Adobe has released its 2025 AI and Digital Trends Asia snapshot, highlighting strong momentum in generative AI adoption across businesses in Asia. The findings, based on a survey of 508 senior executives from Hong Kong, South Korea and Southeast Asia, suggest that AI is becoming a key driver of growth and innovation. However, challenges around data management and integration continue to hold back the full potential of AI technologies in the region.
Generative AI delivers business value across Asia
The study found that more than half of the surveyed executives have already seen tangible business benefits from adopting generative AI. These include freeing up resources for strategic tasks (55%) and enabling more effective marketing efforts that lead to revenue growth (53%).
“Businesses across Asia are embracing generative AI at an unprecedented pace, and the impact is already tangible,” said Shashank Sharma, Senior Director, Digital Experience, Southeast Asia and Korea at Adobe. “From accelerating innovation to unlocking new revenue streams, GenAI is not just a tool—it’s a growth engine for businesses world over. With companies in Asia now integrating GenAI into core their business functions and customer experience strategies, we expect even stronger adoption and market impact in the months ahead.”
AI technologies, particularly generative and predictive AI, are now considered top contributors to business growth in 2025. Improving customer retention and loyalty is a key motivation for many companies across the region.
Expanding use cases point to regional innovation
Executives in Asia appear to be moving beyond the standard AI applications seen elsewhere. While customer support remains a popular use case, businesses in Asia are also applying generative AI in areas such as journey orchestration (16%) and creative content generation, including photoshoots (14%).
“In Asia, organisations must cater for a diverse, digitally savvy, and mobile-first audience. We’re seeing a wide range of use cases on generative AI emerge in the market,” said Sharma.
This broader range of applications suggests that businesses in Asia are exploring AI’s capabilities more aggressively than their counterparts in other parts of the Asia Pacific and Japan region.
Data remains a critical challenge
Despite the positive outlook, data fragmentation remains a key issue for businesses aiming to scale AI effectively. Only 9% of practitioners rated their organisation’s digital customer experience as exceptional. The main barrier is the inability to unify and access customer data across systems in real time.
A large majority (88%) of practitioners said that fragmented data impacts their ability to deliver personalised customer experiences, either sometimes or critically. In addition, 43% of senior executives and practitioners identified privacy and security concerns as the top challenge in linking customer data across departments.
To address this, many executives are planning to invest in data integration capabilities and real-time analytics (61%) over the next 12 to 24 months. Advances in AI and machine learning are also influencing investment priorities for 57% of leaders surveyed.
Balancing opportunity with pressure
The report also highlights the operational pressure that comes with adopting new AI tools. While 87% of executives expect generative AI to significantly increase the speed and volume of content creation in 2025, 69% of practitioners report being overwhelmed by the pace of change. This figure is the highest across the Japan and Asia Pacific region.
“Today, more than ever before, businesses are seeing mounting pressure to use generative AI to elevate their customer experiences. Agentic AI can help ease this burden. By integrating into assistants and copilots, it can provide businesses more adaptive and autonomous support, managing time-consuming tasks like database management and content delivery,” said Sharma.
By combining generative AI with agentic AI, companies can scale personalisation while keeping operational costs down, particularly in areas like customer service where traditional channels such as call centres are often more resource-intensive.
