Southeast Asia Sees Massive Jump in AI Adoption
- By Paul Mah
- July 05, 2023
The Asia Pacific (APAC) region has seen an extraordinary boost in AI adoption in 2023, despite initially lagging behind in 2021 and 2022, according to data from a new IDC report.
Commissioned by data science platform Dataiku, the IDC report offered insights about AI deployments in various verticals and across markets in the region. The latter consists of Australia and New Zealand, Southeast Asia, Japan, and South Korea.
While only 39% of APAC businesses were leveraging AI in their business operations in 2021 and 2022, the figure jumped to 76% of businesses now using AI in 2023. Indeed, businesses in Southeast Asia now say they plan on spending 67% more on AI/ML in 2023 than they did in 2022.
AI drivers
According to the report, top adoption drivers in Southeast Asia include improving employee productivity, accelerating new product introduction, and in risk management.
When it comes to use cases, fraud detection and prevention, product quality inspections, and recommendation engines for commerce and marketing rank top.
Overall, APAC businesses have improved customer experience by 30% thanks to their investments in AI, as well as sped up new product development by 30%.
In addition, APAC businesses have enhanced sustainability by 29% since they started their AI journey. This is achieved through the adoption of AI in power solutions for smarter and more efficient energy management, as well as using AI to manage biodiversity data.
As an example of how AI can improve employee productivity, marketing agencies were reportedly able to reduce the time to compile request for quotation responses from several weeks to mere minutes.
To be clear, the AI/ML maturity level of organizations in the region varies considerably, according to IDC. AI/ML remains a fundamental component of competitiveness – where AI is utilized for various use cases – for only 8% of regional organisations.
For now, the AI Platforms market spend in Southeast Asia is projected to grow by 40.8% each year from 2021 to 2026, growing from USD174 million to USD 646 million.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this trend [of AI adoption'] as businesses rapidly adopt AI-driven solutions, particularly in automation, which heavily rely on artificial intelligence… Organizations based in Japan and the ASEAN countries are expected to experience the highest budget increases as they prioritize the integration of AI technologies into their operations,” noted the report.
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose. You can reach him at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/tapanuth
Paul Mah
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends, where he report on the latest developments in data science and AI. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose.