Empowering ASEAN via generative AI

Jeff Johnson, managing director of AWS ASEAN

How have countries such as Vietnam been benefiting from Amazon’s investment, and how are they shaping the future of digital capabilities across ASEAN?

ASEAN is one of the most vibrant, fast-growing digital markets in the world, and the opportunity is extraordinary. We’re looking at a region with 61 per cent of its population that’s 383 million people under the age of 35.

Add to this the fact that ASEAN is the world’s fastest-growing internet market, with 125,000 new users coming online every single day. The digital economy here is projected to add an estimated $1 trillion to regional GDP over the next decade.

That young, tech-savvy population and booming digital economy translates into huge demand for cloud services. We’ve seen governments and businesses alike embracing a cloud-first mindset, from Singapore’s Smart Nation initiatives to Thailand’s ambitious digital transformation plans.

For AWS, it’s strategic not just in terms of market opportunity but also innovation, with some of the coolest new digital services and startups coming out of ASEAN. We want to empower all of that. That’s why you see us putting infrastructure in place, training more than 1.8 million people across ASEAN in cloud skills since 2017, highlighting local customer successes, and working hand-in-hand with regulators.

On our infrastructure investment, we now have four regions in Southeast Asia: Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. Each represents a significant investment: S$12 billion ($9.34 billion) additional investment in Singapore by 2028, over $6 billion in Malaysia by 2038, and more than $5 billion each in Thailand and Indonesia.

This infrastructure is crucial because it brings AI capabilities closer to our customers, reducing latency and enabling local data residency. Our investments are also creating jobs and contributing to the countries’ gross domestic products.

But what’s most exciting is how organisations are already leveraging this foundation to transform their businesses. Vietnam International Bank (VIB) is one such organisation, leveraging AWS to power its generative AI assistant, ViePro, built on Amazon Bedrock for their customer engagement platform. VIB further enhanced transparency and monitoring by using Amazon SageMaker for continuous model tuning to ensure that outputs adhere to compliance and ethical standards.

How does the company ensure that AI development in the region aligns with global best practices for responsible AI, which could include data privacy, ethics, and governance?

As AI adoption accelerates throughout ASEAN, responsible development has become paramount. AWS’s approach combines a robust technical framework with ethical governance, ensuring organisations can innovate confidently while maintaining the highest standards of responsibility and trust.

Our vision for responsible AI is brought to life through real customer transformations. Take Ascend Money, a leader in financial inclusion across Southeast Asia. By leveraging AWS’s GenAI capabilities, they’ve revolutionised nano-loan approvals from days to seconds, while maintaining strict security standards. Their success demonstrates how responsible AI can democratise financial services while protecting customer interests.

Local innovators like Arcanic AI exemplify how culturally aware AI solutions can be developed responsibly. Their use of Amazon SageMaker demonstrates that ethical AI development and cultural sensitivity can go hand in hand, creating solutions that truly resonate with local markets while adhering to global best practices.

These success stories are underpinned by AWS’s comprehensive security framework and specialised tools like Amazon Bedrock Guardrails and Amazon SageMaker Clarify, which address critical concerns around bias, transparency, and data protection. This enables organisations to push the boundaries of innovation while maintaining the highest standards of responsible AI development.

Can you highlight some successful AI-powered solutions or projects in Southeast Asia that have been built on AWS?

Across ASEAN, we are enabling transformative AI innovation across diverse sectors. From agile startups to established banks and tech companies, organisations are leveraging our platforms to accelerate growth, experiment with new technologies, and revolutionise their customer experiences.

Take Grab as an example. If you live in Southeast Asia, you have probably used Grab for rides, food delivery, or payments. What’s impressive is how they’ve scaled to serve more than 30 million monthly users across multiple countries and even launched new digital banks in just over a year. AWS is the platform behind the scenes making sure it all runs smoothly every single day. Their GenAI solutions run on Amazon Bedrock and help power critical production services while ensuring guardrails are in place.

Businesses in Vietnam are also increasingly adopting AWS’s cutting-edge GenAI capabilities, joining the wave of technological advancement sweeping across Southeast Asia. In the digital international banking space for example, TymeX uses Amazon Q Developer, our GenAI coding assistant, to boost their developers’ coding efficiency by over 40 per cent for, improve testing workflows by a staggering 90 per cent, and reducing testing time from five hours to just 30 minutes.

AI Hay stands out as another innovative example. Its community-driven search platform has captured widespread adoption with 15 million downloads, handling over 100 million monthly queries. Powered by AWS’s specialised AI chips and services, AI Hay delivers remarkable results: 80 per cent user satisfaction for Vietnamese language queries and 85 per cent interest match rates.

This demonstrates how AWS’s AI solutions can effectively serve millions of Vietnamese users while maintaining high performance and cost efficiency.

What industries in Vietnam do you see as early adopters or high-impact beneficiaries of your AI services?

In Vietnam, industry reports show rapid growth of Vietnam’s digital banking sector. Revenue from digital financial services is expected to reach nearly $3.8 billion by the end of 2025, with mobile transactions projected to grow by as much as 400 per cent in the same period.

The wider Vietnamese financial services industry is at the forefront of adopting AI services on AWS, leveraging GenAI and machine learning to drive efficiency, enhance customer engagement, and innovate faster.

Techcombank is another great example of digital banking transformation powered by AWS. Its journey showcases the perfect blend of technological innovation and human capital development. They saw great success utilising Amazon Q Developer to generate over 135,000 lines of secure, high-quality code, and went from a pilot of 50 developers to deploying it across their workforce of over 600 developers.

Using GenAI has allowed it to make resource provisioning 90 per cent faster, reduced monthly application costs by 30 per cent, and better serve its 15.4 million customers with enhanced digital banking services.

AWS has demonstrated how AI solutions can effectively serve millions of Vietnamese people

How is AWS helping the region build a skilled AI workforce, and how does it approach inclusivity and accessibility in AI education across rural and urban areas?

AWS stands ready as a strategic enabler of Vietnam’s digital transformation through three key pillars. Firstly, we ensure Vietnamese organisations have reliable access to cloud services through local infrastructure, including AWS OutPosts, Edge locations, and a planned Local Zone, to ensure high-performance cloud services nationwide.

Secondly, we’re democratising access to transformative technologies. Since our inception, AWS has reduced prices over 150 times while expanding our portfolio to include cutting-edge GenAI solutions. By offering access to premier large language models like Anthropic Claude, Meta’s Llama, and Amazon Nova, we’re ensuring Vietnamese organisations can compete on the global stage regardless of their size.

Thirdly, AWS is committed to building ASEAN’s digital future by developing its most crucial asset – its people. Our track record speaks volumes: since 2017, we’ve equipped over 1.8 million individuals across the region with vital cloud skills. We also exceeded our ambitious global of providing free AI skills training to two million people globally by the end of 2025 a year early.

Through educational initiatives like AWS Skills Builder, AWS Educate, and AWS Skills Guild, as well as local community schemes such as our AWS Vietnam Study Group and First Cloud Journey programme, we’re nurturing the next generation of tech talent. This skills transformation is essential for sustaining Vietnam’s digital momentum.