At 31, Superbench AI co-founder is building tools that bend to the quirks of small businesses

At 31, Jingjing Zhong, co-founder of Superbench AI, has little patience for people who cling to the past. “What I absolutely can’t stand is when people say, ‘things are supposed to be like this.’ That’s constraint thinking. It blocks opportunities because they can’t see beyond the way things have always been done.”

Her impatience has shaped Superbench, the AI company she founded to give small service businesses the leverage they need to outlast change.

For Zhong, it goes far deeper than efficiency. “Asia was built on the backs of small businesses,” she says. “Our parents and grandparents ran shops, farms, and factories that literally put food on the table and built the nations we live in today. SMEs aren’t just a sector — they’re our bloodline.”

It’s precisely why she designed Superbench as more than a chatbot. On the surface, it looks like a conversational interface. Beneath, it functions as an operating system for service-based SMEs — a layer of automation that learns and executes each company’s own SOPs.

It fields bookings, schedules jobs, tracks payments, and coordinates workflows, the kind of repetitive admin that usually eats up nights and weekends. The ambition is not to replace people but to lift the burden of drudgery, so owners can focus on growth.

Built to bend

What distinguishes it, Zhong insists, is adaptability. Every SME has its own quirks and processes, and most software demands businesses conform to the system. Superbench flips that logic.

It bends to the existing structure, automating the flow as it is rather than forcing a reinvention. A cleaning company, a tuition centre, a small logistics firm — each can wire its routines into the system and trust that the machine will execute faithfully.

One client told her that without it, they would have had to hire three additional staff just to stay afloat. In industries where margins are razor-thin, that difference is existential.

Her conviction grew out of small encounters. At a previous job, she nearly dismissed a potential client who had just emerged from gambling debt, arriving in plastic flip-flops with two employees in tow. He seemed too small, too fragile.

Something made her take the risk anyway. A year later, that man had bought a new HDB flat, hired over a hundred staff, and landed major projects. Zhong still recalls the transformation with awe: proof that with the right tools, even those written off can rewrite their story.

That belief in endurance frames her own journey. She stayed too long in her last job, paralysed by fear of instability. Therapy and meditation helped her name and confront that fear, stripping it back layer by layer until the choice became clear.

Leaving was less about survival than conviction. She did not leap blindly; she prepared. And when the moment came, she chose a path she could commit to fully. 

Survival as a manifesto

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Her language about success is stripped of glamour. “Don’t die. Don’t quit,” she says, as if endurance itself were the measure. Still, what brings her joy is not valuation, but clients who message her saying they woke up to a full schedule instead of unanswered inquiries. Those moments, she admits, give her “the ultimate high”.

It is easy to place her in the narrative of another founder chasing scale, but Zhong insists that is not the point. She often talks about authenticity, testing limits, and the courage to ask for help in public. “People say it takes a village to raise a child,” she says. “I think it takes a planet to raise a company.”

Her industry will change. She predicts consolidation, acquisitions, and a thinning of back offices. But that is not where her gaze lingers. What she returns to, again and again, is the human spine of her mission — the SME owners still awake at midnight, spreadsheets open, trying to keep the lights on.

Superbench, in her telling, is a tool not for disruption but for survival, for dignity, for endurance.

What she is building, in the end, is less an AI company than a refusal: that the people who carried Asia into the modern world should not be left behind by it.

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