Data leaders in the Asia-Pacific region are readily looking to adopt generative AI into their business practices in the next 24 months, according to a report from Informatica.
The report also found that these leaders have also placed AI governance/ethics to be the most important priority in planning their data strategies in 2024.
The study covered 600 enterprise chief data officers and other data decision makers across the United States, Europe and APAC — including Australia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia and Singapore.
“Unsurprisingly, generative AI implementation and the data strategies needed to do so successfully continue to dominate bandwidth for most data leaders, regardless of region or vertical,” said Jitesh Ghai, chief product officer at Informatica.
“While there remains a myriad of technical and organisational hurdles that these leaders must navigate, it’s clear investments in holistic, highly integrated data management capabilities are the key to unlock the vast potential of [generative AI] and empower enterprises to take full control of their ever-expanding data estates,” said Ghai.
Results show that while Korea (64%) and India (75%) have already incorporated generative AI in their business practice, Singapore (63%) and Australia (53%) are next to expect generative AI rollout in their organisation in coming one to 24 months.
Nearly all APAC respondents have encountered roadblocks when adopting generative AI, citing AI ethics (42%) and data privacy and protection (42%) as their main challenges.
Across the region, 56% of data leaders are struggling to balance more than a thousand data sources in their organisation, and 78% expects the number of data sources will increase in 2024.
Three in every five (60%) APAC leaders say they’ll need five or more data management tools to support their priorities and manage their data estates, an increase from 2023 (55%).
Also, 45% of APAC data leaders reported that improving readiness of data for AI and analytics is the most common metric to measure data strategy effectiveness.
APAC data leaders also placed the highest emphasis (67%) on enabling more self-service and data democratisation across their organisation when using generative AI to address their data management needs.
Further, APAC data leaders cited the ability to deliver reliable and consistent data fit for generative AI (40%) and improving data governance over data and processes (40%) as the top data strategy priorities in 2024.
Data privacy and protection (45%), data quality and observability (42%), and data integration and engineering (40%) remain top data management capabilities to invest in to support these priorities.
The report stated that with AI and data management, data leaders can recognise that it is not one driving the other, but rather that the two go hand in hand — and making the most of both means transformative change for these technologies, leaders’ strategies, and the future of their organisations.
