ASEAN Companies Need Clear Goals, Strategies To Gain From AI - AWS

From Siti Noor Afera Abu

LAS VEGAS, Dec 5 (Bernama) -- Companies in ASEAN, including Malaysia, must focus on clear business goals, workforce skills and strong leadership to fully benefit from artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud technologies.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) executive in residence, Jake Burns, said many organisations rush into AI without linking it to business value.

He pointed out that companies must first identify the problems they want to solve and then apply AI as a tool to deliver measurable commercial results. 

“One of the reasons why people have not been as successful as they would like is that it’s been so exciting, like the capabilities that we have gone into this with the goal of just using AI,” he told reporters from ASEAN on the sidelines of AWS re:Invent 2025 conference on Thursday.

AWS re:Invent 2025 is the company’s largest technology conference, attracting around 60,000 industry players and running from Dec 1 to 5 in Las Vegas.

Burns also stated that AI requires workforce upskilling, not just new systems, and emphasised that AI success is more about people than technology.

Regarding cloud trends in ASEAN, he said public cloud remains the strongest preference among global and ASEAN enterprises.

He said maintaining private cloud infrastructure is costly and cannot match the scalability and rapid innovation of public cloud platforms like AWS, which include AI services that evolve too quickly for private setups to keep up.

He said ASEAN small and medium enterprises (SMEs), particularly in Malaysia and Indonesia, stand to benefit the most from cloud and AI because they lack the capital and technical resources of large enterprises.

Burns said that when it comes to using AI in small and medium enterprises (SMEs), a skilled workforce is essential, as practical experience matters more than theory.

He said regular developers, product managers and builders are not the model creators, but they are the ones driving real AI value.

“Companies that combine AI with a skilled workforce will gain a stronger competitive advantage and will likely expand headcount, not shrink it,” he added.

On regulatory differences across ASEAN and the United States, AWS scholar Michael Kearns said the scientific principles of responsible AI are universal, but laws differ widely.

He said AWS closely tracks global regulations and aims to stay ahead of compliance requirements.

‘We expect regulatory frameworks to be perpetually changing. You don’t want to be in a position where you are always trying to catch up,” he said, adding that the need is for actionable and sensible regulations that are not overly broad.

Burns added that governments should be flexible with long-term AI roadmaps given the rapid pace of advances.

“In the current era of AI, a five-year plan is likely to be completely wrong,” he said.

-- BERNAMA