An international inspection team from ICOMOS, the advisory body that evaluates World Heritage nominations for UNESCO, arrives on 3 August to evaluate Chiang Mai’s nomination as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Their six-day visit covers eight sites across the old city and Doi Suthep. A decision is expected before the end of 2026, the year Chiang Mai turns 730.

A city, not a museum

Thailand has eight World Heritage Sites. All of them are managed as protected heritage parks. Sukhothai. Ayutthaya. Beautiful and important, but nobody lives in them. Nobody runs a noodle shop inside the boundary or walks their kids to school past the gates.

Chiang Mai’s bid is built on a different idea. The nomination describes the city as a living cultural landscape, a place where 730 years of continuous history, more than 300 Buddhist temples, morning alms rounds and the daily rhythms of a working city all exist together. The heritage is not separate from the life. The life is the heritage.

That distinction is what makes this bid unusual and worth paying attention to. The inspectors arriving in August are not just looking at temple walls and fortifications. They are looking at how a city of nearly 1.8 million people has kept its identity while growing, building and changing around it.

What it means for the neighbourhood

The nominated zone covers 383 rai of the old city, including seven major temples, five city gates, four corner bastions and the moat. The Doi Suthep corridor, with its national park, sacred road and Wat Phra That, forms the second pillar of the case.

For residents inside and around those areas, the practical effect is a city that pays closer attention to how it looks and how it grows. Signage, building heights, visual clutter and conservation standards around historic sites all come under a more structured management framework. Some of that work is already visible in the clean-up happening around the moat right now. The goal is for those standards to become permanent rather than temporary.

Heritage designation also raises Chiang Mai’s profile in ways that benefit the whole city, not just the old town. The Bank of Thailand already identifies Chiang Mai as one of only six key tourism areas nationally, and the visitor base is diversifying. Long-haul travellers now account for a third of arrivals and half of all tourism spending, a shift toward higher-value visitors who stay longer and spend more broadly across the city.

The story the bid tells

The nomination dossier contains details that residents rarely hear but that carry real weight in international heritage circles. The sacred road up Doi Suthep was built in 1935 in five months and 22 days, with 5,000 volunteers a day working under the direction of Kruba Sriwichai. The Kham Muang language, written in the Tham script since roughly 1300, is still spoken by six million people. Chiang Mai University’s forest restoration research on Doi Suthep-Pui is cited as a global model for tropical ecosystem recovery.

These are not just facts for an application form. They describe a city that has maintained its cultural and ecological systems across centuries, through kingdoms, colonialism, modernisation and mass tourism. The bid is an invitation for the rest of the world to recognise what residents already know: Chiang Mai is not a place that preserved its past by standing still. It kept its character while remaining a real, working, complicated, living city.

What happens next

The ICOMOS team visits from 3 to 8 August. The Lanna Architecture Centre at Khum Chao Burirat will host the delegation. CMU’s Faculty of Architecture has prepared presentations for all nominated sites. The governor’s office reported in late May that preparations are more than 80 per cent complete. Chiang Mai has been shortlisted as one of 35 sites from more than 800 nominations worldwide.

After the inspection, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee will consider the case at its session later this year. The outcome matters, and the city has done serious work to get here. Eleven years of surveys, consultations, conservation planning, academic research and cross-sector coordination have brought the bid to this point. The nomination was formally submitted to UNESCO in Paris on 30 January 2026, backed by a five-million-baht PAO budget and broad institutional support from government, universities, religious communities and civil society.

Chiang Mai has spent 730 years becoming what it is. In August, it gets to show the world exactly that.

CMBN Staff

chiangmaibusiness.net/

Only San Miguel de Allende, Mexico (93.07) and Kyoto, Japan (92.02) scored higher. Chiang Mai finished ahead of Hoi An, Siem Reap, and Tokyo, and placed second in Asia behind Kyoto alone. Bangkok took the number six spot at 91.29, giving Thailand two entries in the global top 10. Japan also placed two cities. No other Asian country managed it.

The city held the number two global position and the number one Asia position in the 2025 edition of the same survey with a score of 91.94. The one-place movement on both counts reflects a tighter field rather than any shift in voter sentiment. The score moved by six hundredths of a point across a survey sample that grew by more than 27,000 readers.

How the survey works

The annual T+L poll collected more than 661,000 individual votes, with readers rating destinations on cultural sites, food, friendliness, and overall value.

Top 10 World’s Best Cities 2026

What voters rated

Reader feedback pointed to the walled old city and its temple network alongside a food scene that now runs from night market stalls to Michelin-recognised restaurants. Agoda separately named Chiang Mai Asia’s number one culinary destination earlier this year, based on booking data from January to March 2026. The Doi Suthep range and the Mae Sa valley put forest, trekking, and ethical wildlife encounters within a short drive of the city centre. The upper end of the accommodation market has added wellness properties that compete at an international standard, a trend running in parallel with Thailand’s USD 22.8 billion national wellness push.

Four Seasons Resort Chiang Mai appeared separately on this year’s T+L 500 list of the world’s best hotels, a recognition drawn from the 2025 awards cycle. The resort holds Michelin 3 Keys and its restaurant Khao carries a Michelin Guide listing. One Chiang Mai property now sits on both the city ranking and the hotel ranking.

Two Thai cities, two different propositions

Bangkok and Chiang Mai share a national brand but sell different experiences: density and river trade on one side, mountain geography and a smaller footprint on the other. The dual top-10 placement lands in a year when Thailand’s inbound numbers are softer. The Ministry of Tourism and Sports reported 16.21 million foreign arrivals between 1 January and 4 July 2026, down 3.11% year-on-year. China remains the largest source market at 2.65 million, followed by Malaysia at 2.11 million and India at 1.24 million. The ranking measures reputation and the arrival statistics measure volume, and the two diverged this year.

