To attract foreign investment, the Thai government has recently launched and implemented a series of new policies targeting technology-driven industrial development. The policies include the Thailand 4.0 strategy and the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) plan, aiming to support rapid advancement in and distribution of new technologies and to move beyond labour-intensive manufacturing.
During this period of transformation, few top-ranking Thai management believed their firms were highly competitive in terms of digital customer interactions, operations, skills and development of workforce, data infrastructure, development of digital products, and managing data risk.
These results aligned with the results across APEC; only 21% of executives in Thailand and 29% of executives in APEC said that the digital customer interactions of their firms were highly competitive.
Half of CEOs both in Thailand and across APEC said that their adoption of digital technology was in line with their competitors. In terms of skills and development of workforce, 19% of Thai CEOs and 33% of APEC CEOs said that their firms had a competitive advantage, while over half (56% in Thailand and 52% across APEC) said that they were in line with their competitors.
In terms of managing data risks, 23% of Thai and 30% of APEC executives believed they were highly competitive, while more than half (Thai: 58%, APEC: 56%) said that they were on par with their competitors.
When asked about building artificial intelligence (AI) into products over the last two years, about a third of Thai and APEC executives responded that their firms were not yet making use of AI technologies. However, it’s interesting to note that 25% of Thai CEOs believed that their companies were highly competitive in implementing AI into products and services, compared to only 15% of their APEC counterparts.
Q16: How would you assess your organisation’s performance over the last 2 years in building artificial intelligence (AI)
into products?
Source: PwC’s APEC CEO Survey 2018
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