Many Asia-Pacific organisations are holding back their adoption of AI because of mistrust, potential bias, and a lack of transparency and explainability, said EY recently.
“Dealing with AI solutions that span across different jurisdictions all with different privacy regulations and cultural norms of what is socially acceptable is not an easy task,” said said Christina Larkin, EY Oceania Assurance Digital Trust Leader.
To maximise the real value of AI, business leaders must first build trust with internal and external stakeholders to clear up doubts about the data being collected and used in their AI systems, she added.
EY did a poll on February 13 when it held a live AI webcast with 386 attendees in Asia-Pacific from Australia (62%), Singapore (10%), Hong Kong (5%), Malaysia (4%), New Zealand (4%), Philippines (3%), and China (2%).
Outlying countries (10%) that attended include India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and Thailand.
Poll highlights
- When asked about their AI journeys, almost one-fifth of those polled (18.8%) expressed that they are exploring AI solutions that may be relevant to their industry.
- More than 40% of participants in Asia-Pacific are interested in exploring AI, but unsure on how to start using and implementing AI
- Transparency (28.6%), bias (24.1%), and explainability (22.6%) are the biggest barriers to trusted AI for Asia-Pacific organizations
- Many believe process automation (52.3%) and generating new revenue potential through new products and processes (18.8%), will be the two main benefits of AI.
With the correct context, AI can be used to not only add value to businesses, but also solve many issues in multiple sectors, EY noted.
The mining sector, for example, utilises AI to provide precise algorithms to ensure minimal mistakes and foresee possible problems by predicting when workers will have issues with the trains that move materials from mines to the ships, said EY, adding that streamlining the workforce is also one of the major uses of AI.
