In an exclusive interview with CanadianSME Small Business Magazine, Joycelyn David, Founder of Tulong Technologies, explains why cultural intelligence is no longer optional but a core business system, and how companies can unlock overlooked market opportunities by building it into their data, strategy, and everyday decisions.
Interview By Kripa Anand
Joycelyn David, author of The Multicultural Mindset: Driving Business Growth in a Borderless Era, is the owner and CEO of AV Communications (AVC), a leading multicultural marketing agency. She is also the founder of TULONG, a startup helping build culturally intelligent AI. In addition, David is an industry speaker and podcaster, and serves on the board for the nonprofit organization POCAM (People of Colour in Advertising & Marketing). Born in Canada to Filipino immigrant parents, David earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social sciences, cultural studies, and communications from the University of Alberta and York University.
Your book The Multicultural Mindset argues that cultural intelligence is now a growth strategy, not a “nice-to-have” add-on—how do you define cultural intelligence in a business context, and why do you believe it has become core infrastructure for organizations operating in a borderless market?
Cultural intelligence in business is the systematic ability to understand, interpret, and respond to cultural differences in ways that drive measurable outcomes—revenue, market access, customer loyalty, talent retention.
It’s not only about being “culturally sensitive.” It’s about recognizing that a product name that works in English might be offensive in Mandarin, that your “professional” dress code excludes qualified candidates, or that your AI-powered hiring tool screens out internationally educated talent because it doesn’t recognize credential equivalencies.
I call it infrastructure because, like security or cloud computing, you can’t bolt it on after the fact. When your business operates across borders—whether physically or digitally—cultural intelligence needs to be embedded in your data systems, your product development, your customer experience, and your marketing from day one.
The business case is straightforward: Canada’s multicultural market represents over $80 billion in spending power. Globally, we’re talking trillions. Most companies are leaving that money on the table because their systems—from MarTech to AI to CRM—weren’t built with cultural intelligence infrastructure. That’s not a diversity initiative. That’s a growth gap.
The companies winning today aren’t the ones with the best “multicultural campaigns.” They’re the ones who built cultural intelligence into their operating systems.
You often say that cultural intelligence is the most neglected dataset in modern business—when you look at how most companies collect, label, and use data today, what blind spots or biases do you see, and what practical risks do leaders run if they fail to apply a cultural lens to their data and AI systems?
The biggest blind spot is assuming data is neutral. It’s not. Most business data is collected through an English-only, Western-centric lens, then treated as universal truth.
Here’s what that looks like in practice: Your customer survey asks about “household income” but doesn’t account for multigenerational households common in many cultures—so you misunderstand purchasing power. Your AI hiring tool flags career gaps as negative without recognizing that in some cultures, taking time for elder care is expected and respected. Your marketing analytics measure “engagement” through clicks and likes but miss that WeChat users engage differently than Instagram users.
The practical risks are expensive. You’re making million-dollar decisions based on incomplete pictures. Your AI systems perpetuate bias because they learned from biased data, opening you to legal liability. You launch products that fail in diverse markets because your testing data wasn’t culturally representative.
At Tulong, we see this constantly: companies confidently using data they think represents “everyone” when it actually represents a narrow slice. The fix isn’t more data—it’s culturally intelligent data infrastructure that captures context, not just transactions.
For SMEs, this matters even more. You can’t afford to misread your market. Cultural intelligence in your data systems isn’t nice-to-have. It’s how you compete.
Through AV Communications you’ve launched platforms like Ethnihub and now, with Tulong Technologies, you’re building culturally intelligent AI for marketers—what does it actually look like, in practice, to design AI tools and training data that reflect real-world diversity instead of flattening it or reinforcing stereotypes?
Ethnihub was born from frustration. At AVC, we were manually connecting brands to multicultural audiences by conducting offline research then explaining to clients why the results were important to marketers. I realized we were doing this repetitive work because the infrastructure didn’t exist.
