Asia’s AI agenda 3 Executive summary 1. Executive summary sia-based senior executives at global ‹ Executives also feel positively about AI’s ability firms believe that the impact of artificial to add value to their own industries, with the Aintelligence (AI) and robotics on their business exception of financial service executives, who performance in Asia will be profound and positive— are generally less confident that automation and and will be felt sooner than we may think. machine learning will create purely constructive Outside of global robotics industry leaders Korea benefits for their industry. and Japan, most of Asia currently lacks the depth of technical skills and R&D facilities needed to keep ‹ Most C-suite respondents feel AI will significantly pace with AI development. However, China, India, improve their own competitiveness in Asia, and other large Asian economies generate a copious especially their process efficiency and their ability amount of data, a tremendous “natural resource” to delve into customer data to achieve better that is critical to pushing AI’s capabilities forward. insight. Again, financial industry responses lagged Ironically, given the commonly held view that AI will the average. be responsible for disintermediation of jobs at all levels, it is Asia’s massive human capital dividend—the ‹ Only a small percentage of respondents are billions of constantly Internet-connected workers and currently investing in AI development in Asia. 25% consumers—that will propel AI development in the of respondents, however, indicate that their firms region farther and faster. have already made investments at a global level— MIT Technology Review surveyed over 60 Asia- and another 50% are considering doing so. based senior executives to gather perspective on the impact of AI and robotics on Asia’s business landscape. ‹ Some 70% of HR executives feel that AI and Additionally, two dozen senior HR professionals robotics adoption will result in significant job losses were polled to assess the impact on jobs in Asia— in Asia over the next five years. Unsurprisingly, and the future of their roles in particular. Several nearly all of these respondents feel these in-depth interviews were conducted with AI industry technologies will have a major impact on their roles technologists, investors, and application developers. and functions in the future. The key findings of this research are as follows: ‹ Specifically, HR managers and talent professionals ‹ Overwhelmingly, respondents feel technological feel that their roles will evolve into broader, and advancements in AI and robotics will have very more strategic, “productivity management” roles; positive effects on most industrial sectors in Asia. two-thirds of them say their roles will encompass the management of both human and artificial talent ‹ They also believe even more strongly that these in the next five years. technology advancements will specifically improve their own firms’ competitiveness. © MIT Technology Review, 2016. All Rights Reserved.