class Honours in Economics, winning the Creighton Book Prize for her dissertation on the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis.

When she returned to Singapore, she joined the prestigious Administrative Service, as the Assistant Director of Air Transport overseeing Changi Airport, Singapore Airlines and Singapore’s air space.

She then joined global management consulting firm Bain & Company as a strategy consultant and spent 8+ years in Bain’s Singapore, Tokyo, London and New York Offices. During her time at Bain, Deborah worked with Fortune 500 companies across a wide range of industries from telecommunications, consumer products, retail and private equity. Notable technology clients include Motorola, Vodafone, Cisco, Japan Telecoms, HP.

At Bain, Deborah ran recruiting for the Asian offices and was one of the top rated global trainers for undergrads and MBA recruits.

After Bain, Deborah  spent 5+ years in private equity, responsible for the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation’s European and Middle Eastern funds. Co-investments deals included Valentino/Hugo Boss and Budapest Airport.

Deborah was subsequently headhunted to join Partners Capital – a $13B multi-asset class private investment office serving ultra-high net worth individuals and institutional clients such as the Nobel Foundation.  Besides managing the portfolios for 40+ clients, she was responsible for all real estate investments and ran a $800M Delaware and Cayman Private Equity Real Estate fund.

Digital Discovery

Deborah Kay is currently the founder of Digital Discovery, which provides digital strategy advisory and digital intelligence to CEOs, financial investors, and private equity clients. Digital Discovery also consults with enterprises on digital marketing, web design and development, SEO, SEM, chatbot strategy, intelligence training and conversational design.

Digital Transformation

In 2017, she worked with the Singapore Sailing Federation on their Digital Transformation and athlete fundraising strategy for the Olympics in 2020, She helped to develop an innovative and experiential learning programme called the Future Ready Sailor which incorporates STEM concepts into a regular learn to sail course.

Chatbots

Deborah is an artificial intelligence and bot enthusiast, having built several Twitter bots. She has also built and co-developed a number of Facebook messenger bots:

• ColorMeHappy Cosmetics chatbot, a smart yet sassy e-commerce bot on Facebook Messenger that can analyse your skin tone and recommend lipstick shades
• Sammy the Sailing Bot – built and maintained by her interns at the Singapore Sailing Federation
• EmojiBot – a dialogflow agent that can handle any emoji (available for a donation to Pencils of Promise)
• Chatbot Me Up – a entertaining Facebook messenger bot designed to give you the ultimate pick up lines
• Gif Finder – a Chatfuel Template that integrates with Giphy’s API

In 2018, she was added to the Global #bottish100 Power 100 influencers, ranking #1 in Singapore, and made an official Chatfuel Creator. Her Chatfuel templates can be found in the Chatfuel dashboard.

Writing

Deborah is a writer for Lady Boss Asia,  Chatbot’s Life and UX Collective. Some of the more popular articles she’s written include:

“7 Nifty Artificial Intelligence Tools for anyone to use today”
“The Non-Coder’s Guide to using Giphy’s API in Chatfuel”
“How to use Dialogflow’s Small Talk Agent”
“What if your Chatbot could respond to any Emoji?”
“How to Handle Context with Dialogflow”
“Honey, I built a chatbot, but no one will click my button”
“Wanna build a superbot that can do anything? Here’s how”