Only about 15 in every 100 AI ideas in Southeast Asia make it to production, according to the Southeast Asia findings of the Adobe 2026 State of AI Readiness Report, released on 13 October.
Adobe said the study, conducted by Incisiv, surveyed 5,633 senior executives across 12 industries and 11 markets, including 461 in Southeast Asia. Its conclusion is that the organisation a company builds matters more than the technology it deploys.
Stuck between pilot and scale
About 57 per cent of Southeast Asian organisations are in what the report calls the “Frozen Middle”, piloting or deploying AI without the coordination needed to scale it. For agentic AI, the figure is 40 per cent. Some 79 per cent are at an early stage of AI maturity, the highest share in Asia Pacific and above the global figure of 71 per cent.
Only 6.3 per cent, or 27 organisations, qualify as AI Leaders, which convert pilots to production at nearly four times the rate of others.
Where AI projects get blocked
- Approvals: about 36 per cent of AI proposals stall at IT evaluation, and 18 per cent are rejected at security review. The rejection rate nearly doubles in regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare.
- Ownership: 12 per cent of companies have an AI owner with budget authority, against 89 per cent of Leaders.
- Measurement: 8 per cent measure AI return on investment comprehensively, compared with 11 per cent globally.
- Skills: 81 per cent say their AI skills shortfall stayed the same or worsened over the past year.
Money is not the constraint. About 73 per cent of companies raised AI investment year on year, yet six in 10 need at least six months to move from experimentation to initial deployment.
Jeremy Willmott, Senior Director of Digital Strategy Group Asia Pacific at Adobe, said the gap between experimentation and enterprise-wide value “is becoming harder to ignore”. He said clear ownership, shared measures of success and closer business and IT collaboration will matter most.
