PHILIPPINE COMPANIES should use generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) for tasks where its benefits could be measured, justifying it costs, according to industry experts.
Many businesses are still in the experimentation stage for GenAI, Gian Paulo Dela Rama, chief product officer at Sprout Solutions, told the BusinessWorld Forecast 2025 economic forum.
Common use cases include using the platform to answer questions, similar to what ChatGPT does. However, this alone would not convince business leaders to shift to AI, he said.
“What would get your CEO excited is if you can have one employee do the work of 10 people,” Mr. Dela Rama said.
He added that companies are shifting to AI agents, or applications “that do not only speak and chat… but also transact.”
Mr. Dela Rama noted that Sprout Solutions could process the payroll of 15 companies in 30 minutes using an AI agent.
Only 10% of companies have scaled their AI use, according to Boston Consulting Group.
To identify what AI strategy to use, companies should modernize their technology and unify their data, Peter Manquera, president and chief executive officer (CEO) at Microsoft Philippines.
“At least on the enterprise side, that’s proven to be a challenge because the organization has to be quite mature to be able to think about it in a transformational context,” he told the forum.
About 55% of Filipino leaders worry that their organization lacks a plan to implement AI, lower than the 60% regional average, according to a study by Microsoft and LinkedIn.
Pia H. Azarcon, a managing partner at IBM Philippines, said companies could measure AI outcomes by using it for testing, as well as in code and application programming interface development. — Beatriz Marie D. Cruz
