Organisations in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region must rethink their business processes to fully unlock the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI), according to a senior IBM executive.
“Simply replacing a person with a robot in an existing process may reduce costs, but in APAC, that person isn’t going away,” said Paul Burton, IBM’s general manager for APAC, in an interview with Computer Weekly in Singapore.
“Labour laws here don’t allow for workforces to expand and contract as quickly as in the US, so organisations might even see costs increase as they invest more in technology,” he added.
Instead of merely automating existing processes, Burton advocated for a complete reinvention of workflows to leverage AI’s full potential.
“If you don’t change your business processes to leverage what the technology has to offer, you won’t get the value you want,” he said.
Burton likened the need to relook at business processes to the time when the orientation of steam-powered machines on factory floors remained the same after electricity came along.
“Nothing changed because they didn’t reorganise the machines, but when they reorganised the machines to match the workflow and moved to electricity, the machines became more efficient,” he said.
Read more about AI in APAC
DBS Bank’s AI Industrialisation Programme has been instrumental in industrialising the use of data and AI across its business, resulting in over S$370m of incremental economic benefits.
Alibaba’s SeaLLMs are built to address the linguistic diversity and nuances in Southeast Asia, enabling businesses to deploy localised chatbots and translation applications.
Malaysian startup Aerodyne is running its drone platform on AWS to expand its footprint globally and support a variety of use cases, from agriculture seeding to cellular tower maintenance.
The Australian government is experimenting with AI use cases in a safe environment while it figures out ways to harness the technology to benefit citizens and businesses.
This reimagining of processes, however, presents challenges for many businesses, said Burton. “It requires different skill sets and imagination, which I don’t see a lot of in Asia,” he added. “But when that happens, you’ll see leaps in productivity.”
Another key hurdle for APAC organisations is data management, Burton observed. This encompasses the entire AI lifecycle, from data acquisition, curation and cleansing to deploying and managing AI models.
“Data management has been around for 15 to 20 years, but what makes it different now is that before, you were using data for business intelligence and machine learning, but with generative AI [GenAI], there’s a much broader use of the data and a more urgent need for it now than it was before.”
CEOs are willing to be more aggressive with generative AI because they feel that if they don't get on top of it, they'll be disadvantaged competitively, and it will be very hard to close the gap with competitors who do
Paul Burton, IBM
Burton noted that more advanced APAC markets like Singapore are better positioned to address these challenges, particularly regarding process redesign. “But in other countries, you don’t see the integration of business and technology through cross-functional teams – it’s an organisational design issue,” he added.
Watsonx gains traction in APAC
IBM, which has been heavily investing in hybrid cloud and AI in recent years, is focused on delivering enterprise-grade AI capabilities with built-in security and privacy safeguards.
In 2023, the company launched the Watsonx AI and data platform for foundation models and GenAI, offering capabilities like model training, tuning and deployment, a data lakehouse for AI workloads, governance tools and the Watsonx code assistant.
Burton said Watsonx has “seen a lot of traction worldwide”, including in APAC, where it’s driving significant revenue for IBM. “I won’t mention specific numbers, but they’re well above our targets,” he said. “We’re exceeding expectations every quarter with Watsonx.”
Another key factor is governance. “As soon as models are deployed across the enterprise, you need to make sure they’re managed well and can withstand scrutiny if there’s an issue,” said Burton.
According to a study by Enterprise Strategy Group and TechTarget, 75% of APAC respondents plan to adopt GenAI, with nearly a third already running GenAI workloads in production or testing the technology.
“CEOs are willing to be more aggressive with generative AI because they feel that if they don’t get on top of it, they’ll be disadvantaged competitively, and it will be very hard to close the gap with competitors who do,” said Burton.
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