(Yicai) April 23 -- Companies across the Asia-Pacific region have largely moved beyond artificial intelligence experimentation and into enterprise-wide reinvention, but only a few of them have achieved results that deliver real competitive advantage, with workers' skill readiness remaining a major bottleneck, according to multiple executives.

Executives from telecommunications firm One New Zealand, Singapore's United Overseas Bank, and Indian consumer goods company Dabur, as well as regional leaders from Accenture, joined a webinar hosted by the consultancy to discuss the state of AI transformation at companies yesterday.

The online seminar drew on Accenture's latest Pulse of Change study, which found that 86 percent of APAC executives plan to increase AI investments this year, 77 percent already use AI agents, and 76 percent see AI more beneficial to revenue growth rather than cost reductions.

"Organizations across Asia-Pacific increasingly recognize that talent reinvention is critical to scaling AI, and 41 percent say skills readiness and development is the biggest challenge to scaling AI," said Vivek Luthra, AI and data lead for APAC at Accenture.

Moving Beyond Experimentation

Companies across various industries are shifting from embedding AI in isolated use cases to redesigning core business processes from end to end.

One New Zealand has implemented a network supervision tool that aggregates telemetry data across storm-affected sites and reduces report generation time to under two minutes for the entire network from 11 minutes per site, said Chief AI and Business Services Officer Summer Collins. It also deployed AI agents to resolve billing and delivery errors that had previously left customers waiting three to five days for handsets, she pointed out.

"We are adamant we want One New Zealand to be the most AI-enabled telco, globally," Collins stressed. "The more we've learned about this new technology, the more we're confident that this is going to be the future, both for better customer experiences, better employee experiences, and also for growth."

UOB has more than 300 AI and data analytics use cases spanning revenue uplift, risk management, and productivity, including a next-best-product recommendation model for business banking clients and AI-driven conduct risk detection for its private banking arm, noted Head of Enterprise AI Alvin Eng.

The lender was among the first in Asia to roll out Microsoft Copilot to all of its 28,000 employees, having since built a proprietary generative AI platform to industrialize AI across critical domains such as credit control and wealth advisory, Eng added.

The China Factor and Sovereign AI

As global economic fragmentation rises, data sovereignty has moved to the top of the regional agenda. Sixty-two percent of APAC companies plan to increase sovereign AI investments, seeking hybrid approaches that pair the scale of global cloud providers with locally governed infrastructure, according to Pulse of Change.

China occupies a distinctive position in this landscape, with 93 percent of Chinese companies planning to increase AI investments, 26 percent actively deploying AI agents across multiple functions, and 33 percent piloting them in specific units, according to an earlier Accenture study.

Chinese executives also diverge from global peers in priorities, placing greater weight on operational efficiency and employee productivity over creativity in product innovation.

"Within the APAC context, China's AI ecosystem is distinct," said Ryoji Sekido, co-chief executive for APAC at Accenture. "China has become an AI powerhouse, innovating across much of the stack from infrastructure through to foundation models. A notable characteristic is the focus on lean models and on open source.

"China is emerging as an important partner for many Asian markets as they develop their own hybrid sovereign AI strategies," Sekido stressed. "At the same time, each country's choices are shaped by its own regulatory, security, and data considerations, so there is no one-size-fits-all approach."

Talent Mandate

Accenture has reskilled roughly 550,000 employees on AI foundations worldwide and developed 80,000 advanced AI practitioners serving clients across the region, according to the company.

The challenge for Dabur began with culture, said Manas Mehra, chief information officer of the Indian consumer goods firm. The company deliberately made AI "invisible" to its workforce, embedding tools like Dabur GPT into everyday tasks such as spreadsheet analysis and presentation drafting, before linking them to larger functional use cases, he noted.

"AI is a digital colleague, it is not a replacement for what you do," Mehra noted. "The message is clear, AI as your colleague will help you do the tasks that were eating up your time unnecessarily and were letting you become less productive."

One New Zealand has taken a similarly people-first approach, embedding AI engineers into business teams to demystify the technology, while also launching the continuous learning platform Skills Edge to track skill development and career progression.

Only 8 percent of the global companies qualified as AI front-runners, defined as those able to scale both foundational and advanced AI across their organization, in Accenture's recent assessment.

The gap between ambition and execution remains wide, or as Mehra put it: "In this era, a month is a very long time."

Editor: Martin Kadiev