Thailand should develop clear business goals and a method for measuring outcomes that integrates artificial intelligence (AI) into the economy rather than buying AI platform licences and giving them away for free, say economists.
"Organisations should not start their AI journey by blindly buying AI licences for all employees, nor should AI projects be dumped onto the IT department," Piti Tantakasem, chief executive of TMBThanachart Bank, said on Tuesday during a panel discussion at Microsoft's global AI annual exhibition in Thailand.
"When it comes to driving AI adoption, we should start with what not to do before we get into what we should do. First on the 'what not to do' list: do not buy AI licences and hand them out to everyone. This applies to the organisational level and the national level -- please don't do it."
Companies must start with a clear business direction rather than the technology, he said, prioritising use cases that have high business impact and high technology readiness.
The government plans to spend more than 1.6 billion baht to procure professional and premium generative AI models for free use by up to 5 million Thais for one year.
Mr Piti warned against forcing advanced technology into low-impact areas just for the sake of using AI, as this wastes money.
Organisations should train executives to see the potential and frontline staff to use the tools properly, while utilising a mid-level team to filter and accelerate the right projects, he noted.
Without good foundational data, AI will generate errors and cause teams to lose confidence, said Mr Piti.
He also cautioned against poor digital adoption habits, noting Thais often use powerful AI for trivial purposes such as reading horoscopes or picking lucky bank account numbers instead of generating business value.
"Business must define the desired outcome first and then work back to the technology," said Mr Piti.
"To embrace AI, one needs the right balance of vision and velocity, not too fast or too slow, as it must justify the value. Moving with high velocity but the wrong vision leads to massive losses, while having a good vision but moving too slowly results in missed opportunities."
STRATEGIC TOOL
Santitarn Sathirathai, vice-minister for finance, said AI can be a strategic tool to address three major Thai economic challenges: growth, productivity and inequality.
Post-pandemic economic growth has been stagnant, as Thailand lacks an economic engine. AI can serve as a new growth engine, he said.
Furthermore, Thailand's ageing population results in an estimated 1% annual drop in GDP, making AI essential to unlock productivity and replace lost labour, said Mr Santitarn.
AI can also help tackle inequality by empowering small businesses, enabling marketing and finance skills that level the playing field, he noted.
Rather than merely learning about AI software, the country should be amplifying human skills such as critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration, said Mr Santitarn.
Processes need to be redesigned so that human experts can handle the beginning (asking the right questions) and the end (verifying the quality of AI outputs), while AI does the work in the middle, he said.
"The government should not compete with the private sector in innovation," said Mr Santitarn.
"Instead, it should act as an enabler by creating a trusted digital public infrastructure."
He pointed to payment apps such as Paotang as an excellent first step to connect the informal sector to the digital economy.
Michael Chen, chief executive of Buzzebees, said as a business owner, his biggest fear is not large, established competitors, but rather unseen competitors who can leverage AI to build new solutions and disrupt the market faster than his company can catch up.
The most difficult hurdle is employee mindset; 90% of employees don't truly know how to use AI and think it just means chatting with ChatGPT, he said.
