Asia-Pacific businesses are frantically trying to explore how to best use AI to improve productivity, according to new survey data from Microsoft, which the company’s new Asia president credits to the region’s rapid climb up the value chain.
“We’ve been through an inflection point where the two decades of ‘made in’—‘made in China’ and ‘made in Vietnam’—is shifting to the decade of ‘created in,’” Microsoft Asia president Rodrigo Kede Lima told Fortune.
Asian firms are doing more design and technological work, which is creating a foundation for AI adoption. Asia files 70% of all patents, is home to two-thirds of developers worldwide, and consumes more GPUs than anywhere else, Lima said.
“We are consuming more AI than the rest of the world,” he noted. “The region is ahead on AI.”
Lima took over the role in September after leading Microsoft’s enterprise business in the Americas. Before that, he served as the company’s president for Latin America, which he believes prepared him for work in a “multicountry, multicultural, multilingual” region. “Asia is Latin America on steroids,” he said.
Yet Asia’s AI narrative has already flipped at least once in Lima’s short time in the role—thanks to Hangzhou-based startup DeepSeek.
Before the Chinese startup shook up markets, U.S. Big Tech companies, as the only entities with enough capital to invest in the expensive computing power to train and run models, appeared set to dominate the new technology. Yet DeepSeek’s models require far less computing power, potentially allowing more companies to get involved in AI.
Shares in the Magnificent Seven are down about 16% on average for the year. Yet Microsoft has performed better than its Big Tech peers amid tariff uncertainty, only down by 6% for the year thus far, not much worse than the S&P 500.
For Lima, DeepSeek “proves the point that AI is really happening, and that it’s going to get cheaper and more pervasive everywhere.” More broadly, he thinks we’re going to start seeing more “small language models,” or AI tailored to specific domains, like medicine.
And customers will embrace the choice offered by a more competitive AI market. “One model might be a little worse [compared with others], but it’ll be good enough and much cheaper for certain tasks,” he said.
What do Asian businesses want to use AI for?
On Friday, Microsoft released its annual Work Trend Index, which uses both survey responses and data collected from its office software products to examine workplace trends and behavior.
According to Microsoft data, just over 60% of leaders in the Asia-Pacific region want to increase productivity. Yet almost 85% of both Asia-based business leaders and employees complain they don’t have any more time or energy to give. (Both of these figures are slightly higher than the global average).
Microsoft’s report blames near-constant interruption at work for this gap in productivity. Data gathered from the company’s products suggest notifications—meetings, emails, or even just a ping—interrupt workers every two minutes on average.
The U.S. tech company suggests that “AI agents”—programs that use AI to solve user-defined tasks—can help cover that gap between business demands and resource constraints. Lima suggested one example: An AI tool might be able to attend a meeting in your stead, and report back if your name is mentioned.
Still, the rise of AI agents could put even more white-collar, knowledge-based work at risk of automation.
Fortunately, Microsoft data suggests Asia-Pacific leaders want to use AI to do things that humans can’t do, such as being available 24/7 or providing “unlimited ideas on demand.”
Lima is optimistic AI will create new jobs by increasing economic productivity so that, on balance, employment increases. “I don’t believe in job elimination, I believe in job shifts,” he said.
Still, he believes understanding how AI works will be key to the future workforce. “AI is the new math,” he said. “You’re going to create agents the same way you create a spreadsheet. And if you don’t do that, you’re not going to be as productive as the person sitting next to you.”