What this means for Chiang Mai businesses

A number three global ranking from a 207,000-reader survey is a third-party credential that costs nothing to use. A hotel general manager can put “Top 3 City, Travel + Leisure 2026” on a booking page header tomorrow. Destination management companies can add it to inbound operator pitch decks. A restaurant already on curated lists now has a city-level credential behind it. The ranking is a reader poll, not an objective index, but its sample size exceeds most destination endorsements the city receives and it carries weight with the North American and European travel markets that spend the most per visit.

The UNESCO World Heritage bid, the Agoda culinary ranking, and now a sustained top-three T+L position are stacking into a credential set that Chiang Mai has not held before. Businesses listed on Golden Pages and operators across the city’s hospitality and food sectors have a window to build these into their marketing before the next awards cycle resets the conversation.

Chiang Mai held a number two global ranking for 12 months and the city’s businesses did very little with it commercially. The number three ranking expires in July 2027. Every month without it on a booking page or in a pitch deck is a month wasted.

Sources

Khaosod English: Chiang Mai ranks world’s third-best city in 2026
Travel + Leisure / PR Newswire: Travel + Leisure Announces 2026 World’s Best Awards
Four Seasons Press Room: T+L 500 Recognition
TAT Newsroom: Chiang Mai Crowned Best City in Asia, 2025
Ministry of Tourism and Sports: 16.21 million foreign visitors, first half 2026

CMBN Staff

chiangmaibusiness.net/

The national numbers were set out this week by Nantapong Chiralerspong, director-general of the Commerce Ministry’s Trade Policy and Strategy Office (TPSO). Thailand produced more than 3,100 tonnes of raw cocoa beans in 2025, nearly 40 per cent more than the year before. Exports of raw beans and processed cocoa and chocolate products reached more than US$131 million last year, up 27.4 per cent, with a further US$32.5 million in the first quarter of 2026. The TPSO sets this against a global market it expects to grow from US$55.8 billion in 2025 to more than US$86.5 billion by 2034, an average annual rate of 4.98 per cent, citing research firm Fortune Business Insights.

The headline figure matters less than where the value sits. The TPSO is explicit that the opportunity for Thai exporters lies in high-value, environmentally sound and health-focused products, including those carrying geographical indication status. That is a description of premium, traceable, single-origin chocolate. It is not a description of bulk commodity volume, and the distinction decides who in Thailand benefits.

The volume is southern. The value proposition is northern.

Most of Thailand’s raw cocoa comes from the south, concentrated in Songkhla, Nakhon Si Thammarat, Phatthalung, Prachuap Khiri Khan and Ranong. Chiang Mai will not out-produce those provinces on tonnage, and competing on volume against established southern farms is not the local opportunity. The northern advantage is a different one. It is flavour, provenance and the craft economy that has grown up around both.

Cacao in the northern highlands grows at the outer edge of where the crop survives, above 18 degrees latitude, in cooler valleys with distinct seasons. Most of it grows in agroforestry plots alongside mango, banana and coffee rather than in cleared monoculture. Specialist makers describe the resulting beans as unusually complex, with tropical-fruit and spice notes that do not resemble West African or South American cacao. That difference is the entire commercial argument for a premium product.

The groundwork for this is local and decades old. At Maejo University, Professor Sanh La-ongsri and the Thailand Cocoa Center developed the I.M.1 varietal, a cross adapted to northern highland conditions and now grown on dozens of farms across the region. The varietal gave Chiang Mai growers a starting point that southern bulk production never required, and it underpins the city’s standing as a credible fine-flavour origin.

Skugga as a working model

The Mae On lab is a useful case because it is built around exactly the segment the TPSO identifies. Skugga works with single-origin Thai cacao sourced directly from domestic farms and controls fermentation, roasting and production on site, which means every bar is traceable to the place it came from. The valley sits at 410 metres in the northern highland corridor, the same terroir that international tasters have begun to associate with distinctive Thai flavour. The economics follow the model rather than the volume. A bean-to-bar operation that owns its supply chain and sells on origin earns a margin that a commodity supplier never reaches, and it does so from a footprint that suits a Chiang Mai farm rather than a southern plantation.

Skugga is one operator in a wider field. Chiang Mai craft makers including Siamaya turn local cacao into bars sold to residents, tourists and overseas buyers, cafes across the city build menus around single-origin Thai chocolate, and farms in districts such as Mae On and Mae Wang fold cacao into existing planting and open their gates to visitors.

Quality is the foundation under the price

The premium pricing rests on proven quality, and Thai craft chocolate has earned it at the highest level. Bangkok micro-batch maker PARADAi has won gold at the International Chocolate Awards World Final using Thai-origin beans, and a growing field of producers now holds international recognition, with the London-based Academy of Chocolate awarding silver to Thai-origin dark chocolate at its 2025 awards. That record is the reference point a Chiang Mai maker or exporter cites when justifying a price that sits well above the commodity rate.

Geographical indication as a regional tool

The TPSO’s emphasis on geographical indication is worth reading as a direct instruction to producing regions. GI status ties a product’s identity to a defined place and protects it in export markets. Doi Tung coffee already demonstrates how a northern GI origin commands a premium that ordinary commodity grading does not. A registered Chiang Mai or northern Thai cacao origin would give local growers and makers the same instrument, and it arrives at a useful moment. European import rules now require full traceability from farm to importer, and the smallholder agroforestry model common in the north carries that traceability by default.

