Artificial Intelligence Applications and Use Cases in Asia-Pacific, 2018

Transforming Services and Business Models with Penetration of AI Applications into Business Operations

This research service provides an overview on Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) market. It also includes an analysis of the different roles played by AI service providers and identifies the strategic imperatives for growth opportunities in this space.

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly penetrating into all aspects of business operations, transforming services and business models. Emerging technologies are being increasingly leveraged in both public and private sectors, significantly impacting the customer journey through different touchpoints. With the convergence of Internet of Things (IoT) and communication technologies such as 5G, AI applications are destined to pervade across all customer touchpoints going forward. The development of AI applications is aimed at making all actions as intuitive as possible for all kinds of users. AI applications embrace a series of co-creation endeavors to build, adjust, and optimize solutions with diverse inputs from myriad key players, end users, and indirect input providers. Connecting all AI-enabled services fades the boundaries of distinction across different touchpoints in the usage journey.

AI applications strive to create a smoother and effortless user experience. This study identifies and defines three main roles for AI service providers. These are:

• AI Solution Enablers-Key players to provide essential AI components such as computing power, processable data, and software stack
• AI Domain Specialists-Key players to provide critical AI functions such as Natural Language Understanding and Computer Vision
• AI Vertical Specialists-Key players to focus on industry- or vertical-oriented solutions, with exclusive data or proprietary models to deal with industry-specific issues such as medical diagnostic, robotics, autonomous driving, and personalized marketing

The use cases discussion in this study focuses on AI applications across different verticals such as banking and finance, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and automotive in different markets in the APAC region (including China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, and others). The profiles of vendors include those of the top tech giants as well as start-ups developing AI-enabled applications.

Key Issues Addressed

• Which are the technology advances and macroeconomic trends affecting AI development?
• What are the roles of key service providers in the AI application ecosystem?
• Which kind of AI use cases are deployed by users in APAC?
• How did AI applications help in the use cases discussed?
• What are the growth opportunities enabled by AI applications?
• Which are the issues that companies need to be aware of when developing AI applications?