Nearly eight in 10 employees in APAC use AI weekly. Only 7% of firms have scaled it

Asia-Pacific has one of the world’s most AI-enabled workforces, but has yet to translate into enterprise-wide change. Weekly AI use among knowledge employees in the region has reached 78%, according to Boston Consulting Group, while McKinsey & Company puts the share of organisations that have successfully scaled AI across the enterprise at 7%.

That gap is the starting point for Making AI Work: A Practical Agenda for APAC Workers and Firms, published by the Asia Tech Alliance (ATA), a regional industry association founded by 12 global technology organisations. Drawing on published research and interviews with economists, industry leaders and policymakers across the region, the paper sets out an agenda for governments, employers and technology providers.

At its centre is what ATA calls the Fluency-Transformation Framework, built around two shifts: from AI literacy to AI fluency, and from AI adoption to organisational transformation. Fluency, in the paper’s definition, goes beyond knowing how to operate a tool. It means understanding where AI adds value, where it falls short, and how work should be redesigned around the complementary strengths of people and machines.

That distinction has measurable consequences. A Harvard Business School field study cited in the paper found that knowledge employees using AI on tasks where it performed reliably completed 12.2% more tasks and worked 25.1% faster. Those who applied it to tasks it was less suited to were 19% less likely to produce correct solutions than peers working without AI at all. Value, on the paper’s reading, depends on three things happening together: employees building fluency through practical application, organisations redesigning jobs, workflows and operating models, and governments supporting workforce transformation alongside adoption.

“Realising AI’s potential will require organisations to reimagine how work gets done, and support employees to apply AI confidently and effectively,” said Goh Lih Shiun, Managing Director of the ATA. “SMEs, in particular, are a segment that deserves attention as they play a significant role in Asia-Pacific economies.”

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Those smaller employers hold much of the balance. Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises account for roughly 97% of all enterprises across ASEAN, employ around 85% of the labour force and contribute about 45% of regional GDP, according to United Nations Development Programme figures. Yet many face three interconnected barriers: limited knowledge of how AI applies to their business, constrained capability to experiment and redesign work, and insufficient organisational readiness to scale the use cases that do work.

Against each, the paper proposes a remedy. On knowledge, it recommends piloting AI Transformation Compacts, a regional platform to share implementation lessons. And APAC-specific case studies. On capability, it calls for tiered workforce development, more accessible AI maturity assessments for smaller firms, and governance toolkits geared towards workflow redesign rather than compliance alone. On readiness, it points to shared regional funding mechanisms and better longitudinal evidence on how adoption changes work, capability and business performance. ATA said it will use the paper to support engagement with governments, industry, academia and civil society.