Artificial intelligence (AI) affects all different business functions. As a marketing and sales practitioner, I truly see the transformative power of leveraging generative AI (gen AI). In Asia, we know that many companies and industries have been early adopters of some of these technologies.
Over the past decade, Asia contributed 55 to 60 percent of global GDP. I think AI will allow Asia to continue to maintain this competitive advantage. Sixty-five percent of organizations are adopting AI use cases, with the most prevalent being related to growth, marketing, and sales.
It’s exciting to understand some of the specific areas and use cases in which Asian companies are using it. There are three that I like to talk about: CX, or customer experience; accelerate growth through analytics; and generate greater productivity in the functions.
This ability to become hyperpersonalized when targeting your customers with specific content is clearly cutting edge. Using advanced analytics to exploit pockets of new growth and opportunities is another area that will give an advantage to first movers or fastest movers.
And third, this notion of driving productivity across different functional areas by using AI and AI generation to perform some of the more repetitive tasks, freeing up time for higher value-added tasks.
There are, however, risks that people should be aware of during this journey. One is intellectual property infringement, and the other is data privacy, including how the rules governing it differ between countries and regions.
It is important to take a structured approach and have a clear operational framework for how you are going to use this new technology. Because I sincerely believe that companies that move faster and take risks – intelligent risks – are those that develop a real competitive advantage in the short term, which could give them real strategic distance in the medium and long term.
