Artificial Intelligence Revolution To Drive Next Phase Of SME's Growth In The ASEAN Region

Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) will not only create more jobs, but could be the catalyst to spurSMEgrowth, allowing them to punch above their weight and compete with bigger firms despite their smaller size and resources.

- Sudhir Agarwal

While AI and other tech such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has received mixed reviews, mainly due to fears that automation would take away jobs, they will in fact do the opposite, and enable employees to do higher value work. According to research, half of the activities that employees are currently paid to do can be automated by available technology. Technology such as AI, allows firms to handle the high-level service experiences that is demanded by customers, alongside freeing up staff to focus on delivering higher value duties by going above and beyond for clients.

AI in general, tends to elicit many different opinions. For some, it is the dawn of a dystopian future, while for others, AI is the solution to a more productive and prosperous future where mundane jobs will be a thing of the past. AI is essentially a software with a mix of skills such as speech recognition, visual perception, translation and decision making, allowing it to perform certain tasks on a larger scale and with much greater accuracy. As such, AI is often touted as a solution but is accompanied with the negative perception of replicating humans. This view is understandable but misguided.