If you run a department in this region and have not started with AI yet, you have probably been told that everybody else has.
A survey of 3,630 people across six ASEAN markets says otherwise, and it says so with a number.
Operational efficiency is the top business priority for 35 to 43 per cent of respondents, depending on the market. AI and technology is named a top priority by 24 to 33 per cent. Efficiency outranks AI in every one of the six countries, and AI is a minority priority in all of them.
What was actually measured
The study is The Great Restructuring: ASEAN Consumer and Business Pulse Survey 2026, run by Reeracoen Group with panel supplied by Rakuten Insight. It covers Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, and was fielded in June 2026.
Stated sample, six named markets, a named fieldwork month. That combination is rarer than it should be, and it is the reason this is worth reading rather than the size of the numbers.
On hiring, the same survey found 32 to 47 per cent of businesses reporting selective hiring, and only 7 to 16 per cent actively expanding headcount.
Where the interest in AI actually sits
Read the two priority figures together and something more useful appears than either on its own.
The question was not whether AI matters. It was what is at the top of the list. Efficiency won everywhere, and AI came second or lower for two thirds to three quarters of respondents.
That is not a region rejecting the technology. It is a region where AI has to compete for attention against margin pressure, hiring decisions and the ordinary work of running something, and where mostly it is not winning that competition yet.
Which is a far more accurate picture of your competitors than the one you get from a conference stage or a supplier’s deck.
The anxiety this ought to settle
The feeling that you have missed something is the most expensive emotion in this subject.
It produces two bad decisions and they look opposite. The first is buying quickly to catch up, usually the thing that was demonstrated most recently, without a problem attached. The second is avoiding the subject entirely because the gap feels too large to close, which compounds quietly for a year.
Both come from the same wrong belief: that everyone else is further ahead.
Between a half and two thirds of businesses in these six markets are not expanding headcount. Three quarters to two thirds do not have AI at the top of their list. The people you are comparing yourself against are, mostly, also working it out.
That should not read as permission to do nothing. It should read as permission to do it properly, because the window for a considered decision is wider than the noise suggests.
Vietnam is the exception, and it is the sharpest number here
One figure runs against the pattern and it is the one I would sit with.
Thirty-nine per cent of Vietnamese workers considering a career change named AI and automation as a primary motivator. Vietnam was the only market in the study where technology ranked ahead of income growth and work-life balance as the leading reason to move.
Read that from the employer’s side. In one of these six markets, the technology is already a bigger driver of people leaving than money is.
Not because they are being replaced. Because of what it means for what their job becomes, whether their skills still count, and whether anyone has told them what the plan is.
If your team is in Vietnam, that is a retention issue with a number attached and it is live now. If your team is elsewhere in the region, it is the shape of a conversation worth having before it becomes one.
Who ran this and what they sell
Reeracoen is a recruitment company. The finding is about hiring.
That is a real interest and it belongs on the table whenever these numbers are quoted. A recruitment firm publishing research that concludes companies are hiring selectively and thinking hard about talent is a firm publishing research adjacent to its own business.
What keeps it usable is that the instrument is stated. The sample size is given, the six markets are named, the fieldwork month is disclosed, and an independent panel provider supplied the respondents. You can weigh it. Compare that with the more common alternative, which is a vendor asserting a trend with no sample, no method and no date, and the difference is the whole reason one of them appears here and the other does not.
What to do with it
One exercise, and it takes fifteen minutes.
Write down the top three priorities for your department this quarter, in the order they actually sit, not the order they would sit in a presentation.
Then find where AI is on that list. It may be first. More likely it is fourth, behind something about cost, something about people and something about a customer.
If it is fourth, the useful question is not how to move it up. It is whether AI could help with the three above it. That is a different question and it produces better answers, because it starts from a problem your team already has rather than from a capability somebody demonstrated.
Efficiency is the top priority across this entire region. AI is quite good at some kinds of efficiency. Those two facts sit closer together than the framing usually allows, and the survey has just told you which one your colleagues actually care about.