Where Asia is taking the world with AI
Forbes | 22 May 2020
By Ayesha and Parag Khanna
The landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), research and commercialization is increasingly broadening to Asia.
The region, which is home to 61% of the world’s population, stands to gain the most from deploying AI given its still early stages of development but huge potential to scale returns. From Japan to Singapore, AI startup and research clusters are emerging rapidly, a harbinger of the technological leapfrog that is to come.
Here’s a look at how AI is unfolding in the region.
AI As Strategy: R&D And Talent
Asia has been home to tech pioneers for decades. Leading tech companies in Japan and South Korea, for example, have some of the highest numbers of AI patent filings, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization. The success of these and other East Asian conglomerates is also a testament to the quality of their talent and ability to commercialize research. Asians are placing emphasis on scaling applications in industrial and home robotics, self-driving cars, and smart city projects such as one large automotive manufacturer’s planned development in the foothills of Mount Fuji.
China now leads the world in annual R&D spending with nearly $275 billion (just above 2% of GDP), but other Asian nations are also above the 2% mark, including Japan (roughly $176 billion), South Korea ($70 billion) and Singapore ($13 billion). For comparison, U.S. federal R&D spending is roughly $131 billion. While these figures capture a wide range of sectors from biotech to materials to computer science, all are driven by AI.
Japan’s large-scale push into IoT sensor deployment across Asia should be understood as part of its AI strategy given the data it will generate. As the first country with widespread 5G deployment, South Korea has an edge in gathering data that will deepen its AI prowess in areas such as smart manufacturing, immersive gaming and autonomous vehicles.
Bringing It All Together: Singapore And ASEAN
Though its R&D spending is much lower than other countries in the region, Singapore stands out for its ambitious vision for AI and success in execution. Singapore’s recently announced AI strategy includes all the key ingredients to become a leading AI hub for Asia:
Application to industry and urban problems
Capital investments for startups
Support of small businesses to leverage AI
Investment in research and subsidies for citizens to upskill
A regulatory framework that oversees data protection and AI ethics
As Singapore ramps up 5G deployment to cover half the island in the coming years, it has also identified five national projects across logistics, housing, healthcare, education, and security for which it is training 25,000 professionals in AI basics. Singapore’s holistic approach to innovation has helped it rank as the third most innovative country in the world. (Korea is second; the U.S. is ninth.)
Singapore is also taking a global lead in AI governance. At the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos, the Minister for Communications and Information presented the country’s guidelines for responsibly implementing AI, managing its risks and building consumer trust.
While Singapore remains a small market, it has positioned itself as the most dynamic emerging region of Southeast Asia (ASEAN), home to 600 million people with a lower median age and per capita income than China.
This zone of nearly 10 countries between China and Singapore is also a highly collaborative one. Leading companies in Japan, China, South Korea, and Singapore are all lead investors in one of Singapore’s most promising startups, with services ranging from ridesharing to e-payments. One e-commerce and gaming unicorn also launched in Singapore with funding from a Chinese multinational conglomerate and in 2017 became the region’s first tech company to conduct an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange.
As foreign investment in manufacturing shifts from China to Southeast Asia, companies are putting AI to work to bring automation to the industrial landscape of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. These countries are home to major investments from Chinese tech giants, which have opened up AI labs in the region. This trend shows no sign of slowing as venture capital funds invested over $3.4 billion in ASEAN in the first half of 2019, and China’s investment in the region increased fourfold.
AI’s Rapid Expansion In Emerging Asia
While India lags behind East Asian states in R&D spending and patent filing, it ranks second only to China in the number of computer science graduates it produces each year. By further training software engineers to become data scientists and machine learning specialists, India almost doubled its AI workforce from 40,000 in 2018 to 72,000 in 2019.
This labor pool is deeply involved in national initiatives such as a universal identification project—which has already registered more than 1 billion citizens—and a new facial recognition database for law enforcement agencies. Many global companies have set up AI research centers in Bengaluru while one multinational AI company has raised more than $325 million to boost enterprise efficiency with AI.
Pakistan is another young and fast-growing Asian market with an increasing emphasis on nurturing deep tech. In 2019, Pakistan was ranked as the region’s fastest-growing country for digital freelancers. The government also recently appointed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology-trained executive to head its Digital Pakistan initiative.
This survey of Asia’s burgeoning AI landscape suggests there is a great deal of fusion across the region, with Chinese, Japanese and other players contributing enormously to the development of new technologies and ethical governance frameworks.