The constraint is supply, and it is a business problem

The barrier is not demand. Bordin Charoenpongchai, president of the Thai Trade Association of Cocoa and Chocolate (TACCO), points to the appeal of locally crafted chocolate made with ingredients such as rice milk and Thai herbs, and the TPSO names China, Japan, the United States, Europe and ASEAN neighbours as the markets in reach. Japan and China alone recorded Thai cocoa and chocolate export growth above 40 per cent in a single year.

The difficulty is producing enough fine-flavour cacao to meet that interest. Cacao trees take three to four years to reach first harvest, competing crops offer faster returns, and the northern sector was fragmented for decades before bodies such as TACCO existed to coordinate it. Makers willing to pay two to three times the commodity price to local farmers have found that the premium alone does not generate volume fast enough to scale. For Chiang Mai, that gap is the opening. Highland valley microclimates suit fine-flavour cacao, the agroforestry model is already embedded in how northern farmers work the land, and the makers who can prove origin are the ones holding the pricing power.

The export numbers confirm the trend has started. The volume question is now a local one, and the businesses that answer it first, on Chiang Mai’s terms of quality and provenance, are the ones that will hold the position.

CMBN Staff

chiangmaibusiness.net/

Published 26 June 2026, Thailand’s national Sunthon Phu Day

Each 26 June, schools across Thailand hold ceremonies for a man who spent two stretches in prison, was homeless for years, and began his masterwork while jailed after a bar fight.

Students recite his verses in grade-level assemblies. Flowers are placed at his portraits and statues. In Rayong Province, three hours south of Bangkok, a three-day festival fills the memorial park built in his honour. The programme runs to poetry competitions, verse duels, and a costume pageant where people dress as the villain of his most famous epic. They queue to wear the costume of a sea-ogress.

The man being honoured was born in 1786 in Thonburi, with no court connections, into a literary culture that belonged almost entirely to the palace. He died in 1855 as Phra Sunthorn Voharn, a UNESCO-designated World Poet, with a 30,000-line epic as his monument. The decades in between were not smooth.

The world he was born into

Thai poetry in the late 18th century was court work. It was composed in formal language for royal ceremonies and aristocratic patrons, on subjects the palace approved. The language was elevated, the characters were noble, and the emotions were the ones a king would sanction.

Sunthon Phu wrote in the language of ordinary people. His characters fell and recovered and fell again, and he gave them inner lives that formal verse had ignored. The court of King Rama II saw something in this and appointed him court poet. That appointment was the platform he built his career on, and the first thing he lost.

The first fall

His first imprisonment came from a love affair with a woman of the royal palace named Chan. The court would never have approved it, and it produced the first great poem of his career. The nirat is a Thai poetic form shaped by departure and absence. Sunthon Phu wrote his first major nirat, Nirat Muang Klaeng, from inside a cell, and the feeling he put into the form has outlasted everything written in it since.

He was released, recovered his position, and found a second patron in King Rama II himself. When the king died in 1824, Sunthon Phu lost his income and his standing along with him.

After the patron

The years that followed were the most difficult and the most productive of his career. He had no court appointment, no reliable income, and a drinking problem that had grown severe. Around 1821, before the king’s death, he had been jailed again after a fight. Somewhere in the middle of all this, with no patron and no clear path forward, he began Phra Aphai Mani.

He published it in instalments over the following 20 years, producing 30,000 lines with no fixed address and no one paying him to write.

What the poem chose to be about

Phra Aphai Mani is an epic, but it does not behave like the Thai epics of its era. Its hero is not a warrior but a musician. When the two brothers are sent to choose a field of study, his brother selects the martial arts suited to a future ruler. Phra Aphai Mani chooses the flute. The court read this as a failure of judgement, and the poem spends 30,000 lines proving otherwise.

His flute can stop armies. Across fantasy kingdoms, sea voyages, and encounters with monsters, he wins with the skill everyone around him had dismissed. The flute does the work a sword does in other epics. Phra Aphai Mani’s name translates as the Jewel of Forgiveness.

The villain is a sea-ogress named Phi Sua Samut. She is a giant who falls obsessively in love with the hero, and she becomes the obstacle he has to outthink rather than outfight. She is fierce and devoted, and her devotion is what destroys her. In Rayong each June, she is also the subject of a costume pageant. Adults and children spend weeks competing to embody a character from a poem written by a homeless man in a cell in the 1820s.

Some Thai scholars read Phra Aphai Mani as a disguised anti-colonial text, written as European powers pressed into Southeast Asia. Its hero wins without force and moves between kingdoms without being swallowed by any of them. That runs against the military logic of the colonial period. Whatever the intention, the poem holds to the unconventional path from start to finish.

How Thailand celebrates him

Thailand declared a national Sunthon Phu Day in 1987, the year after UNESCO designated him a World Poet of the 20th century. Every 26 June the country marks the occasion in two places: in schools and at dedicated memorial sites.

In classrooms, the day brings poetry recitals, Thai language activities, and grade-level assemblies around his work. His poems are already in the school curriculum, but Sunthon Phu Day is when students perform them rather than study them. The tradition is built on oral recitation, and performance is the point.

The national focal point is the Sunthon Phu Memorial Park in Klaeng District, Rayong Province. The three-day celebration runs there from 26 to 28 June each year. The park covers 33 acres and is free to enter. At its centre, sculpted characters from Phra Aphai Mani stand in the grounds: the prince with his flute, the ocean butterfly, and the mermaid who becomes his companion. Poetry reading contests draw competitors from across the country. Verse duels, a form of live competitive poetry from classical Thai tradition, run throughout the festival. The Phi Sua Samut costume pageant brings the poem’s most dramatic character to life in fabric and paint.