That experience eventually evolved into Tulong, and today our multicultural media platform doesn’t just list 2,000+ outlets—it understands what makes each distinct. When marketers search “South Asian media,” we don’t flatten that into one category. The system surfaces Punjabi newspapers, Tamil digital outlets, Hindi radio, Gujarati community TV—each tagged with audience generation, language nuance, and cultural calendar relevance.
The AI layer prevents stereotyping through intelligent prompting. If a campaign only targets Mandarin media for a “Chinese market” push, the system asks: “Are you missing Cantonese speakers? Here are relevant outlets.”
We went from manually preventing these mistakes to building AI infrastructure that prevents them at scale. That’s what culturally intelligent design looks like: systems that make doing the right thing easier than doing the lazy thing.
Your “bubble tea shame” story has become a powerful metaphor for how culture moves from margin to mainstream—how has that sixth‑grade experience shaped the way you talk to executives about missed opportunities, and what does it teach us about spotting the “next bubble tea” in our own markets before everyone else does?
That sixth-grade moment—being mocked for drinking bubble tea, then watching it become a billion-dollar mainstream trend—taught me that what’s “niche” today is often mainstream tomorrow. The executives who win are the ones who spot that shift early.
When I talk to business leaders, I use bubble tea as shorthand for a larger pattern: immigrant communities and culturally diverse populations aren’t lagging indicators of culture, they’re actually leading indicators. They’re already living the future your mainstream market will embrace in 5 to 10 years.
The practical lesson is this: Stop treating diverse communities as “specialized” markets. Start treating them as early adopters whose preferences forecast broader trends. The companies that positioned culturally specific products early—whether it’s food, fashion, or financial services—owned those categories when they went mainstream.
To spot the next bubble tea in your market, pay attention to what diverse communities are passionate about but mainstream businesses are ignoring. What are immigrant families buying that grocery chains haven’t noticed? What media are multilingual households consuming that advertisers aren’t accessing? What problems are culturally diverse consumers solving that your competitors dismiss as “too niche”?
The companies missing these signals aren’t just losing today’s diverse market. They’re missing tomorrow’s mainstream market. That’s the expensive part.
(please be sure to link to the Galing story on YouTube https://youtu.be/S1NsoiS_UEQ?si=xYZ1Y6xu3o3I4mHC)
For small and medium‑sized business owners who may not have a dedicated insights team or AI lab, what are some concrete first steps they can take to build their “Multicultural Quotient”—in their marketing, product decisions, or leadership practices—so that cultural intelligence becomes a daily habit and competitive advantage, not just a campaign theme?
Start by taking the Multicultural Quotient quiz I developed for The Multicultural Mindset. It’s a diagnostic tool that reveals where your business has cultural blind spots—not through guilt or theory, but through practical scenarios you face daily.
See https://joycelyndavid.co/whats-your-mq%3F
The quiz assesses five dimensions: awareness (do you see the opportunity?), knowledge (do you understand cultural nuances?), strategy (is cultural intelligence in your business plan?), capability (do your systems support it?), and results (are you measuring cultural ROI?).
Most SME owners discover they score high on awareness—they know diverse markets matter—but low on capability. They want to reach multicultural audiences but their website doesn’t support multiple languages, their media buys ignore ethnic outlets, or their customer data doesn’t capture cultural preferences.
Once you know your gaps, the fixes become clear. Low on knowledge? Subscribe to ethnic media in your market and actually read it. Low on capability? Start with one operational change—add culturally diverse media to your next campaign using platforms that aggregate those outlets. Low on strategy? Set one cultural intelligence KPI and track it monthly.
Cultural intelligence as competitive advantage starts with honest assessment. The MQ quiz gives you that baseline. Then it’s about building one culturally intelligent habit at a time until it’s embedded in how you operate.
Disclaimer:
The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CanadianSME Small Business Magazine. Our platform is dedicated to fostering dialogue and sharing insights that inspire and empower small and medium-sized businesses across Canada.
