(Yicai) April 23 — Many companies in the Asia-Pacific region are moving beyond experimentation with artificial intelligence to engage in enterprise-wide reinvention, but only a minority are achieving results that deliver true competitive advantage, and workforce skills readiness remains a major bottleneck, multiple executives said.
Yesterday, executives from telecoms company One New Zealand, Singapore’s United Overseas Bank and Indian consumer goods company Dabur, as well as regional leaders from Accenture, took part in a webinar hosted by the consultancy to discuss the current state of AI transformation in enterprises.
The webinar builds on Accenture’s latest Pulse of Change survey, which found that 86% of APAC executives plan to increase investment in AI this year, 77% are already using AI agents, and 76% believe AI is more beneficial for revenue growth than cost reduction.
“Organizations in Asia Pacific are increasingly recognizing that reinventing their talent is essential to scaling AI, with 41% saying skills readiness and development is the biggest challenge in scaling AI,” said Vivek Luthra, Accenture’s AI and data lead for APAC.
Beyond experimentation
Companies across industries are moving from incorporating AI into individual use cases to end-to-end redesign of core business processes.
One New Zealand company deployed a network monitoring tool that aggregated telemetry data across storm-affected sites, reducing network-wide reporting time from 11 minutes per site to less than two minutes, said Summer Collins, chief AI and business services officer. She also pointed out that the company has deployed an AI agent to resolve billing and shipping errors that previously caused customers to wait three to five days to receive their devices.
“We really want One New Zealand to be the most AI-enabled telco in the world,” Collins emphasized. “The more we learn about this new technology, the more confident we become that this is the future, both for customer experience, employee experience and growth.”
Alvin Eng, head of enterprise AI, said UOB has more than 300 AI and data analytics use cases across revenue improvement, risk management and productivity, including next-best product recommendation models for business banking customers and AI-powered conduct risk detection for the private banking sector.
Eng added that the financial institution was one of the first in Asia to deploy Microsoft Copilot across all 28,000 employees and subsequently built its own generative AI platform to industrialize AI across critical areas such as credit management and wealth advisory.
China factor and sovereign AI
As the global economy becomes increasingly fragmented, data sovereignty is at the top of the regional agenda. According to Pulse of Change, 62% of APAC companies plan to increase their investments in sovereign AI, exploring a hybrid approach that combines the scale of global cloud providers with locally managed infrastructure.
China occupies a unique position in this landscape, with 93% of Chinese companies planning to expand AI investments, 26% actively deploying AI agents across multiple sectors, and 33% piloting AI agents in specific sectors, according to previous Accenture research.
Chinese executives also differ from their global peers in their priorities, emphasizing operational efficiency and employee productivity over creativity in product innovation.
“In the APAC context, China’s AI ecosystem is unique,” said Ryoji Sekido, Accenture’s co-chief executive officer for APAC. “China has become an AI powerhouse, innovating across much of the stack from infrastructure to underlying models. A notable feature is its focus on lean models and open source.
“China is emerging as an important partner for many Asian markets as it develops its own hybrid sovereign AI strategy,” Sekito emphasized. “At the same time, each country’s choices will be shaped by each country’s regulatory, security and data considerations, so there is no one-size-fits-all approach.”
Human resources mission
According to the company, Accenture has retrained approximately 550,000 employees around the world on AI foundations and developed 80,000 advanced AI practitioners to serve customers across the region.
Manas Mehra, chief information officer of an Indian consumer goods company, said Dabur’s challenge started with culture. He noted that the company intentionally made AI “invisible” to employees, incorporating tools like Dabur GPT into daily tasks like spreadsheet analysis and drafting presentations before tying them into larger functional use cases.
“AI is a digital colleague, not a replacement for user activity,” Mehra said. “The message is clear: AI as a colleague can help you perform tasks that used to unnecessarily consume time and reduce productivity.”
One New Zealander has similarly taken a people-first approach, incorporating AI engineers into business teams to demystify technology, while launching Skills Edge, a continuous learning platform to track skills development and career progress.
A recent Accenture assessment found that only 8% of global companies were recognized as AI Frontrunners (defined as companies that can scale both basic and advanced AI across their organizations).
There remains a huge gap between ambition and execution, and in Mehra’s words, “a month is a very long time in this day and age.”
Editor: Martin Kadyev
