Fostering growth in Indonesia's AI industry

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been predicted to become one of the major pillars of business development. AI has the potential to make brands more efficient, and even create new job opportunities.

For industries in Indonesia, however, experts say that the full adoption of AI technology may still take a long time.

Compared to other neighboring countries, Indonesia remains in the initial stages of adopting AI technology across various industries.

Herman Widjaja, the vice president of Engineering Tokopedia, sees Indonesia as one of the countries with huge potential to successfully implement AI. He believes that industry players in the country need a few more years to adopt AI properly and perfectly.

"Tokopedia just celebrated its ninth anniversary and is headed for the 10th year. The amount of data that we have for our customers, understanding who they are, is really big.To the point where basic technology cannot absorb and adapt anymore with AI, the concept is different, it is toward learning. How do we continue learning the amount ofdata that we have and continue using it to give better recommendation, better personalization, solving a lot of hard problems," said Herman.

AI technologies are all about learning and collecting data. In Indonesia, new industry players have only begun to use AI as a chatbot feature and have not fully reached the predictive stage of machine learning. There's also an issue with regulatory problems in Indonesia related to this technology. The government would need to lay out rules and laws for companies to abide by when adopting AI.

Ache Harahap is the man behind chatbots Bang Joni and balesin.id, both simplifying daily activities of the consumers. Bang Joni can book flights, reserve hotels and quickly retrieve information from the web.

"The backbone of the Indonesian economy is SMEs and the millennial tend to have their own businesses because of the major e-commerce and chat messengers like LINE and Whatsapp. We believe we want to help them to make automation throughout Indonesia with the language that they are used to, once it is very common for them. We want to make AI a very simple process," said Ache.

Both business leaders and employees in Indonesia say AI can increase employment, and not reduce or replace work previously done by humans. As high as 53 percent of the employees surveyed claimed that AI helped with their work. Many companies are also aware of the importance of training their employees to face the changing landscape of businesses. Most companies allocate their investments in AI systems and employee skills for the future of their brands.

(CGTN)