IBM CEO Study: ASEAN leaders actively adopting AI agents

IBM shares how it works with companies in the region in their Agentic AI journey in a forum discussion, following the release of the study.

As businesses continue to increase their AI investments, findings from IBM’s 2025 CEO Study have revealed that CEOs around the world are prepared to pair human ingenuity with AI agents to supercharge business growth. Specifically, 61% of CEOs believe their organization is actively adopting AI agents and is prepared to implement them on scale.

Taking a deeper look at the findings of the study from Southeast Asia, 57% of ASEAN leaders are actively adopting AI agents and are prepared to scale them across their organizations. Interestingly, the study also revealed that 71% of the ASEAN leaders stated that their organizations prioritize AI use cases based on ROI while 67% believe that AI is changing aspects of their business that they consider core.

However, the recent pace of innovation and investments in AI has also revealed disconnected technology pieces across organizations in the region, with more than half of ASEAN leaders experiencing it. Businesses are now moving from AI to GenAI and in agentic AI use cases. While this promises greater productivity and efficiency in the long run, the primary goal would be to understand AI and its capabilities.

As such, having the right AI strategy and understanding how the technology can be best used to provide the right business outcomes with the investment made and being able to scale on it is imperative for businesses in the region.

According to Catherine Lian, General Manager for IBM ASEAN, AI agents must be able to work seamlessly across a vast web of applications, data and systems that underpin today's complex enterprise technology stacks. For Lian, this means that AI agents can orchestrate, integrate and automate as these are key movers to really run the actions towards the ROI that businesses are seeking.

“At IBM, we are reimagining the underlining technology stack that will power the AI agent era. Our strategy is all about helping our clients put agents to work across all technologies on any infrastructure powered by their data. We now stand at a pivotal moment where AI assistants and agents are evolving from tools and technologies into true partners,” said Lian.

Echoing her sentiments is Anup Kumar, Head of Client Engineering at IBM APAC. Kumar believes that the biggest challenge to adopting AI for organizations in the region is putting the silos together.

“In ASEAN, customers are pretty excited about AI. However, when you look at an agentic AI perspective, different customers are at a different adoption curve at this point in time. Not everyone is looking at 100% autonomous, and this itself is a journey for a lot of customers. One of the key issues what we are seeing in ASEAN is among the skills. To solve this, IBM has come up with an AI incubation campaign, which is something we have done for the last couple of years. We started with regular AI, and also did it very successfully for generative AI, and now we are accelerating the same on agentic AI. The whole idea of an agentic AI incubation program is to help our customers adopt this technology, learn the lessons, develop the skills, and co-build together with IBM,” explained Kumar.

To accelerate the journey further, Kumar highlighted that IBM has conducted agentic AI bootcamps, to help customers conceptualize the business process and understand the agents that will be required to build autonomous into those workflows. These will then be built together over two days, and customers will be able to appreciate the value of developing them.

“They're able to understand the tools, and as part of the process, they also get some pretty good hands-on skills. We have done this across multiple ASEAN countries, including the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore,” said Kumar.

Regional views on AI development and deployment

Representatives from government agencies in Southeast Asia also shared their views on AI development in the countries they represent in a forum organized by IBM.

According to Clifton Phua, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Systems at Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), the focus remains on constrained high-value workflows that can grow in complexity as user confidence increases. As a regional leader in AI, Phua pointed out that Singapore's strategy combines innovation and governance whereby IMDA is testing agentic use cases with industry, and at the same time emphasizing safety by design.

“We recognize that the real power of agentic AI isn't in replacing human decisions, but in enriching them. So, when AI systems can think independently and collaborate meaningfully, every business process becomes an opportunity for innovation. The analogy that I would like to give is that it's very much like upgrading from a map to a navigator, not just showing the path, but actively helping to find the best route forward,” said Phua.

For Henke Yunkins, Director of Regulation & Ethics, Indonesia Artificial Intelligence Society (IAIS), the AI evolution is creating a different set of challenges because everyone is moving from basic assistance to GenAI. Yunkins believes the problem and the challenge with agentic AI is autonomous and cloud-directed, with some sort of governance needed.

“Singapore is moving very fast but still with very good guardrails. Indonesia is building consensus before scaling. There are some piloting projects on AI agents and agentic AI. What's great about it in ASEAN is that it creates an ecosystem of approaches. So maybe the biggest thing is we need to learn while still safeguarding a potential issue that may arise,” explained Yunkins.

Meanwhile, Jack Madrid, President and CEO at IBPAP highlighted the IT BPM industry in the Philippines, where there are over 1.9 million Philippine agents delivering customer experience to global customers. A big part of the industry is in the contact center in the customer experience sector.

“We're seeing applications of agentic AI with AI agents handling tier one support, very basic FAQs, as well as other transactional queries for all our global clients across banking, healthcare, retail, and telecom accounts. So, we're seeing productivity gains. We've reduced handle times, better first contact resolutions, and an increasingly seamless handoff from AI agent to human agent,” said Madrid.

While it’s still evolving, Madrid stated there are efficiencies being witnessed as well.

“On the healthcare front, which is a growing sector of our industry, we are seeing both voice and text-based AI agents being piloted for summarizing doctor to patient conversations. A far cry from what used to be medical transcription. We have evolved. So overall, across similar to contact centers, basically faster processing time, slightly higher levels of accuracy, and taking into account also compliance with specific U.S. health code regulations,” he added.

The role of partners

While IBM does offer bootcamps and training to help businesses understand more about AI, they also rely heavily on their channel partners to get the conversations going with potential customers in the region and also have the necessary skills needed to cater to customer’s needs.

“For IBM and our channel partners, we have taken a multi-prolonged approach to ensure that our businesses have the necessary skills to work effectively with agentic AI. We recently launched and enhanced the IBM Skills Build, where it's a free education platform offering AI, including agentic AI concepts. This includes AI fundamentals, prompt engineering to couple off with AI ethics and technical certifications,” said Lian.

Lian also mentioned that IBM partners together with the industry leaders to drive a very strong notion of job seekers, professionals, and even students' level to build the foundation and job-ready skills. She also mentioned that IBM has been looking at collaborations to include reskilling initiatives on AI adoption as well as how IBM could provide custom AI readiness assessments and workshops for organizations.

“As we looked at how we want to get ready on the agentic AI skills, it is evident that digital talent is scarce around the region. This is where we will partner through collaborative initiatives with the government and the private sector. It is a continuous journey because as technology continues to enhance, this is where we have to continue to play catch-up to ensure that many are not left behind and many are ready to actually run in the workforce of tomorrow,” explained Lian.