From sci-fi prophecy to everyday business tool – seven APAC sector voices assess the current state of AI.
David Irecki, CTO for APJ, Boomi
AI has advanced significantly, making the integration of intelligent agents into workflows more achievable as technology progresses. We see that AI will augment many of today’s business processes, which could include advanced chatbots for customer service or AI-driven personalised recommendations in retail. Within an AI-centric world, the evolving role of developers and IT professionals would mean for AI to act as a tool to augment, and not replace human roles, but complement human expertise.
Businesses need to understand that any digital transformation initiative seeking to leverage AI and automation must have a robust API management foundation. APIs, the connective tissue for data and transactions, are vital for communication between most applications and microservices. They’re essential for moving data into and out of AI large language models (LLMs), AI agents and other AI applications.
Greg Statton, Office of the CTO, Data & AI, Cohesity
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has existed for years, but recent advancements and use cases have sparked renewed excitement about its endless possibilities. AI encourages us to evolve, rethink “that’s the way it’s been done” processes and inspire new entrants to the field. We’re living in a time where decades of transformation are becoming a reality in weeks, and weeks of transformation are defining decades to come. While we appreciate AI’s potential, we must recognize the associated risks. AI relies on data, and it’s paramount to use it for growth and innovation without exposing new vulnerabilities or compromising data security.
Vincent Tang, Vice President, Asia, Epicor
AI has become an innovative force in the manufacturing industry, poised to transform and revolutionise production processes. With its ability to analyse large datasets, identify patterns and make informed decisions, AI is driving greater productivity and competitiveness.
Manufacturing, a data-rich sector, generates vast amounts of information at each stage, from supply chain logistics to customer feedback. These complex data make traditional, manual extraction of actionable insights difficult. AI brings value by using advanced algorithms and machine learning to analyse and interpret this information, now available from the point of demand.
The synergy between AI and ERP will do more than improve existing workflow processes; businesses that leverage the technology will unlock the new vision of industrial operations.
Sandie Overtveld, SVP, Freshworks APAC & MEA
Gen AI has become a transformative force across various sectors, providing innovative solutions to complex business challenges.
We observe three key changes AI introduces to enterprise software: workflow automation, co-pilot assistance and data analytics for decision-making.
As businesses rapidly adopt AI, its applications have been expanding in scope and impact. Smarter AI can now understand customer sentiments, handle simple queries and free up agents.
For more nuanced or complex inquiries, AI can triage these accurately in real-time to the right agents.
Riding on this AI wave, enterprises need to adopt AI-powered solutions to level up their customer and employee experiences, boosting efficiency and engagement.”
Suresh Sambandam, CEO, Kissflow
AI has evolved into a daily business tool for executives to leverage.
What once seemed a technical challenge has become a cultural and organizational shift to embrace AI tools.
People are excited to offload mundane tasks to AI assistants, freeing employees to focus on more strategic, meaningful work.
Organisations have to recognise that business process automation (BPA) and AI together offer unmatched productivity gains and returns on investments (ROI). BPA lays the groundwork with predefined workflows while AI adds intelligence and adaptability.
Patrick Harding, Chief Product Architect, Ping Identity
AI has opened doors for nearly every industry, including cybersecurity, as it has allowed organisations to become more proactive against threats, create more frictionless user experiences, and stop attackers in their tracks faster than ever before. Yet, just as AI has been a force for good, it’s also been a catalyst for threat actors to increase their sophistication, putting identity under attack. This kind of activity is on the rise, with 41% of IT leaders expecting cybercriminals’ use of AI to significantly increase identity threats over the next year. That said, today should serve as a reminder that while AI has created challenges for security, there is also a great opportunity to embrace the emerging technology. More specifically, organisations can (and should) use AI to combat AI-related threats and stay one step ahead of cybercriminals – protecting their customers and employees alike.”
Eric Helmer, SVP & Chief Technology Officer, Rimini Street
AI has catapulted IT from the back office to the front office and on the leading edge of revenue generation, competitive advantage, and corporate growth. With growing talent and skill shortages and greater complexity of IT systems, having the right allocation of people, time and money is critical if organizations want to invest in these important AI initiatives.
Though software vendors tout AI offerings, often if you move to their latest versions available exclusively in the cloud – at a significant cost and disruption to the business, IT and finance executives must take the first step in assessing the true ROI of such an endeavor. By locking your IT budget and roadmap in with the vendor’s promise, you may only innovate at the speed of the big ERP vendor, which may be too slow to stay relevant and ahead of the game.
At Rimini Street, we recommend organizations stay flexible and in charge by starting with their AI goals, then seeing where specific ERP data fits into that as opposed to starting with an ERP upgrade and retrofitting to try and meet your AI needs. We also place greater emphasis on investing in projects to ensure our clients’ ERP data is clean and accurate, as AI is only as successful as the data it pulls from. Remember, “garbage in, garbage out.
Daniel Chu, Vice President of Systems Engineering, APJ, ExtraHop
AI has made significant strides in recent years but has been fundamental to ExtraHop’s DNA and integrated into our Network Detection and Response (NDR) platform, RevealX, since our company was founded nearly 20 years ago. To be ready to tackle today’s threats and resilient against future ones, ExtraHop continues to build upon its proprietary AI and machine learning capabilities to help organisations detect, identify, and mitigate security threats and network issues with speed and accuracy.
A rapidly growing threat landscape and overwhelming alert overload is impacting security operations center (SOC) analysts, making them increasingly overworked and under-resourced. ExtraHop recently made new AI advancements to directly address these issues, better automating SOC workflows and relieving analyst fatigue. One recent advancement is a new AI Search Assistant that acts as an SOC analysts’ threat hunting companion, enabling teams to gain a better understanding of their attack surface through natural language queries. By utilizing the power of generative AI in the search assistant, new and already established analysts can identify risks with greater speed and ease.
As AI continues to rapidly advance, organisations must continue updating their offerings to provide customers with powerful capabilities that enable them to work smarter.
