Today I Learned: While the World Burns Billions on AI, This Makati Firm Turned a Profit

Somewhere right now, in a boardroom in New York, London, or Singapore, a senior executive is approving an artificial intelligence (AI) budget that will produce nothing. Not a little. Nothing.

It is plain math. Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that 95 percent of generative AI pilots deliver zero measurable impact on a company's earnings, all while global AI spending is forecast by the International Data Corp. to hit $301 billion in 2026. 

What a contradiction: the most hyped technology of a generation, consuming staggering sums is overwhelmingly failing to show up where it counts.

The companies you would expect to solve this—the deep-pocketed, Valley-pedigreed giants—are mostly still inside the problem, treating losses as the cost of someday. The company that says it has found the way out is not in California. It is in Makati.

NMBLR.ai, the enterprise AI orchestration firm founded by venture capitalist Winston Damarillo, has been profitable since 2024. It grew more than 50 percent the next year. And this year, Damarillo expects the Philippine market to drive that growth even higher.

“So this year we anticipate a bigger growth than 50 percent from last year,” he said.

His answer to the 95 percent problem is not a slide or a slogan. It is the balance sheet itself.

“Doing that profitably isn't a constraint,” he said. “It's the proof the model works.”

Damarillo describes the early years plainly, like someone who caught a wave because he was already in the water.

“Year one, we were blessed because AI is in such a hot demand at the starting point,” he said. “Most people are just looking for how do I use AI type of help.”

That was the whole market once — disoriented enterprises drowning in headlines, looking for someone to translate the noise into something usable. NMBLR answered, and the answering paid.

But the market grew up fast. 

“Maybe that translated last year into I need a product so I can use it more consistently,” Damarillo said. Companies stopped asking what AI was and started demanding something they could run every day. That shift—from curiosity to dependence, from experiment to infrastructure —is precisely the ground NMBLR was built to hold.

The proof points came from the United States first. NMBLR's earliest clients were American: the Filipino-American grocery chain Seafood City, and the global development firm Chemonics International, for which it built Chemlink, an AI system connecting human capital operations across the world. Validation abroad, in the familiar pattern. 

And then the company turned toward home, where the fastest growth is now coming from.

What NMBLR is doing in the Philippines is not localization in the cosmetic sense — a foreign product wearing a Makati address. It is the harder thing: taking a platform proven in one of the world's most punishing enterprise markets and re-grounding it in the specific weight of Philippine business.

The orchestration stack runs on Amazon Web Services and rests on three products. 

Foundation provides a secure, governed base layer, which is non-negotiable in a market where institutional trust and data control cannot be waved away. 

Prism turns enterprise data into actionable intelligence through plain language, meeting Filipino business leaders where they are rather than demanding they learn a new dialect. 

Forge collapses deployment from months to days, which matters in an economy where waiting has a price.

And the clients are not small. NMBLR is working with some of the country's largest banks, financial institutions, retail groups, and real estate developers.

On Tuesday, NMBLR opened its AI Nexus called Programmable in Makati's central business district. 

Programmable is the permanent home of NMBLR's executive AI fluency program, already completed by hundreds of senior leaders. It is, in Damarillo's words, where the abstraction dies.

“Programmable is where AI stops being abstract,” he said. “Executives walk in with questions and walk out with running systems.”

NMBLR recently signed a marketing partnership with Alchemi Ventures, extending its platform across the more than 50 countries where Alchemi operates. 

The company is backed by funding from strategic partners and is pressing product development across Southeast Asia and North America.

“NMBLR is one of the few companies turning that idea into reality at scale,” Jamey Butcher, Alchemi's chief executive said. “Together, we're bringing this system of intelligence to organizations across the world's fastest-growing markets.”

One of the few companies. Not one of the few American ones. Not one of the few with the right Valley pedigree. One of the few, full stop.

That is the argument Damarillo is making out of Makati, proven in dollars and pesos and live deployments: that the technology the whole world is struggling to make work is already working here. 

That the Philippines did not wait for permission, or for someone else to figure it out first. It just built the thing and made it pay.