Salesforce research reveals generative AI is among the top three business priorities for 87 per cent of Singapore C-suite executives.
According to the survey of 221 leaders from large businesses across the country, 48 per cent said their organisation currently had a clear and defined generative AI strategy, while a further 47 per cent said they had started working on a generative AI strategy for their business.
Research suggests companies that haven’t already implemented AI risk losing significant ground to competitors, and this could happen more quickly than anticipated, as we move from chatbots to copilots to autonomous AI agents. This next great leap forward will feature agentic systems, which can be thought of as trusted digital colleagues as opposed to digital assistants.
C-suite executives said the key motivations driving generative AI adoption were:
- To be seen as being on the cutting edge of technology adoption (43%)
- Remaining competitive (42%)
- Innovative customer and employee experiences (42%)
Singapore C-suite executives are bullish on generative AI integration and are taking decisive action to ensure its success. The CEO is seen as being the most responsible for ensuring generative AI is successfully integrated (42%) and teams enabled, followed by the CIO/CTO (31%), and department heads (18%).
When asked where generative AI would have the biggest positive business impact, C-suite executives identified information technology (40%), operations (33%), finance (29%) and customer service (28%).
Despite being widely used, however, 95 per cent of C-suite executives said they believed there were still barriers to adoption of generative AI in their business today. Data factors were high on the list of barriers, including:
- Accessibility and inclusivity (43%)
- Lack of skill-building or training opportunities (33%)
- The use of incomplete customer/company data to train AI models (31%)
- Lack of governance (31%)
- Generative AI producing inaccurate outputs (28%)
“As CEOs look at AI to deliver measurable value and remain competitive, their first step should be unifying their data. Every conversation I have with business leaders about AI inevitably comes back to data and overcoming silos to increase the impact and accuracy of AI. Without building a cohesive view of the customer, Generative AI initiatives will fall short,” said Sujith Abraham, Senior Vice President and General Manager, ASEAN, Salesforce. “The good news is that it’s possible to bring your data together, efficiently, without actually moving it through innovations like zero copy. Innovations like this will differentiate each organization’s ecosystem of autonomous agents, humans and AI and how well they drive customer success at scale.”
