Cover Christel Buchanan, founder of ChatAndBuild, is also known as the “AI bestie” (Photo: ChatAndBuild)
Christel Buchanan, founder of ChatAndBuild, is also known as the “AI bestie” (Photo: ChatAndBuild)
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After scaling global tech platforms, Christel Buchanan is rethinking who gets to create software—opening the tools of AI to creators, entrepreneurs and communities far beyond Silicon Valley
Christel Buchanan has spent much of her career inside companies built for scale. In the late noughties, she joined Twitter in its early years, when the platform’s defining idea was to give millions of people a voice in a global, real-time conversation. She later helped grow Brandwatch across Singapore and Asia-Pacific, working with businesses to interpret the vast stream of data emerging from those online interactions. She then founded Bolt, designed to help live video and interactive content reach audiences beyond the industry’s usual priority markets.
Across those experiences, one observation kept returning. Technology platforms were widening participation, yet the ability to create them remained concentrated among a familiar group of insiders. “I was always struck by the fact that they all seem to be founded by the same type of people,” she says. “They went to Stanford [University], they had a computer science degree, they knew how to code.”
That pattern became the starting point for ChatAndBuild, which launched in August last year. If social platforms gave more people a voice, and consumer intelligence tools helped businesses understand those voices, Buchanan believes AI can open the next chapter: allowing more people to build technology themselves. She describes that shift not as artificial intelligence but as “abundant intelligence”. “The limiting factor has always been the idea of coding something, building something, talking to a computer,” she says. “Now, the universal language could be English, it could be Vietnamese, it could be Bahasa [Indonesia or Melayu], it could be Thai.”
That belief is embedded in ChatAndBuild’s design. The platform allows users to describe what they want in natural language and generate working software from a phone or laptop. It supports more than 40 languages, including Japanese, Arabic, Korean and Mandarin, and integrates tools such as GitHub syncing for managing code repositories, Stripe for payments, Supabase for databases and backend services, and Figma-to-code imports, which turn interface designs into working code. It is powered by multiple models, including OpenAI, and is built for people who may have ideas, workflows or domain expertise but little technical training.
Read more: Why your AI sounds smart in English but struggles with Asian languages
Above Buchanan at the inaugural Codechella Summit in September 2025—the platform’s flagship global gathering of builders, founders and innovators shaping the frontier of AI and emerging technologies (Photo: ChatAndBuild)
Buchanan at the inaugural Codechella Summit in September 2025—the platform’s flagship global gathering of builders, founders and innovators shaping the frontier of AI and emerging technologies (Photo: ChatAndBuild)
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Buchanan describes the experience in simple terms: “ChatAndBuild is like ChatGPT, and then you basically can build any app that you want just by speaking to it or just by typing a prompt.” One of the clearest signs that this was more than a neat demo came during a hackathon in Vietnam, where users simply spoke into the microphone in Vietnamese and watched their applications take shape. “That was an eye-opening moment also for us that anyone should be able to build in any language,” she says.
The examples she returns to are telling because they are so specific. One is a doctor and former A*Star scholar who built EczemaChecker.com in a single evening for her children, who suffer from eczema, before turning that work into a broader venture. Another is a nine-year-old who used the platform to build a game, then learnt to rethink his prompt when he wanted the experience to feel three-dimensional. “Make this from the dog’s perspective,” he wrote, and the whole game shifted accordingly.
OpenAI sits centrally within that vision. Buchanan calls it “our foundational, most important model” and points in particular to its voice capabilities, arguing that voice-to-voice interaction adds context and creates a more intuitive relationship with machines. She also sees its tools as part of a wider shift in literacy. “Coding [used to be how] we talked to computers. With prompt engineering, you can increasingly just use normal human language.”
Read more: This speech app is transforming the way children with autism learn to communicate
ChatAndBuild has built on that premise with features such as enhanced prompt structuring, making the system more legible for users who know what they want but not necessarily how to instruct a machine with precision.
Its latest product, ChatChat, extends that logic from app creation to agent-based collaboration. If ChatAndBuild is the build layer, ChatChat is the messaging layer here users can create personalised agents, connect them to selected data sources and place humans and agents inside the same conversation. Buchanan describes it as “our agent platform”. A user might ask their own agent for health data, calendar context or Slack updates; in a shared chat, that agent will disclose information only with permission. The ambition is not merely automation. It is coordination, memory and trust.
The emphasis on community runs through the company’s growth. ChatAndBuild has run sessions with enterprises, families and children; partnered with communities including Women in AI and Open Sourced; and been used in settings ranging from Oxford University to Singapore’s Lorong AI. Buchanan is attentive to the fact that technology adoption often depends less on capability than on invitation. “We try to really reach out to many varied communities,” she says, “not just people who are interested in AI but those who may not be interested in AI.”
There is a reason this matters from Singapore. Buchanan argues that the city-state’s multilingual, multicultural fabric offers an unusually concentrated testing ground for products meant to serve a global audience. “AI is not just developed for the west or the east,” she says. “AI is developed for everyone.” In that context, building from Singapore is a strategic advantage: a place where international ambitions meet everyday diversity, and where the future can be tested against real cultural complexity.
Ten years from now, Buchanan suspects we will look back on this era and realise how narrowly we understood AI. “A lot of people still think that AI is a chatbot,” she says. “AI fundamentally is a supercomputer.” The premise behind ChatAndBuild is that the next interface will not belong only to engineers, nor only to Silicon Valley. It may emerge from people with expertise and experience in other fields, able to build in their own language, on their own terms.
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As Senior Editor of Tatler Singapore, Hashirin champions and refines the storytelling across platforms—curating and crafting compelling profiles, cover stories and features that spotlight visionaries shaping culture, business and impact. Driven by curiosity, she draws inspiration from the artists, changemakers and trailblazers she encounters through her work. Beyond the pages of Tatler, she is an avid supporter of local theatre and delights in seeking out art in every city she visits.
