Session 4: How APAC CEOs Are Deploying AI—and Their Top Lessons for Success

Update introduction to: We brought together CEOs from across Asia Pacific across a range of industries, including financial services, luxury, consumer, and IT software and services, to hear how they were actively piloting, adopting, and implementing AI technology. Here is what we learned.

Three key takeaways from our conversation with CEOs who are actively piloting, adopting, and implementing AI technology.

How CEOs are adopting AI

01. For transformation: CEOs share how AI will usher in vast changes for organizations, and whole business models will need to be re-imagined. CEOs did mention, however, that an organization needs to have gone through digital transformation and have a connected data house to reap the benefits of AI. It was advised that leaders adopt centralized data stores that are accessible across the organization. But many companies are yet to consolidate their data or leverage the cloud sufficiently to make this happen.

02. To boost productivity and innovation: All attendees were focused on how AI could execute mundane or routine tasks, including admin tasks, customer service, or software development. One CEO shared that, thanks to GenAI, the productivity of their coding team was four times what it previously was, adding that they use GenAI to help write code, as well as check it, optimize it, and trial the result. Optimizing supply chains, investment theses, and strengthening connections with customers were all mentioned as specific use cases.

03. To stay ahead of the competition: Attendees also referenced the risk of being radically disrupted, outperformed, or falling behind the competition, noting that the opportunity available to them through AI was also available to their competitors. One CEO spoke of the most competitive companies being those that learn the fastest. “Whoever learns [AI] fastest wins,” they said.

Key lessons from CEO actively adopting AI

Our attendees shared the opportunities, challenges, and lessons they had faced when implementing AI across their organizations.

Lesson 1: Imagination and learning velocity are key differentiators

There was agreement among participants that the CEO should be the chief transformer of organizations. As one CEO stated, “If you are serious about transformation and you're not taking it on as your full-time job, nobody will do it.”

One  attendee spoke about the importance of imagination and understanding the art of the possible with AI. “If you look at your internal business processes, a corporation is nothing more than an aggregate of processes: you take inputs, you do something to them, and you produce an output. Well, if  you think about it that way, you can use AI to do a lot of business processes. The question becomes: Can you imagine the use case? One of the impediments to deploying AI is [a lack of] imagination, because you have to rethink your business processes through the lens of what the technology is capable of.”

Attendees also discussed the importance of “learning velocity”—how quickly CEOs can imagine possibilities, experiment, learn, and iterate. One CEO said CEOs need to play the role of both Chief Technology Officer and Chief Learning Officer, before adding: “Everything should be an experiment. “Why run two [pilots]? Why not run five or 10? You don’t need to run one every minute, but the idea is that you’re getting data. You farm hypotheses, test those hypotheses, and get an empirical result. You’ve got to do that at scale. You’ve got to do it at speed. But you can’t go faster than you’re capable of learning. So learning is really the critical path on everything.”

Lesson 2: Data and culture are the bigger blockers to transformation

Attendees also discussed the specific role CEOs can play in driving transformation, with three clear themes emerging.

First, ensuring that systems are in place to mine and interpret data—and that you have the right foundational capabilities across the enterprise to harness it. As one CEO said, “Organizations have blocks of data everywhere and you’ve often got duplication of data. We need to solve for that collectively first. It’s going to be incredibly difficult but it’s the journey that we need to get to.”

Another CEO shared, “The age of digital transformation really comes down to data  and  how  you  exploit  data.  I  describe  data  as  the  lifeblood  of  the  modern  enterprise  that  carries  information  and  nutrients  to  all  functions. If we  get  the  data  right,  and we  have  a  system  in  place  where  we  can  learn  from  that  data  through  a  variety  of  mechanisms, everything  works  out  well. Then  it's  just  velocity  after  that.” They added, however, that people are still part of the equation. “We need to be asking, ‘Do we have people who can collaborate with algorithms? Do we have people who can ask the right questions, interpret the results, and then ask the obvious next question and drive that dialogue forward iteratively?’”

The CEO added that diversity of thought is even-more critical when building teams in an AI world. “It’s important to find people who are not wed to a particular process or particular way of doing things… My team is very diverse. I have historians, I have scientists, I have economists, I have math people. And conversations can go all over the place, but they tend to be interesting.”

Second, CEOs have a critical role to play in setting the right environment for innovation to thrive. The group shared how culture was often one of the largest blockers to transformation. As Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani share in their book, “We emphasize that good leaders of digital firms must also understand the softer issues. They still need to master the human side and understand the critical issues that inevitably come up as workers interact with increasingly digital operating models. Managers need to have a feeling for the inspiration, capabilities, and culture needed to drive continued, ongoing evolution.”

The conversation then touched on the transformation of leadership roles and the importance of CEOs building trust and connectivity within the executive team to facilitate meaningful change. Attendees also discussed how leaders needed to pay constant attention to their teams’ experiences as they interact with AI in their roles and accept that although AI may help increase productivity, employees’ cognitive load won’t necessarily decrease.

There was a shared consensus that all employees needed the tools and skills to utilize AI—for innovation to flourish and to create versatility in the workforce. Targeted education and training initiatives will help ensure the workforce becomes agile, informed, and capable of navigating the complexities of AI-driven business landscapes.

Lesson 3: AI is a board-level issue—and many are bringing in tech-savvy members

The group agreed that the revolution caused by AI was absolutely a board-level issue, and if it was not represented in the boardroom, AI would not typically get addressed in the organization. As Professor Karim Lakhani at Harvard Business School explained: “With AI, the board starts to play a much bigger role. The curation of the board becomes super important; their role is to create a healthy tension between optimizing the current state, and making your quarterly numbers for Wall Steet, and investing and spending time for the future state. That tension is tough and it’s going to be a tension that will be ongoing.” Professor Lakhani added, however, that a Harvard-led study showed a strong correlation between the technology intensity of an organization and its performance in the stock market—specifically those organizations with the strongest technology architecture and innovation processes outperformed their peers. “We see clear evidence that leading  companies  that  are  looking  to  transform  themselves are adding board  members  that  aren’t necessarily AI experts but are future leading in terms of thinking  about  how  they  can  use  technology  or  the  company  can  use  technology  to  think  about  their  business  model,” he said.

Several attendees mentioned aims to bring in more tech-savvy board members when succession planning was needed in an attempt to modernize the expertise the board could bring. The group discussed that no single figure should be loaded with the entire tech and disruption conversation, though boards must regularly focus dually on both the broader business implications and relevant technological aspects.