PETALING JAYA (Dec 4): Asia-Pacific (Apac) organisations are expecting artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver longer-term benefits for their business in areas such as innovation or revenue generation, according to a recent study commissioned by IBM entitled “Apac AI Outlook 2025”.
AI investments in 2025 for Apac organisations will centre on enhancing customer experience (21%), back-office business process automation (18%) and sales automation and customer lifecycle management (16%).
However, significant challenges will persist when developing cost-effective AI solutions that offer the flexibility to utilise custom-built open-source models to ensure seamless integration across diverse vendor ecosystems.
Malaysia-specific challenges will include limited data accessibility, lack of AI strategy and limited AI skills, expertise or knowledge.
To mitigate these challenges, the government has allocated RM10 million to the National AI Office and RM50 million to AI education in Budget 2025. These investments signify a strong commitment to foster AI capabilities and cultivate a skilled talent pool.
"AI is fundamentally changing Malaysia’s businesses to a degree never seen before. By 2025, we expect businesses will embrace AI with a strong emphasis on strategies that focus on human-centric innovation and productivity enhancement,” said Dickson Woo, IBM Malaysia’s managing director and technology leader, during his keynote speech at IBM’s year end dialogue: Top tech trends to watch in 2025.
“This will include utilising flexible, open-source architecture and effectively managing the seamless integration of AI to achieve measurable outcomes.”
He also highlighted five key trends that are poised to impact the AI landscape in 2025: Strategic AI, rightsizing AI, unified AI, agentic AI and human-centric future of AI.
The report predicts that in 2025, AI will be a key driver of revenue. Businesses will adopt a strategic approach to AI, prioritising projects that are feasible and have a significant impact on the bottom line.
This shift reflects a growing awareness that initial successes are essential for building trust and gaining organisational support, but it must be aligned with a broader, long-term AI strategy. The challenge will lie in scaling AI initiatives across various use cases to maximise revenue generation and return on investment.
To make AI more efficient, smaller and specialised open-source models are becoming increasingly popular. These models are designed for specific tasks, such as understanding local languages or handling simpler computations and require significantly less training data and have a reduced carbon footprint compared to the large language models that have dominated AI discourse, said Woo.
Companies in the Asia-Pacific will increasingly rely on open-source AI models to boost innovation and productivity, while robust orchestration tools will help manage these AI models more efficiently, making them flexible, affordable, secure and easy to integrate with other technologies.
For example, these tools can automatically train AI models on new data, deploy them to various platforms and track their performance.
Woo also said that in 2025, enterprises will increasingly devise agentic workflows, powered by AI agents, to autonomously execute tasks, collaborate with human workers and drive value across the business.
This is done through combining AI with automation, which has the potential to achieve significant gains in operational efficiency, customer experience and decision-making. However, organisations need to establish internal security measures and regularly evaluate underlying models to ensure ethical and responsible use.
While productivity tools have been a major focus of AI adoption, the future lies in leveraging AI to enhance human experiences and capabilities. The human-centric AI approach will become a tool for employees to augment their roles, automate routine tasks and unlock new opportunities for creativity and innovation.
“Strong public-private collaboration in Malaysia within the digital ecosystem will be crucial for this transition, ushering in a new era of technological advancement, positioning AI as a true enabler of sustainable growth and a competitive advantage,” said Woo.