In Bangkok, the Sunthon Phu Museum at Wat Thepthidaram in the Rattanakosin district is open daily from 10:00 to 17:00 (admission 100 baht). The museum sits inside the temple complex where the poet lived as a Buddhist monk during one of the long stretches between court appointments. It holds manuscripts, portraits, and artefacts from across his life, and most visitors on 26 June are Thai school students.

A country that holds a three-day festival, sends its children to recite his verse, and runs adult costume contests for a poet who spent years in poverty and two spells in prison has settled the question of what it values in a creative life. The festival keeps the poverty and the prison in the story rather than editing them out.

The practice that outlasts everything else

The order of events in Sunthon Phu’s career is what gives it shape. Patron lost, income lost, housing lost, work produced. Patron found, position elevated, work produced. Patron lost again, conditions worse, work produced. The work did not pause for better conditions or wait for a new patron to appear.

Resilience advice built in well-resourced places tells people to treat failure as data and keep their momentum through the rough patch. That advice is not wrong, but it was developed in places where failure has a soft landing and the next source of help is close by. Sunthon Phu worked from different ground, where there was no next round and the court was not coming back, and the practice continued anyway.

His career poses one question to anyone working without a safety net: whether the core practice continues when the conditions do not. For him it did, and the conditions became the material the work was made from.

The institutions that supported Sunthon Phu have not survived him. Phra Aphai Mani has. He made it from the conditions that should have stopped him.

Thai Roots: A CMBN Research Series is published by Chiang Mai Busienss Network that reads Thai history, literature, and philosophy as working material for entrepreneurs and business operators in Thailand today.

Next: King Taksin and the 500-Soldier Startup. How a half-Chinese general rebuilt an entire kingdom from scratch, in three years, after total defeat.

CMBN Staff

chiangmaibusiness.net/

The lockdown ended. Hanover kept thinking about the second part.

She had seen the pattern often enough to know what it was. Founders with solid products and capable people around them, stalling out not because the market turned against them but because the team had quietly come apart. Hires made on CVs and gut feeling. Job descriptions that had nothing to do with what the role actually demanded. Nobody clear on who could make a call without checking upstairs first. Good people going silent, then leaving, while the founder concluded they had an attitude problem or a motivation problem.

In 2021, Hanover co-founded TeamBridge Thailand with Panthila Jeerawatchanon, known to almost everyone as Khun Ai, on a straightforward premise: the failures that look like people problems are almost always structural problems, and structural problems have structural solutions.

What the work actually is

TeamBridge runs across three areas. Organisational design looks at how authority, decision-making and role clarity are built inside a business. Coaching engagements work at the individual and team level to surface what is slowing execution down. Recruitment support brings the same thinking to hiring, screening for team fit alongside the usual credentials.

The tool at the centre of most engagements is the Enneagram, a personality framework that works differently from the ones most corporate teams have encountered. MBTI and DISC describe what a person does. The Enneagram maps why they do it. It identifies how someone operates under stress, what they are afraid of, and where their communication breaks down when things get hard.

For a business trying to understand why a strong hire has gone quiet, or why two senior people cannot get aligned despite apparently agreeing in every meeting, this is a genuinely useful distinction. Knowing how someone performs on a good day tells you something. Knowing how they behave when they are cornered or exhausted tells you considerably more.

The problem TeamBridge is most often called to fix

Hanover calls it the Visibility and Reality Gap. A founder notices execution has slowed and the team has gone quiet. The working assumption is that people have stopped caring. What TeamBridge actually finds, almost without exception, is one of two things: the team does not know what the job genuinely requires day to day, as opposed to what the description said it required, or nobody is clear on who has the authority to make a decision without waiting for permission first.

Neither problem shows up on a performance review. Both compound quietly over months until someone resigns or a deadline fails in a way that cannot be explained.

The engagement that follows runs to a defined sequence. By 90 days, there are 30, 60 and 90-day execution plans on the table with named owners, a shared framework for handling conflict, and a hiring process built around team fit. Early turnover drops. Decision cycles shorten. INC.com reports that companies with effective communication retain their best people at 4.5 times the rate of those without it. Communication, in the TeamBridge model, is not a culture initiative. It is something that gets engineered at the structural level.

Why Chiang Mai

Chiang Mai is not just where TeamBridge is based. It is where the methodology was built, and the city is the reason the methodology works as broadly as it does.

The range of organisations operating here in close proximity is unusual. Traditional Thai family businesses. International schools with complex administrative structures and high staff turnover. Hospitality businesses managing Thai and foreign staff simultaneously. Remote-first companies whose teams have never shared a building. Global founders running product companies on local execution teams. A methodology that holds across that range, and across the cultural distance it contains, is more useful than one built for a single type of client.

The client list reflects it. International schools across the coaching practice. Local businesses including Siamaya and Alt Coliving. The city also runs on relational trust in a way that suits this kind of work. Referrals carry further here than advertising. A word from a respected operator in the local network, including those listed in the GoldenPages Chiang Mai business directory, is worth more than most paid campaigns. TeamBridge has built its reputation on exactly that basis.

The next 90 days

This period is the peak preparation sprint for international schools heading into a new academic year. TeamBridge is running leadership resets and administrative audits for education executives before the calendar turns. Alongside that, several specialised recruitment searches are in progress for local businesses building out their leadership before Q3.

Hanover is also working toward advanced organisational certifications that will broaden the technical range of the coaching practice.

The Free Assessment

The Free Assessment is the entry point for organisations that want to understand their team health before committing to a full engagement. It is a direct conversation with Hanover or Khun Ai. It takes around 60 minutes and costs nothing.

