On May 23, the first day of BEYOND 2024, at The Venetian Cotai Expo in Macau, entrepreneurs working in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) sector revealed in a panel discussion how the technology will impact traditional businesses in Southeast Asia (SEA).

According to William Zhou, vice president at iFLYTEK Group, chatbots are popular in the region, though their adoption was relatively slow. However, the quality of the service these chatbots provide has improved in recent years.

Apart from chatbots, captioning is a popular use of the technology, Zhou said, pointing to the use of captioning technology by the event organiser, which was provided by iFLYTEK Group.

However, the increasingly widespread use of AI does not mean there are no barriers to adopting it for businesses in SEA. In the same. panel, Imagine AI Founder & CEO Edwin Loh said that barriers to adoption are mostly experienced by small to medium-sized enterprises due to the lack of resources.

“So, we set out to provide an AI-as-a-service [platform] instead of customised projects that we usually do for companies. We provide a SaaS model [tailored] for them; essentially, a tool for them to develop their own applications,” he said. “It’s great because the businesses know themselves best; they know their pain points.”

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Based on the company’s experience, Zhou stated that a lack of knowledge and understanding is the main barrier to AI adoption. This is followed by fear of business loss. “‘This is going to be very complex; do I need to hire engineers to do this?’” he said, giving an example.

“To overcome these two challenges, the first one is that we need to simplify the process, make it so easy to adopt that we do not need any programming; they can simply implement the target,” Zhou said. “The second step is to allow concurrent use of the technology at the same time … It’s not as simple as ‘how many workers can I save’ by using this.”

How AI helps advertisers reach their audiences

At the same panel discussion, Khanh P. Ngo, Head of Monetisation Strategy & Operations, APAC & MEA, at TikTok, revealed how the popular social media platform uses AI to help advertisers reach audiences.

“The challenge faced by our advertiser clients who want to work with platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram is the difficulty of creating good enough creative content for them to advertise in,” he said.

“This is not just a SEA region problem. We have seen it across the board, especially in the developed world, where creative production costs are very high. So, we- and many other companies in the space- have been investing in solutions to help advertisers reduce that.”

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Advertisers in SEA are looking forward to these solutions, especially given the rising popularity of live commerce in the region.

“We have many case studies of sellers in remote areas using this service [to do their business],” he said. “Here we are playing the role of data analytics platform that can help small businesses make decisions.”

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