APAC TEAMS NOW REQUIRE AI FLUENCY, ACCORDING TO CIO
Manu Narayan, Chief Information Officer, GitLab, argues that the APAC region has already won the AI adoption race and that the differentiator now is not the scale of spend but the operating model beneath it. He makes the case for a huband-spoke approach that embeds AI engineers inside business departments, on the basis that access is table stakes and fluency is what actually drives results. obody in Asia Pacific needs
N convincing to adopt AI. KPMG’ s Global AI Pulse found that firms in the region expect to invest an average of US $ 245 million in AI over the next 12 months, well above the global average of US $ 186 million and ahead of every other market. IDC projects Asia Pacific’ s AI spending will reach US $ 370 billion by 2029, with enterprises shifting hard from pilots to production. On paper, they have won the adoption race.
Yet inside many organisations, adoption is unfolding unevenly. Some parts of the business are seeing measurable gains in speed, capability and productivity each month. AI is helping them shorten delivery cycles, uncover insights and automate work that once required significant time and effort.
For other functions, progress has stalled. They are still waiting on a governance sign-off, a formal rollout, or simply someone to tell them where to begin. That gap between the AI haves and have-nots compounds weekly. Closing it takes more than budget; it takes a new operating model.
Your teams need more than access
When leaders notice the uneven distribution of capability across their business, the instinct is to treat it as a tooling problem. They push to get everyone access to the same platforms, provide general-use training and hire some specialists to slot into IT.
But access is table stakes. It’ s a good start, but it won’ t get you to strong organisational adoption.
Harvard Business School reported that workers using these tools completed tasks 25 % faster and produced results rated more than 40 % higher in quality. But the same study also found that performance declined when people used the tools without understanding where they applied and where they didn’ t. Fluency, not just access, drives results.
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