For any business that recognises the pattern described in this article but has not yet been able to put a name to it, that is probably the right place to start.

Book at teambridgethailand.com/assessment.

TeamBridge Thailand is a founding member of the Chiang Mai Business Network.

CMBN Staff

chiangmaibusiness.net/

The figure that matters most is not the rank but the rate. Thailand’s AI adoption rate stands at 10.7% of the population, against a global average of 16.3%. Vietnam recorded 23.5%. Malaysia reached 19.7%. The Philippines came in at 18.3% and Indonesia at 12.7%, both ahead of Thailand despite smaller digital infrastructure bases.

These are not projections. They are measurements of how many people in each country are using AI tools in practice, not the volume of data centre announcements, not the number of ministerial AI task forces, and not the reach of corporate pilot programmes. Thailand has all of those. What it does not yet have is adoption at the population level.

What the gap reflects

Thailand’s digital economy expanded 23.35% in 2024 to reach 2.496 trillion baht, according to DEPA and the IMC Institute, and the three-year outlook through 2027 projects digital services growing at 10 to 14% annually. The AI market alone is forecast to reach 114 billion baht by 2030. Investment is real and accelerating. Google Cloud opened its Bangkok region in January 2026, adding local data residency and direct access to AI infrastructure for the first time. Global technology companies have identified Thailand as a viable regional investment base.

The adoption numbers indicate that this investment has not yet reached ordinary users. Nearly 90% of Thailand’s population does not use AI or lacks access to it. Infrastructure creates capacity. It does not by itself create the skills, habits, or institutional frameworks that move people from awareness to active use.

The countries ranked above Thailand in the region have invested in both sides of that equation. Malaysia’s AIForMYFuture programme, developed with Microsoft and the National AI Office, set out to train 800,000 Malaysians in AI skills by end of 2025, reaching students, civil servants, and business leaders simultaneously. The government backed it with RM64.2 billion in education funding and a national AI roadmap running through 2025, with a second plan already in development targeting 2030. Vietnam enacted its Law on Digital Technology Industry in late 2024, providing fiscal incentives for AI research, foreign investment, and workforce development in the same legislative instrument. Vietnam’s ranking of 38th reflects those parallel commitments, not a natural advantage.

Thailand’s policy response exists but has moved more slowly on the skills side. The Ministry of Digital Economy and Society launched THAI Academy in April 2025 in partnership with Microsoft, targeting one million Thais through a free, open-access AI and digital skills platform. DEPA’s One Tambon One Digital initiative targets 15,600 SMEs, micro-retailers, and farmers by 2026. The Department of Skill Development offers more than 280 courses covering digital literacy through to advanced AI management, and DEPA provides grants and tax incentives of up to 250% for corporate training expenditures. The tools are available. The adoption rate indicates they are not yet reaching people at scale.

The Chiang Mai position

Around 77% of Thais say they believe AI will do more good than harm, among the highest rates of positive sentiment in the region. Adoption among SMEs sits at roughly 39%, which places Thailand behind Indonesia and Vietnam even in the business context where the tools are most accessible and the use cases most direct.

Chiang Mai sits within this national picture but operates with particular characteristics. The city’s tech and startup community includes remote workers, international founders, and local operators who have been building AI into their workflows through self-directed learning rather than through structured national programmes. The Digital Talent Visa, projected to bring 8,000 to 10,000 active holders to Chiang Mai by late 2026, adds a further layer of AI-literate professionals to the city’s working population. That knowledge does not automatically transfer to local businesses, but the proximity creates conditions that do not exist in most of Thailand.

The practical consequence of the national adoption gap shows up here in three ways. First, the available talent pool for AI-capable roles is thinner and more expensive than the headline cost of living in Chiang Mai suggests, because qualified people have options that extend well beyond the local market. Second, international clients and partners increasingly expect AI-integrated workflows as a baseline, and businesses that have not yet built those capabilities face a perception gap that is not easily explained away. Third, the government programmes that exist, including DEPA grants and the 200% tax deduction on qualifying digital training expenditure, are underused by Chiang Mai’s SME community relative to what is available.

The businesses in this network that are furthest ahead on AI adoption have reached that position through peer knowledge-sharing, not through formal programmes. That path works and works faster than waiting for national initiatives to reach the north. It also places real value on networks where that knowledge circulates, which is precisely the function the Chiang Mai Business Network exists to serve.

What the numbers do not measure

The 89th-place ranking captures population-level tool adoption. It does not capture the quality of use, the business impact of the tools being used, or the distribution of capability within the population it measures. Thailand’s student AI adoption rate is above 90% among university students and 81% among teachers, which places it at the top of ASEAN in that segment. The gap between that figure and the 10.7% general population rate reflects how concentrated current adoption is, in cities, in education, and among younger users, rather than distributed across the economy.

For businesses operating here, the concentration matters. The talent pool that knows how to use these tools is real but uneven. The businesses that have moved earliest are accumulating a working advantage that compounds, because AI-integrated operations produce data and output that inform the next cycle of improvement. That dynamic applies as directly to hospitality and tourism operators as it does to tech companies, and as directly to professional services firms as it does to e-commerce sellers attending the Cross Border Summit.

Thailand’s 89th-place ranking will change. The investment going into infrastructure, the programmes now running on skills, and the pace of tool accessibility all point toward a higher adoption rate within two to three years. The question for businesses in Chiang Mai is not whether to wait for that national shift. It is how much ground to cover before it arrives.

Source: The Nation Thailand, May 2026, citing “Global AI Adoption in 2025: A Widening Digital Divide.”

