The increasing growth of artificial intelligence (AI) usage around the globe, as well as its vast potential in transforming businesses and opening the doors to a new era of productivity and growth, is well documented, with AI stocks in emerging markets outside the USA growing by US$1.9 trillion this year.
With the immense buzz around AI and its potential around the world, how do Malaysian businesses view AI and to what extent are they making use of its transformative potential to drive organisational growth? We took a closer look at the business perspective of AI in Malaysia as we dove into the statistics surrounding AI usage in Malaysia in recent years.
Looking at the awareness of AI among Malaysians, we see that it has generally been on the rise ever since 3Q’23, kicking off 2024 at an 84% rate of awareness among our respondents, which is in line with the growing usage and investment in AI globally.
The high awareness rate among Malaysians in the past year can also be seen translating into a moderately high usage rate, with 79% of all respondents stating that they had used AI before, and 62% stating that they had used AI in the past 6 months.
Looking at the profile of AI users, we found that the age group with the highest proportion of AI users was 25-39 years old, with the average age of all AI users coming to around 35 years old.
For the working status of AI users, PMEBs were by far the biggest segment out of all those who had used AI before, whether it was in the past 6 months or otherwise. Meanwhile, most AI users were also seen to be under the RM4,501-RM7,000 MHI group.
As a segment, AI users in Malaysia are seen to skew towards 25-39 years old PMEBs from Penang.
We then look closer at how AI has been used in the past 6 months. Our survey found that the majority of AI usage was exclusively for personal purposes; with only 12% of AI users utilizing it for work/business or for the combined purposes of personal and work usage.
This is a good indicator of the increasing scope of AI usage beyond usage in the workplace, as there are many prevalent AI applications such as AI text-to-speech programs, AI designers, and AI video/art programs which are easily accessible and can be used for both leisure and personal projects, such as creating videos with voiceovers for social media or creating graphics for personal use.
When it comes to AI users in a business context over the past 6 months, most of the AI users came from small or medium-sized companies. This is a sign of the potential for organisational growth that AI holds for businesses, as it seems that small and medium-sized companies have been very willing to adopt the technology due to the benefits that it brings in helping these smaller companies scale up their daily operations and achieve much more effective and efficient workflows.
In terms of the sectors that AI is used in, we found that AI is most popular in the manufacturing sector, followed by the service, transportation, and insurance sectors, evenly.
The manufacturing sector is the most popular as this sector comes with various industries that need AI to help boost their productivity, accuracy, and quality-related costs. Therefore this brings the results of enhanced customer experience and reduced operation costs.
Looking closer at the reasons and applications for AI usage, we found that the usage of AI among employees is generally driven by company initiatives, where these companies tend to leverage the automation function of AI predominantly to reduce manual tasks (70%), automate repetitive tasks (67%), and speed up processes (66%), freeing up time for employees to work more efficiently and facilitate organisational growth.
The 2nd most common reason for using AI was to improve decision-making at 68%. In this usage case, AI has the ability to consolidate and synthesize vast amounts of information and data entries that would normally take hundreds of employee hours to be gone over manually, allowing business leaders to make informed, vital decisions for organisational growth with the essential information at their fingertips.
When it comes to the most commonly used AI applications, navigation systems, and biometric identifications have a considerable lead in usage, which is unsurprising given their utility.
Those aside, visual (e.g., Canva) and chatbot (e.g., ChatGPT) applications are most popular in the business context, which has a wide array of usage in providing simple solutions for day-to-day tasks in many business settings.
Finally, when it comes to how Malaysians view the impact and outlook of AI going into the future: it appears that AI is likely to gain an increasing foothold amongst businesses in Malaysia as 93% of the AI users in the past 6 months either agreed or strongly agreed that AI applications have had a positive impact on their business operations.
Accordingly, Malaysians’ outlook for AI in the business environment is optimistic, as 78% of respondents agreed that AI is either likely or highly likely to have a significant and enduring positive impact in the future.
If you are keen to explore more about the AI landscape in Malaysia, contact us at theteam@oppotus.com now!
