By Saqib Sabah, SAP Malaysia Managing Director
Looking ahead to 2024, the continued prominence of artificial intelligence (AI) is evident, with AI serving as the common thread in predictions for the digital economy.
The increasing availability of vast financial data poses a challenge for organisations, which often lack the resources for rapid and meaningful analysis. SAP Business AI emerges as a solution, promising more affordable, equitable, and sustainable access to next-gen innovations.
This shift is expected to drive the ascendancy of predictive analytics, fostering enhanced data-driven processing and decision-making capabilities. Despite using dated data, the transformative potential of AI is undeniable, offering organisations opportunities to achieve greater efficiency, accuracy, transparency, and agility while concurrently reducing costs and risks. Key applications of AI, including natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision, and chatbots, are anticipated to play pivotal roles in this transformative journey.
In the landscape of 2024, the accelerated acceptance and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) stand out as a dominant trend. Businesses are shifting their focus to the rapid deployment of AI solutions to unlock its manifold benefits. Effective implementation and strategic utilisation of data will be paramount considerations. Across diverse industries, fundamental differences in how AI is adopted and deployed will shape the landscape.
Key trends include the widespread application of predictive analysis in sectors like retail and manufacturing, emphasising analytical insights, trends forecasting, and data-driven decision-making. Large enterprises, SMEs, micro-businesses, and public agencies will spotlight chatbots, customer journey experience, and resource management.
Digital economy drivers, including fintech, logistics, and data management, are now pivoting towards sustainability, resiliency, and seamless integration. Businesses are actively pursuing measurable outcomes, data-driven functions, and the development and engagement of digital talents, aligning with a shift away from formal degrees toward skills-based hiring practices.
The evolution of tech talent in Malaysia is accelerating with a focus on continuous learning and development, acknowledging the need to keep skills up-to-date.
A recent Deloitte-SAP tech trend report found that technical skills become outdated every 2.5 years on average. As such, companies need to hire for the long-term instead of just for hiring for current conditions, and ensure learning and development programmes are in place to keep their skills up to date. Formal degrees will continue to lose importance, clearing the way for hiring practices solely based on skills – Organisations are also increasingly searching for professionally skilled talent, placing less emphasis on the formal completion of an undergraduate degree.
The benefits of this widening search are monumental, providing new opportunities to communities facing obstacles in accessing higher education and bringing more diverse and innovative perspectives to the workforce.
Notably, sustainability is emerging as a strategic priority for businesses across Asia Pacific & Japan, with a focus on proving return on investment from sustainability strategies, despite challenges in measurement.
Last but not least, we’ll see more businesses across Asia Pacific & Japan invest in sustainability as a strategic priority, as it can lead to positive business impact.
A recent SAP study found that almost three quarters (74%) of APJ businesses saw sustainability strategies contributing to outcomes like revenue or profit growth to a moderate or strong degree. Similarly, 77% of APJ respondents saw a moderate or strong increase in the efficiency of business processes from sustainability activities. Extracting value from sustainability data will be key to enabling APJ businesses to prove return on investment. Difficulty proving return on investment is one of the top barriers to taking environmental action with 36% of APJ businesses finding it a challenge, above the global average of 33%.
Next year, businesses are poised to confront several challenges, notably stemming from disparate data and data-sets scattered across siloed storage and management platforms. The resulting deduplication and overlapped files will demand additional time and effort to manage efficiently. Another hurdle lies in the presence of repeated and conflicting data and processes, potentially impeding the smooth adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and next-gen digital technologies.
Ensuring business agility in embracing next-gen innovations like Generative AI, eKYC, and data analytics is crucial to avoid negative impacts on digital transformation efforts. Failure to swiftly adopt these innovations may hinder businesses in optimising processes and gaining a competitive edge in the evolving landscape.
A short-term risk looms with the potential replacement of talent by AI and next-gen automation, posing a disruption to existing workflows and potentially affecting customer engagement.
Moreover, the current non-acceptance of AI and next-gen innovations due to financial constraints or limited access to necessary support presents a formidable challenge. Overcoming this hurdle requires concerted efforts in securing funding and facilitating access to the required resources, ensuring that businesses can fully leverage the potential benefits of these transformative technologies.