CMBN Staff

chiangmaibusiness.net/

Bartlett built a tool to close that gap. It is called Flight Path Noise and it tracks all flight paths within a 20-kilometre radius of Chiang Mai International Airport. The tool calculates estimated noise levels at any given location based on aircraft type, altitude, and frequency of overhead traffic throughout the day.

How it works

Users enter an address or drop a pin manually anywhere on the map. The tool analyses noise exposure across the full day at that point, rather than offering a static average. A share function allows users to export a set of saved pins, which makes it practical for comparing shortlisted locations or sending assessments to a partner or agent.

Bartlett notes that the tool does not account for road traffic noise or building construction quality, both of which have a material effect on interior sound levels in Chiang Mai’s residential stock. The interface is currently optimised for desktop rather than mobile.

Why this matters for the Chiang Mai property market

Flight noise is one of the least well-documented variables in Chiang Mai’s rental market. CNX handles a substantial volume of regional and international traffic, and the expansion of low-cost carrier routes over the past decade has changed the noise profile of several established residential areas, particularly in the east of the city around the Nimmanhaemin and Santitham corridors. Property listings rarely carry noise disclosures of any kind.

The groups and forums where incoming residents ask these questions, including the Chiang Mai expat Facebook communities and r/chiangmai on Reddit, have no single reference point to point to. Until now, the honest answer to “how noisy is this area?” was to visit at different times of day and hope for a representative sample.

A community-built tool that aggregates flight data and models noise at street level changes that calculation. It will not replace a site visit, but it gives prospective residents a starting point that the property market has not provided.

Try it

Flight Path Noise is a personal project and remains in active development. Bartlett is collecting bug reports through the comments on his original post. The tool is free and requires no account to use.

flightpathnoise.com/chiangmai

CMBN Staff

chiangmaibusiness.net/

They are not wrong about the speed. They are wrong about what comes next.

Vibe coding, a term coined by former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy in early 2025 to describe building software entirely through natural language prompts without reviewing the underlying code, went from weekend curiosity to business trend in under a year. Collins Dictionary named it Word of the Year for 2025. Sixty-three percent of the people now using these tools are not developers at all. The tools have improved, the marketing is compelling, and the argument is simple: why pay someone to build a website when AI can do it faster and cheaper?

That argument collapses the moment the site needs to be run.

The CMS problem

A professionally built website typically runs on a content management system, or CMS. This is the backend layer that allows a business owner to add a page, update pricing, publish a post, or change opening hours without touching any code. WordPress is a CMS. So are many of its alternatives. The separation between content and code is not a cosmetic feature. It is the mechanism by which a non-technical person operates a technical asset.

AI-built sites assembled through vibe coding tools typically have no such layer. The site is the code. To change the site, you change the code, which means returning to the AI tool, re-prompting, reviewing the output, testing the result, and repeating the cycle until the output is correct. For a business that updates its site regularly, that cycle accumulates across every single task.

A GitClear analysis found that AI-generated code produced a four-fold increase in code duplication and a near doubling of code churn, meaning code that is quickly rewritten or discarded. The initial saving disappears. The person absorbing the maintenance cost is usually the owner, spending hours on a task a contractor would have handled in minutes.

The compounding effect is worse. Each modification risks introducing new problems into code the owner cannot audit. A University of San Francisco study found that after five rounds of AI refinement, critical vulnerabilities increased by 37 percent, not decreased. Prompting AI to fix its own mistakes does not reliably produce better code. It produces more code.

The security problem

This is where the conversation shifts from inconvenient to serious.

A landmark Veracode study analysed over 100 large language models across 80 coding tasks and found that 45 percent of AI-generated code introduces security vulnerabilities, including critical flaws on the OWASP Top 10 list of the most dangerous web application security risks.

The reason is structural. Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 calls it context blindness: AI evaluates functions in isolation, missing system-wide architectural vulnerabilities such as missing rate limits or poor token management. Generative models optimise for plausible-looking output, not secure architecture.

The consequences are not theoretical. In March 2025, a security researcher testing a LinkedIn profile generator built with vibe coding platform Lovable found that removing a single authorisation header gave full access to the entire user database. A subsequent scan of 1,645 Lovable-built applications found that 170 of them, one in ten, had critical security flaws exposing 303 vulnerable endpoints. The leaked data included full names, email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses, and API keys. A separate first-quarter 2026 assessment of more than 200 vibe-coded applications found that 91.5 percent contained at least one vulnerability traceable to an AI hallucination.

Lovable’s platform at the time was used by employees at Microsoft, Nvidia, Uber, Zendesk, and Deutsche Telekom. The flaw was not obscure. It was the default.

The liability problem

The security exposure is material for any business that collects customer data, processes payments, or operates in a regulated sector. That list covers most established businesses.

Consider the range: legal practices, insurance brokers, medical clinics, financial advisers, lenders, educational institutions, hospitality businesses with booking systems, and any business holding customer data subject to data protection obligations. In Thailand, the Personal Data Protection Act carries penalties for breaches regardless of how the vulnerability was introduced. The liability attaches to the operator, not the tool.

Breaches involving AI-generated code now cost between four and nine million dollars per incident at enterprise scale, with unpatched flaws producing an estimated half a million dollars per month in compliance penalties. Those are large-company figures. For a small business, the exposure is proportionally smaller. The mechanism is identical: a vulnerability the owner cannot see, in code the owner does not understand, on a site the owner believes is working correctly.

The performance problem

Beyond security, discoverability matters to any business that relies on its website to generate enquiries.

Professional developers design websites with SEO in mind from the start, ensuring proper heading structures, clean code, optimised images, and fast loading speeds. In 2025, discoverability also means performance in AI-driven search tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, which rely on structured, trustworthy content to surface recommendations. A site built without considering these factors does not appear in those results.

