Asia is hungry for AI with governments taking the lead in several countries. In an exclusive interview with Entelechy Asia at Adobe Summit in Vegas, Adobe’s Senior Director of Digital Experience for Southeast Asia and Korea Shashank Sharma explains why Asia is proving more willing to test AI, what makes the region’s customer experience market unique and why change management remains the biggest hurdle.
According to Sharma, Asia is moving faster than many Western markets in adopting AI for customer experience, but success depends on more than just deploying new tools.
He said Asian enterprises are often more willing to experiment with AI than their Western counterparts. He credited this to digital-native consumers, a strong appetite for testing and iteration, and more progressive AI frameworks in places such as Singapore, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and South Korea. At the same time, cost sensitivity and intense competition in the region mean vendors must stay highly competitive.
Strong growth patterns
Adobe sees two strong growth patterns across Asia — fast-growing emerging markets such as Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, and more mature markets such as Singapore and Malaysia. In the emerging markets, many companies are leapfrogging legacy systems and moving directly to full-stack customer experience platforms. In the more mature markets, businesses are increasingly trying to connect fragmented systems and remove data silos to support more integrated experiences.
“Asia stands out because of its scale, mobile-first behaviour and digitally native consumers, said Sharma.
He pointed to Indonesia as an example of a huge, mobile-only market where lessons from the US do not always transfer cleanly.
He also noted that India’s massive customer bases create operating conditions that are very different from North America or Europe, making local context essential for any digital transformation strategy.
“Technology is only part of the challenge,” said Sharma. The bigger obstacles are change management, data silos and outdated processes that prevent enterprises from fully using modern tools such as AI.
In his view, enterprises often buy new technology but keep old ways of working, which limits the business impact.
Among the sectors most ready for AI-powered customer experience, Sharma highlighted travel, retail and B2C-focused businesses as quicker movers, while banks, telcos and the public sector tend to proceed more cautiously because of regulation, legacy systems and data constraints.
He cited Standard Chartered as an example of a customer already using Adobe technologies to create content at scale.
Sharing practical lessons
“Adobe’s role is not just to provide software but also to share practical lessons from thousands of customer engagements across industries and geographies,” said Sharma.
The company’s Digital Strategy Group works with customers to define a North Star, map what is possible and guide them through process change as well as technology change. This includes passing on hard-won learnings from projects that succeeded and from those that did not.
Entelechy Asia 