How CIOs in Thailand Can Overcome Agentic AI Challenges While Boosting ROI
By David Mould, Country CTO and Solutions Director, Salesforce Thailand
As Thailand progresses towards its vision of becoming a regional AI hub, we’re at a pivotal moment with a new era of agentic AI — autonomous AI agents that can act, decide, and drive positive outcomes without constant human intervention.
The technology, poised to power a $6 trillion digital labor market, presents a significant opportunity in Thailand against the backdrop of an aging national workforce. However, successfully navigating the complexities of agentic AI y is crucial to realizing its full potential.
As AI startups and solutions flood the market, CIOs need solutions that deliver tangible quality and productivity, moving beyond flashy demonstrations.
Overcoming integration challenges and other complexities is essential for AI to become a true success. To navigate these hurdles and maximize ROI, CIOs should focus on the following strategic pillars.
1. Developing a strategic and integrated approach to agentic AI
Instead of pursuing isolated AI projects, CIOs should adopt a pattern-centric approach, identifying common processes and patterns across the organization to ensure scalable optimization and better ROI.
It’s crucial to treat AI as an integrated layer of intelligence, rather than just a niche tool. This requires cultivating a culture of experimentation from the top down to foster widespread acceptance. Leveraging a deeply unified platform for building and deploying agents can significantly boost operational optimization, reduce security risks, and cut costs.
2. Building a strong data foundation
An AI agent’s effectiveness is directly tied to the data it can access. For Thai organizations embarking on their agentic AI transformation journeys, it’s important to have a system that connects valuable business data and metadata, providing agents with the necessary context.
According to our recent State of IT research, 39% of developers from Thai organizations say their data quality and accuracy isn’t sufficient for the successful development and implementation of agentic AI. This is why solutions like Salesforce’s Data Cloud offer a compelling advantage. By providing unified access to critical company data and metadata, these solutions simplify traditional data management.
Data standardization is also a must. CIOs should lead initiatives to ensure data is clean, consistent, and readily available, breaking down silos and modernizing infrastructure. With robust data governance and integration, this can unlock valuable insights from archived data.
At the start of the Big Data era the phrase “data is the new oil” was common. In the era of agentic AI, data is the oxygen. Without good quality data of sufficient quantity AI and AI agents will suffocate and not thrive.
3. Ensuring responsible and trustworthy AI
In regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and government, CIOs face even more pressure to ensure responsible AI use and meet strict compliance requirements. Building trust in technology is key. According to a Salesforce survey, 52% of CIOs globally cited a lack of trusted data as a top concern when implementing AI.
To build trust, there needs to be a focus on transparency (seeing what the agent did), explainability (understanding why it did it), and control (knowing what to do next).
4. Aligning agentic AI with business goals and showcasing impact
Technical prowess alone is not enough; CIOs must align agentic AI initiatives with overarching business goals. They should clearly articulate how AI drives growth, enhances efficiency, and improves experiences for both customers and employees.
By focusing on tangible outcomes, CIOs can demonstrate that AI is a strategic asset. Transparently communicating the purpose and benefits of digital labor is crucial, highlighting how automation can relieve employees of repetitive tasks and boost their satisfaction.
5. Keeping the human element of AI adoption top of mind
Today, CIOs also need to act as chief education officers, proactively addressing cultural resistance and fostering innovation. Natural concerns about job displacement and workflow disruption should be anticipated and addressed by explaining how AI will augment human capabilities, freeing employees for higher-value, creative, and strategic tasks. Identifying change agents within the organization can further boost adoption from the bottom up.
In addition, championing continuous reskilling and upskilling is essential, integrating this into the workforce strategy to teach employees AI literacy and how to collaborate with agents, alongside crucial ‘human’ skills like adaptability, collaboration, and emotional intelligence. Setting measurable goals for reskilling underscores its importance.
Other vital elements include addressing employee skepticism by sharing the wins and demonstrable value of digital coworkers, such as improved first call resolution. Gamification and incentives can also motivate employees to embrace AI.
Embracing AI-human collaboration
To unlock the full potential and ROI of agentic AI, Thai CIOs must adopt a strategic, holistic, culturally aware and human-centric approach, particularly as Thailand’s digital landscape evolves. By integrating AI with data and automation while considering local market conditions and workforce dynamics, CIOs can navigate complexities, foster innovation, and lead their organizations to unprecedented efficiency, and long-term success.
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Media Contacts
Supisara Nakkaew
TQPR (Thailand) Co., Ltd
+66 2260 5820 ext. 126