Aaron Rigby. Regional commercial leader, Asia Pacific.
Fifteen years building and running commercial teams across the region, most recently at Taboola and Nielsen. Based in Bangkok, open to leadership conversations.
Writing.
The pipeline maths I run before every quarterCalculator
You know the call. Last Friday of the month, forecast due, and the CRM gets updated in the hour before it. Dates slide to the right and probabilities get rounded up, and whatever comes out of that hour gets read to a board. How many first conversations does one seller need to hold today to land the number they signed up for? The arithmetic takes an afternoon. Put your own numbers in and find out.
Everything breaks down into three things
People pick the book up expecting a manual for using AI to remember things. A few pages in they work out it is about the structure of knowledge instead. I have been building knowledge repositories my whole life: diaries first, then iPad files, then Notion dashboards rebuilt more times than I want to admit. Different tools, same instinct, same failure. What I found eventually is that everything breaks down into three things.
The day a client turned his laptop around
Bangalore. I walked into that room relaxed, because I had delivered the same pitch a hundred times and delivered it well. Then the client turned his laptop around and walked the room through what he was seeing on his end. The numbers were on the screen, the room went quiet, and I had nothing to put next to them. It was one of the best days of my career. What happened next is the whole job.
The graveyard of systems
There are twenty leather-bound notebooks on a shelf in my home office. Half used. Stacked like monuments to productivity. Flick through them and you can watch the decay happen: beautiful at the front, desperate scribbles by the back. The planners gave way to apps, the apps gave way to a Notion second brain, and none of them held. It was never a discipline problem.
The promotion trap
The day you get promoted out of an individual contributor role is the day you start working with worse information. As an IC you had everything: every data point, every signal, every deal. Then comes the title. More markets, more people, more responsibility, and less information than you have ever had in your career. Why that happens, and what closing the gap actually asks of you.
One email, every second Friday.
What I'm learning about running commercial teams in the AI era.
Fifteen years across Southeast Asia, India and Thailand. The numbers, the teams, the turnarounds.
Unfinished Business. The process I used to reshape how I lead commercial teams in the AI era.
Commercial leadership and applied AI, for teams and conferences across the region.
Open to all conversations. Bangkok based, working across Asia Pacific.
Experience.
SEA, Taboola
Set the strategy and structure behind Taboola's SEA enterprise acceleration: Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia built into enterprise markets within twelve months, and the strongest quarters on record for the SEA book inside two years, closing Q1 2026 at 200% of plan.
India, Taboola
Rebuilt the India sales organisation onto a market-level operating model, opening deeper agency inroads and producing the largest single client deal in Taboola India history.
Thailand, Nielsen
Turned a fragile business profitable in three years, and brought the Thai TV industry together for the first time to co-found ADTEB, the broadcasters' industry body, which then launched the world's first cross-platform ratings service outside the US and Poland.
Around those: nine APAC markets and a $40M book at 99% renewal as Managing Director at Nielsen Media Asia, and four consecutive years of growth running Ebiquity Australia.
Commercial leadership,
rebuilt for the AI era.
Writing Unfinished Business (2026) was the process I used to harden and reshape how I lead and run commercial teams in the AI era. The book documents the method. Cortex is the system it produced, running daily on my own work. What came out the other side is how I now operate: forecasts built on captured evidence rather than memory, meeting prep in minutes, decisions that stay findable, and less lost in every handover.
Speaking.
I speak on AI in commercial leadership and the future of media and ad tech. Recent: DNPA Conclave 2026 (Delhi) and Techspectations 2025 and 2026 (Kochi, Manorama Online).
Unfinished Business.
A playbook and a guide for what it actually takes to lead commercial teams in the AI era.
Not a manifesto.
A method.
Every senior operator has the same problem: the things you need to remember, decide on, and follow up on outnumber the hours in the week. Most people treat this as a willpower problem. It isn't. It's an architecture problem.
This book is the method I used to get out of the way of my own work: a knowledge system built on three primitives and one simple loop. It's what I wish someone had handed me fifteen years ago.
If you've ever lost a commitment, forgotten a context, or felt like your calendar was running you instead of the other way around, this is for you.
Buy the book, build the system.
Two years to build. Three months to write up. Yours in a weekend. The book is the why. The Cortex Complete System is the how, and it's a self-build, not a ready-made program. You get every prompt, setup blueprint, and runbook I use to run my own second brain, and you stand yours up with your own hands, on your own machine.
- The engine. The core prompts (entity, thread, commitment, connection, and the nightly inference pass) that power the whole graph.
- The setup blueprint. One paste into Claude Code builds the body for your brain: structure, files, and wiring.
- The owner-profile builder. A guided interview that tunes the system to how you actually think and work.
- Worked examples + a weekend runbook. From an empty folder to a running system, step by step.
Keynotes &
conversations.
On the architecture of knowledge in the AI era, what commercial leadership is becoming, and how to stop drowning in your own work.
I speak at conferences, leadership offsites, company all-hands, and founder gatherings across Asia-Pacific. The through-line is always the same: the real work of leadership in the AI era is architectural, not motivational. You don't need another framework. You need a system.
Talks are built around live, practical examples from my own work: what works, what breaks, and what to do about it on Monday morning.
Keynote
The Second Brain for Commercial Leaders
Why the inbox-and-calendar model of leadership has broken, and what replaces it. A live walkthrough of Cortex, the system I built for myself, and the three primitives that make it work.
Keynote
Leading Through the Transition
What changes when every senior person on your team has an AI teammate that never sleeps: the organisational, emotional, and commercial implications, drawn from fifteen years running APAC teams.
Workshop
Building Your Own Cortex
A hands-on session where participants leave with the architecture sketched for their own second brain. Three primitives, one loop, a concrete first build. For groups of 8–30.
Keynote or breakout. Remote or in-person, with a strong preference for in-person in APAC. Decks custom-built for the audience: no off-the-shelf reruns.
A ninety-minute intensive for founding teams, C-suites, or senior leadership groups. Interactive, tuned to the group's actual operating context.
Internal talks for teams working through their own AI transition. The focus is on what the commercial function actually has to change, not abstractions.
Book a conversation.
Tell me the audience and the moment. I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person for it.
Get in touch