Technology leaders today have access to more digital tools than ever, but more software doesn’t always translate into better productivity. The real value comes from choosing tools that remove friction, improve decision-making and make it easier to manage increasingly complex businesses.
For Justin Loh, Country Manager for Singapore and Brunei at Cohesity, technology plays a central role in how he manages customers, teams, sales pipelines and the growing volumes of information that come with running an enterprise technology business.
Justin has more than two decades of experience in enterprise technology. At Cohesity, he leads the company’s overall business strategy, sales operations and growth initiatives across Singapore and Brunei.
Before joining Cohesity, he was regional director at NiCE, where he led the customer experience and AI business across Southeast Asia, alongside strategic enterprise accounts across Asia Pacific. His previous experience includes leadership positions at Veritas Technologies, JOS Singapore and Avaya, covering areas such as sales, customer experience, consulting and professional services.
Cohesity provides AI-powered data security and management solutions designed to help organisations improve cyber resilience, accelerate recovery and manage their data more efficiently. Its Cohesity Data Cloud combines Zero Trust security with AI and machine learning capabilities. The company serves customers in more than 140 countries, including two-thirds of the Global 500.
From keeping distributed teams connected to understanding the health of the sales pipeline, these are five technology tools Justin relies on to manage his work.
Zoom for keeping teams and customers connected (Paid)
A large part of my role involves maintaining relationships across different locations, whether I am speaking with customers, meeting colleagues or having a quick discussion with someone working remotely. Zoom makes those interactions straightforward.
One of the biggest advantages is how little friction there is between deciding to speak and actually getting onto a call. A link and a click are usually enough. Reliable video and audio are particularly important when conversations involve customers or teams in different markets, where connectivity may not always be perfect.
I also use Zoom for working sessions rather than only formal meetings. Screen sharing makes it easier to review documents together and work through issues in real time. The whiteboard functionality can also help when we need to map out an idea or work through something visually as a group.
Recording is useful when someone cannot attend or when there are details that need to be revisited later. Instead of relying entirely on meeting notes or someone’s memory, there is a record of the discussion that can be shared.
Ultimately, it reduces the chance of miscommunication. When teams are distributed and calendars are busy, making communication simple helps keep work moving.
Claude as a thinking and writing partner (Paid)
Claude has become useful for the parts of my work that can otherwise consume several hours, including research, drafting, editing and processing large amounts of information.
I often use it at the early stages of a task. That could mean taking rough notes and turning them into a more structured piece of communication, condensing a long document into its most important points or helping me organise my thinking before making a decision.
One use that I find particularly valuable is asking it to challenge my reasoning. Rather than using AI purely to produce an answer, I can use it to question assumptions, identify gaps in an argument and help me look at an issue from a different angle before I commit to a position.
This is particularly useful when you are managing a business without unlimited resources. There are many tasks where having additional support with a first draft, initial analysis or structured thinking can reduce the amount of time needed to get from an idea to something usable.
It does not replace judgement. The final decision still sits with me. What it does well is remove a lot of the friction that comes before that decision.
Clari for understanding the sales pipeline (Paid)
Clari is the tool I use to understand how the business is performing before the month-end or quarter-end numbers tell me.
One of the areas I pay close attention to is linearity. I want to know whether deals are progressing and closing steadily throughout the month or quarter, or whether too much of the pipeline is being pushed towards the final week.
That pattern can reveal quite a lot about the health of a sales pipeline. A strong headline number may look positive, but if too many deals depend on everything closing at the last moment, it can create unnecessary risk.
Clari also gives me a way to understand productivity across the team. I can see who is moving opportunities forward, where activity has slowed and which deals may have stalled without attracting enough attention.
For me, the most useful part is the early warning. If a potential problem becomes visible several weeks before the end of the reporting period, there is still time to respond. I might need to put more attention on a particular opportunity, shift resources or have a direct conversation with someone on the team.
That makes Clari more than a reporting platform for me. It helps show where my attention is needed while there is still time to act, rather than explaining what went wrong after the numbers have already been recorded.
Microsoft Office for external communication and analysis (Paid)
While platforms such as Zoom support much of my day-to-day collaboration, Microsoft Office remains central when work needs to move outside the organisation or requires more detailed analysis.
Outlook is my main channel for external communication. Email still matters when there needs to be a clear record of a conversation. Proposals, contract discussions, formal follow-ups and introductions often need to be shared with multiple decision-makers, and email gives those conversations a structure that instant messaging does not always provide.
I use folders, rules and flags to organise external conversations by account so that important threads do not disappear among internal messages. The calendar integration also makes scheduling easier and reduces the amount of back-and-forth involved in finding time for a call.
Excel is where I spend more concentrated analytical time. Rather than using it for basic calculations, I use it to examine data in more depth. This can include multi-tab financial models, pivot tables for reviewing pipeline and account data from different perspectives and formulas that connect scenarios together.
That lets me take raw information and turn it into something I can use to test assumptions before making a decision.
For me, Outlook provides the structure needed for formal external communication, while Excel gives me the analytical depth required when a business decision needs more than a quick answer.
Cohesity Gaia for getting grounded answers from business data (Paid)
Cohesity Gaia has changed how I think about using AI at work because it addresses one of my biggest concerns with generative AI: whether the answer I receive is based on real information or is simply a convincing response.
Gaia is a conversational, AI-powered search assistant that works with an organisation’s data stored in backups. It combines retrieval-augmented generation with large language models, allowing users to interact with their own backup and archival data.
That distinction is important. Instead of asking an AI system to respond based primarily on information from a general training set, I can query the documents, emails, spreadsheets and presentations that the business has created and retained over time.
I find this particularly useful when institutional knowledge becomes difficult to access. People change roles or leave organisations, projects evolve and the reasoning behind an old decision can become harder to reconstruct.
With Gaia, I can look back at what was written, decided and recorded. I might use it when preparing for a business review, understanding the history behind a decision or looking at how a project developed.
The value is that the response is grounded in governed backup data and can be traced back to an actual source. For business uses where accuracy matters, that gives me more confidence in the information I am working with.
AI can help people work faster, but speed only matters when the underlying answer can be trusted. Gaia gives me a way to use AI while keeping that connection to the organisation’s own data and records.