An AI tool asked to build a high-performing site produces something that resembles one. Whether it actually performs is answered by auditing the output, not trusting the prompt. Developer trust in AI code accuracy dropped from roughly 40 percent in 2024 to just 29 percent in 2025, even as usage continued to climb. The people closest to the tools are the most sceptical of what the tools produce unsupervised.

The opportunity cost problem

The financial argument for vibe coding rests on a comparison of build costs. The professional site costs more to set up. The AI site costs less. That comparison ignores ongoing management, risk exposure, and what the owner is not doing while maintaining the site themselves.

Every hour spent re-prompting an AI tool to modify a website is an hour not spent on client work, business development, or the activities that justify the owner’s position in their own business. For any founder or professional whose time has a clear market value, the calculation runs in the wrong direction almost immediately.

The brag is that the site was built in a weekend for almost nothing. The reality, visible several months later, is that the same owner is spending disproportionate time on a task that was supposed to have been permanently solved.

What this means for Chiang Mai businesses

The wave is still early. The tools will continue to improve, and there are genuine use cases where AI-assisted builds make sense. A solopreneur validating an idea on a tight budget is a different situation from an established business migrating its primary commercial asset on the basis of a trend.

For established Chiang Mai businesses considering the move: the speed is real, the initial cost is lower, and neither fact changes the underlying logic. A website is a commercial asset. Commercial assets require professional management, proper structure, and ongoing accountability. The tools that assembled the asset over a weekend are not equipped to protect it, optimise it, or repair it when something breaks.

The cleanup work is already forming. The businesses that avoid it are the ones that treated AI as a capable tool within a professionally managed framework, rather than a replacement for one.

CMBN provides digital audits covering SEO, schema, security posture, and search visibility for businesses across Chiang Mai. Contact the team to find out where your site actually stands.

CMBN Staff

chiangmaibusiness.net/

The brand launched in 2020 on Sukhumvit 22 in Bangkok, positioning itself as a source of authentic German-style doner kebab in Thailand. The Chiang Mai opening is the 17th branch in the country, a figure that reflects a consistent expansion built on a straightforward proposition: freshly grilled meat, generous portions, and a menu anchored to the Berlin street food tradition.

The food truck format suits the Nimman location well. The soi runs between the hotel strip and the weekend market zone, drawing a mix of residents, visitors, and digital nomads throughout the day. The truck operates daily from 10am to 2am, which covers both the lunch crowd and the late-night window that few comparable options in the area currently serve.

What is on the menu

The menu centres on the doner sandwich, served in a toasted sesame flatbread with grilled meat, shredded cabbage, tomato, cucumber, and onion. Protein options are chicken, beef, and kofte (lamb and beef blend). Portions are priced by weight, from 100g up to 220g, with chicken starting at 199 THB and beef at 239 THB for the smallest serve.

The wrap format uses a grilled tortilla-style flatbread rolled around the same fillings. Chicken wraps are priced at 279 THB, beef at 319 THB. The doner box, a component-style serve with meat, fries, and a chopped salad presented separately in a kraft paper tray, offers a different way into the same ingredients and suits those who prefer their elements unassembled.

Beyond the core doner range, the menu includes currywurst served with fries or rice and a soft drink at 189 THB, feta salad at 199 THB, feta and falafel salad at 259 THB, and nuggets with fries at 199 THB.

Location and ordering

The Nimman Soi 11 branch is available for eat-in, takeaway, and delivery via Grab. The catering operation, which deploys the food truck for private events and functions, is also available to book through the catering page.

Berlin’s Doner Kebab, Nimmanhaemindha Soi 11, Chiang Mai. Open daily 10am to 2am. Tel: 082 839 9523. www.berlinsdonerkebab.com

CMBN Staff

chiangmaibusiness.net/

His phrase for this was the medium is the message. The content of any medium is a distraction. The real story is the way the medium itself reorganises human attention, social structure, and thought.

McLuhan died in 1980. He never saw a personal computer become a household object. He never saw the internet, the smartphone, or a large language model. But his framework is the most useful tool we have for thinking about what AI is doing to us, because it forces a question almost nobody in the AI conversation is asking.

Not what AI produces. What AI does to the producer.

The content is a decoy

Most of the public conversation about AI is a conversation about output. Is the essay any good. Is the code correct. Is the image original. Is the answer true.

McLuhan would call this a category error. He would point out that we did the same thing with television. We spent fifty years arguing about whether the programmes were any good and missed the fact that the act of watching television, regardless of what was on, was rewiring civic life, attention spans, political campaigning, and the architecture of the home.

The content of AI is the decoy. The message of AI is what happens to a human being who spends an hour a day in conversation with a machine that produces fluent language on demand. The message is what happens to a writer who no longer writes first drafts. The message is what happens to a student who no longer struggles with a blank page. The message is what happens to a workforce in which the bottleneck task of articulating an idea has been removed.

That is the story. The chatbot output is the noise.

Extension and amputation

McLuhan’s second move was to argue that every medium extends a human faculty and numbs the one it replaces. Writing extended memory and atrophied oral recall. The car extended the foot and atrophied the act of walking. Television extended the eye and atrophied the imagination required to picture a scene from a book.

The pattern is consistent. Every extension is also an amputation.

Apply this to AI honestly. AI extends cognition, articulation, synthesis, recall, and a growing share of creative judgement. The corresponding amputation is the capacity to do those things unassisted. The capacity to sit with a blank document and construct a sentence from nothing. The capacity to hold a problem in mind long enough to reason through it. The capacity to remember without retrieving.

