NEWS | A top Google executive says artificial intelligence became widespread across Asia in about two years, compared to the more than ten years it took cloud computing to reach the same level of adoption. Harsha Konduri, managing director for Google AI across Asia Pacific and Japan, made the comparison in a recent interview, framing the pace of change as historically unusual for the region.
Google is responding by shifting what it builds for businesses in the region, focusing on three things companies keep asking for, data security, governance controls, and real time cost management. Many Asian companies operate across different countries with different privacy laws, so they want guarantees that their sensitive data stays where it is supposed to before connecting it to AI systems at all. Corporate spending has also shifted, businesses have moved past just testing AI models and are now focused on running them efficiently day to day.
BMN sees a real shift in what businesses actually need from AI providers right now. Early AI adoption was about proving the technology worked at all. This stage is about proving it can run safely and affordably inside a real company, which is a very different, and much harder, problem to solve.
That harder problem is also where the real competition sits. Microsoft and Amazon are pushing just as hard across the same region, all racing to offer built in compliance tools so companies do not have to build their own security systems from scratch, and the winner of that race could end up locking businesses into their platform for years.
If AI adoption in Asia moved five times faster than cloud computing did, how much time do companies actually have to get the security and governance side right before problems start showing up at scale?
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