The advice Huy Nguyen brought to a room of business owners in Ho Chi Minh City on October 8, 2026, began with the ordinary machinery of a working company. Repetitive processes. Cash-flow forecasts. Customer questions. In a conversation about artificial intelligence, these are refreshingly unglamorous subjects. The office spreadsheet had finally been invited to the future.
Huy, LARION’s CEO and co-founder, offered a practical route into AI: automate recurring tasks, use clean data to improve forecasts, and consider virtual assistants for customer interactions. His audience was gathered for a business discussion organized by the Ninh Binh Entrepreneurs Club in Ho Chi Minh City. The occasion celebrated Vietnamese Entrepreneurs’ Day. His subject was what those entrepreneurs might actually do on Monday.
There is a long history behind that preference for useful work. Huy helped establish LARION in 2003. More than two decades later, the company still operates from Ho Chi Minh City, serving businesses beyond Vietnam. The tools have changed; the question of how to turn technical ability into something a customer will trust has stayed remarkably durable.
Before the AI talk, there were five employees
LARION began with two friends who had studied information technology at Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology. There were five employees and limited money of their own. That is a small beginning with a very specific advantage: the founders knew one another before they had to discover whether they could run a business together.
Huy’s LinkedIn profile still lists the university. He also uses the name Jacky, a useful identifying detail for anyone navigating a professional world rather generously supplied with people named Huy Nguyen. His public career is rooted in the company he helped build, rather than a succession of unrelated ventures.
One earlier title helps explain the trajectory. In June 2018, Huy Nguyen Quang was LARION’s deputy general director and chief operating officer, working alongside CEO Eric Lai. Huy now leads the company as CEO and co-founder, with Eric as co-founder. That progression puts the organization’s daily work at the centre of his career: coordinating people, attending to delivery and helping a services business function over time.
Operations rarely provide a glamorous opening scene. They do, however, put a person close to the distance between a promise and a delivery. For a software services business, that distance matters: the customer buys a commitment before the finished work exists. Someone must make the commitment survive contact with schedules, changing requirements and other people’s systems.
A passport made of working software
By 2007, LARION had won its first million-dollar contract with a US client. Four years after its founding, a company started by university friends had reached a different commercial scale. A contract of that size brings a pleasing number to the company history. It also makes the promises larger.
By June 2018, LARION’s customer footprint spanned 15 countries. Its regional revenue breakdown for 2016 provides an earlier view of that international business: the United States accounted for 54 percent, Japan for 27 percent, Europe for 14 percent and Vietnam for 5 percent. Those are historical figures, but they provide a useful picture of the business in which Huy worked as an operator.
Its office was in Vietnam; most of that reported revenue came from elsewhere. That arrangement requires a company to become familiar with customers whose working day, expectations and business context may be far away. Software can travel instantly. Familiarity takes longer.
Where LARION’s revenue came from
The company’s later work includes software development, testing, integration, data analysis, mobile applications and DevOps. These are services that follow a customer’s systems through different stages of their life. A program must be built, connected, checked, maintained and sometimes reconsidered. The launch party occupies a rather small part of the calendar.
The balance sheet he talks about
When LARION reached its twentieth anniversary in 2023, Huy described its valuable assets in human terms: the trust of partners and customers, and a cohesive, capable workforce. He emphasized the work of building a company culture, organized around cooperation, service, responsibility and learning.
That is a revealing choice of emphasis at an anniversary. Such occasions offer every opportunity to parade a number. Huy’s answer returned to the people who do the work and the people willing to commission it again. Read as a statement of priorities, it makes the relationship between internal culture and external confidence unusually plain.
It is also a demanding standard. Trust has to be renewed by behavior. A client cannot install a company’s anniversary speech on a server and expect it to perform. The actual work must carry the argument.
“Tech companies must possess the ability to continuously learn, adapt, and master technology.”
Huy Nguyen, on the pace of technological change
The firm’s current leadership places Huy alongside chairman and chief digital officer Danh Thai, co-founder Eric Lai and chief technology officer Thinh Phan. It is a useful reminder that his career concerns the construction of a team. The chief executive’s name fits on a business card; the delivery requires considerably more space.
The world outside, the neighbours next door
Huy’s international business also has a very local address: Quang Trung Software City. He appears in QTSC’s CEO club membership directory, part of the professional community around the technology park. The global story remains attached to a particular place, with neighbouring companies and people who can meet in person.
In June 2024, he joined discussions with QTSC about cooperation among businesses in the park. The conversations involved LARION, Atalink and Bestarion, with attention to their capabilities and possible working relationships. QTSC’s chief executive, Tran Huu Dzung, took part, alongside Atalink’s Lai Duc Nhuan and Bestarion’s Nguyen Van Phi Hung.
The photograph from that visit is an amiable office group picture: Huy in a navy company polo, colleagues and visitors lined up in front of the LARION sign, thumbs raised. There is a model sailing ship behind them. International commerce has acquired rather different equipment, but the decorative fleet is still welcome.
A software company’s relationships extend in several directions. Overseas customers matter. So do the people nearby who understand the same hiring market, infrastructure and commercial environment. A business can sell across borders while continuing to build its working community close to home.
AI arrives with an invoice
Huy’s more recent remarks about AI retain an operator’s attention to resources. Discussing rapid technological change, he has raised the expense of training people, research and development, infrastructure and testing. These investments require time, while their effectiveness and repayment remain difficult questions.
The tension is familiar to anyone responsible for a company rather than a demonstration. A new capability may be impressive immediately. Making it dependable inside an existing business asks for further work. Meanwhile, the technology continues moving, shortening the time available to understand it.
His response is to emphasize learning and adaptation, and the need to turn technological change into practical value for customers and the business. The interesting part is the combination. He treats technical mastery and commercial usefulness as connected responsibilities. Keeping up is only part of the job.
That concern also appears in what he shares publicly. On LinkedIn, Huy has reposted discussions about outsourcing relationships, onboarding, documentation and common product goals. They describe work that depends on understanding the customer’s business. In his own post about catching up with US technology contacts, he expressed pleasure at hearing praise for Vietnamese teams and invited discussion about the country’s technology future.
For a founder, this creates an awkward budgeting problem. Training consumes time that could otherwise go into delivery; skipping it can leave a team less prepared for the next assignment. Research can produce useful capabilities without producing immediate revenue. Huy’s comments acknowledge that delay. His emphasis on learning therefore has an operational cost attached to it, as well as an appealing sound. The question for the executive is how to support that work while continuing to meet the obligations already made to customers. A faster technology cycle makes both sides of the decision harder to ignore.
Back to Monday morning
At the October 2026 gathering, the examples were suitably concrete. Automating repetitive processes gives a business a defined place to begin. Clean data provides something usable for forecasting. A virtual assistant has a recognizable job in a customer interaction. Each example connects a technical tool with an existing piece of work.
For Huy, that is a fitting place for the story to arrive. His career runs from a university connection to an operating role, from international software contracts to conversations with the business community around him. AI adds a new set of decisions to that career. It also returns him to an old responsibility: helping people decide what technology is useful for.
There is room for ambition in that approach. It asks Vietnamese engineers to understand customers, maintain relationships and keep learning as their tools change. It asks business owners to examine their own processes closely enough to improve them. Neither task is finished by acquiring a fashionable piece of software.
The meeting ends; the recurring task is still waiting. Huy’s advice gives its owner a place to start. After more than two decades in software services, the work remains personal in that very practical sense: somebody needs something to function, and somebody else has to help make it happen.