This is not a moral claim. McLuhan was not a moralist about media. He was a diagnostician. The diagnosis is that whatever AI does for us, we will become measurably worse at doing for ourselves, and the loss will arrive without anyone announcing it.

Hot and cool, scrambled

McLuhan classified media as hot or cool. Hot media are high-definition and demand low participation. Film, radio, a printed book. The medium delivers a finished thing and the audience receives it. Cool media are low-definition and require the user to fill in the gaps. Television in his era, the telephone, conversation itself.

AI does not fit either category. The output is hot. It arrives polished, dense, finished-looking, and confident. The interface is cool. It is conversational, requires the user to prompt and refine, and leaves the participant feeling like a collaborator.

This hybrid is the source of AI’s cultural traction. It feels like dialogue while delivering monologue. The user experiences authorship while consuming finished product. McLuhan would find this combination both fascinating and dangerous, because it produces a particular kind of confidence in the user that the user has not earned.

A return to the oracle

McLuhan was preoccupied with the way electric media were ending the 500-year reign of print. Print created a particular kind of human being: silent, private, linear in thought, capable of holding a long argument across many pages. Electric media, he argued, were dismantling that human being and returning us to something older. Tribal, oral, simultaneous, communal.

AI accelerates this dramatically. Knowledge is no longer something we retrieve from a fixed text in silence. It arrives through conversation with a presence that speaks back. This is the structure of oral culture, not literate culture. Consulting an AI is closer to consulting the oracle at Delphi than reading a book.

That shift is not trivial. The literate mind, the one shaped by five centuries of reading printed pages alone, is the mind that built modern science, modern law, modern accounting, and modern public administration. Replacing the act of reading and writing with the act of asking and receiving is not a productivity upgrade. It is the partial undoing of the cognitive infrastructure of modernity.

The village speaks back to itself

McLuhan coined the phrase global village to describe how electric media collapsed distance and produced an involuntary intimacy among strangers. He did not mean it as a hopeful phrase. He thought the global village would be loud, anxious, tribal, and prone to conflict. He was right about that, decades before social media made the case for him.

AI is the global village speaking back to itself. A large language model is trained on the collective written output of humanity, including every argument, every grievance, every consensus, and every contradiction. When it responds, it is the village reflecting its own voice. There is something both intimate and uncanny about this, and the long-term cultural effects are not yet visible.

The ground, not the figure

Late in his life, McLuhan refined his framework with a distinction between figure and ground. The figure is the thing in front of you. The ground is the environment that thing creates around itself. You cannot understand a medium by staring at the figure. You have to look at the ground.

The figure of AI is the chatbot, the image generator, the coding assistant, the meeting summariser. The ground is something larger. A working environment in which the provenance of any sentence, image, or argument is unknowable. A creative economy in which the distinction between human and machine output stops being useful. A market in which the cost of producing a passable version of almost anything approaches zero, and the value of being the one human in the room who can still do the thing without help becomes either negligible or enormous.

That environmental shift is the message of AI. It is not contained in any specific product. It is the room those products are building around us while we are looking the other way.

What this means for businesses watching from Chiang Mai

The businesses operating in this city, like businesses everywhere, are being sold AI tools by vendors who want to talk about features and outputs. Productivity gains. Cost savings. Faster turnaround. Better customer service.

McLuhan would tell them to ignore the sales pitch and watch the room. The relevant question for any business leader is not whether AI can do the task. It is what kind of organisation, workforce, and customer relationship the use of AI will produce over five years.

A team that drafts every email with AI will, eventually, contain people who cannot draft an email without it. A customer service operation that routes every enquiry through an AI layer will, eventually, lose the institutional knowledge that came from humans answering those enquiries. A creative agency that generates every concept with AI will, eventually, find that its competitive edge has migrated to the prompt and away from the craft.

None of this is an argument against using AI. It is an argument for using it with eyes open. The medium is the message. The message is the kind of organisation you become.

The last generation that will remember what the previous environment felt like is the one running businesses right now. That is worth thinking about before the memory fades.

About Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan (1911 to 1980) was a Canadian professor of English literature at the University of Toronto who became, almost by accident, the most influential media theorist of the twentieth century. His central insight, that the form of a medium shapes society more profoundly than any content it carries, was treated as eccentric in the 1950s, prophetic in the 1960s, and obvious by the 1990s. He coined the phrases the medium is the message and the global village, both of which entered common use long before the technologies they described arrived.

McLuhan worked at the intersection of literary criticism, sociology, and what would later be called media studies. He spent most of his career at the Centre for Culture and Technology in Toronto, which he founded in 1963. His public profile peaked in the late 1960s, including a memorable cameo in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, before his ideas fell out of fashion in the 1980s and returned to relevance with the arrival of the internet.

Core reading

The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). The book that established his argument about how the printing press created the modern individual. Dense, scholarly, foundational.

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964). The most cited of his works. Contains the medium is the message, the hot and cool distinction, and the extension and amputation framework. The single best entry point.

The Medium is the Massage (1967, with designer Quentin Fiore). A short illustrated paperback that compresses his thinking into a visual experience. Reads in an afternoon. Still in print after sixty years for good reason.

War and Peace in the Global Village (1968, with Quentin Fiore). His most pessimistic book, arguing that the global village would be a place of conflict rather than harmony. Worth reading now.

Further listening and viewing

The 1977 ABC television interview with McLuhan, widely available online, remains the clearest record of how he spoke and thought in person. The McLuhan Centre at the University of Toronto continues to publish lectures and archive material at https://mcluhancentre.ca.

One sentence to take away:
We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

CMBN Staff

chiangmaibusiness.net/