Southeast Asia’s Artificial Intelligence Moment
Southeast Asia’s Artificial Intelligence Moment
As a speaker at the 2018 Milken Institute Asia Summit, I was asked to identify the biggest opportunities and challenges as some say the world’s economic center of gravity is shifting towards Asia.
The McKinsey Global Institute projects that “at least 30 percent of the activities that are performed by 60 percent of all occupations” could be automated by adapting existing technologies. The numbers are even higher for Southeast Asia. The September 2018 issue of Robotics & Automation notes that in Southeast Asia, robot density is led by Singapore with 488 units per 10,000 employees, followed by Thailand and Malaysia with 45 units and 34 units each.
McKinsey estimates that roughly half of the work activities in the four biggest economies of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand—could be automated by using machine learning to identify images, recognize speech and perform other tasks that previously required humans. The occupations most at risk include those that entail routine physical duties—sewing machine operators, sorters of agricultural products, stock clerks—as well as those that involve a large amount of data collection and processing.
Artificial intelligence could lead to dramatic productivity increases for Southeast Asian economies, according to McKinsey, as companies use AI-powered models to run their existing operations more profitably, expand into new businesses and create new positions that require people to work closely with AI predictive models. In my new book, The UnRules, I emphasize the need to bring together a variety of ideas and opinions because the key to prediction is combining many different models.
Workforces will need to be properly trained, and large parts of them reskilled. That’s one reason I founded WorldQuant University, an international not-for-profit that offers tuition-free online programs in financial engineering and data science. It’s also why WorldQuant recently partnered with global online-learning company Udacity to launch a new nanodegree program teaching students how to use artificial intelligence for trading.
But education is not enough. At WorldQuant, we’ve long understood the value of using machines to help free up talent from monotonous tasks in order to allow people to work on more complex and beneficial projects, amplifying their role at the center of the process. To be successful, Southeast Asian companies must embrace AI. As McKinsey explains in a September 2017 discussion paper, “Most of the companies across ASEAN will need to make fundamental changes in management culture, including adopting a data-driven style of decision making, and, most importantly, striking innovative partnerships with specialist firms to incubate the scarce skill sets needed for AI efforts.”
I couldn’t agree more. Every time I return to Southeast Asia, I’m excited about the prospect of talking to business leaders from the region to find out what they are doing to utilize AI and sharing my experiences.
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