{"id":56327,"date":"2026-09-14T15:05:05","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T14:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/?p=56327"},"modified":"2026-09-14T15:05:06","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T14:05:06","slug":"apac-teams-now-require-ai-fluency-according-to-cio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/2026\/09\/14\/apac-teams-now-require-ai-fluency-according-to-cio\/","title":{"rendered":"APAC teams now require AI fluency, according to CIO"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Manu Narayan, Chief Information Officer, GitLab, argues that the APAC region has already won the AI adoption race and that the differentiator now is not the scale of spend but the operating model beneath it. He makes the case for a hub-and-spoke approach that embeds AI engineers inside business departments, on the basis that access is table stakes and fluency is what actually drives results.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody in Asia Pacific needs convincing to adopt AI. KPMG’s Global AI Pulse found that firms in the region expect to invest an average of US$245 million in AI over the next 12 months, well above the global average of US$186 million and ahead of every other market. IDC projects Asia Pacific\u2019s AI spending will reach US$370 billion by 2029, with enterprises shifting hard from pilots to production. On paper, they have won the adoption race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet inside many organisations, adoption is unfolding unevenly. Some parts of the business are seeing measurable gains in speed, capability and productivity each month. AI is helping them shorten delivery cycles, uncover insights and automate work that once required significant time and effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For other functions, progress has stalled. They are still waiting on a governance sign-off, a formal rollout, or simply someone to tell them where to begin. That gap between the AI haves and have-nots compounds weekly. Closing it takes more than budget; it takes a new operating model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your teams need more than access<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When leaders notice the uneven distribution of capability across their business, the instinct is to treat it as a tooling problem. They push to get everyone access to the same platforms, provide general-use training and hire some specialists to slot into IT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But access is table stakes. It’s a good start, but it won’t get you to strong organisational adoption.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harvard Business School reported that workers using these tools completed tasks 25% faster and produced results rated more than 40% higher in quality. But the same study also found that performance declined when people used the tools without understanding where they applied and where they didn’t. Fluency, not just access, drives results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Departmental leaders need guidance around how they should be applying capabilities in the context of their day-to-day work. Without that knowledge, they can\u2019t ask the right questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Teams playing catch-up tend to focus on how to inject new tools into existing workflows, when they should be thinking about re-engineering processes entirely. They\u2019re focused on evolution in a world undergoing revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reimagining a process also requires stepping back from it, which is easier said than done. Here’s how it plays out in practice:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An SDR team comes to IT with a specific, bounded ask: \u2018improve our sales lead routing\u2019. Completely reasonable. But only when someone from IT, with visibility across the broader system, dives into the problem does the real opportunity surface. The data pipeline supporting lead routing is unnecessarily complex. With the right support, the conversation shifts to overhauling the entire pipeline and opens the door to fully agentic lead follow-ups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Departmental leaders don’t lack ambition but throwing a software license and Slack channel at them won\u2019t build the right kind of adoption. Technical support and strategic guidance are required to reimagine work from first principles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Make fluency structural, not optional<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The typical pattern puts a centralised team in charge of taking requirements, interpreting them in isolation and delivering capabilities to departments months later. This model can\u2019t keep pace when AI capabilities launch weekly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A more effective approach pairs a central \u2018hub\u2019 that owns platform strategy, governance and reusable patterns with AI engineers embedded directly inside business departments. AI engineers serve as \u2018spokes\u2019 inside departments, helping them identify vertical use cases day-to-day and delivering the cross-functional visibility needed to make a real impact. The AI engineer who solved a problem for finance can share the pattern with someone facing the same challenge in operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a department just getting started, the embedded AI engineer is the primary technical capability: scouting, prototyping, building. In a more mature department, they shift towards enablement, feeding patterns back to the \u2018hub\u2019 and helping teams navigate AI without getting buried in the process. Over time, departments will transform into AI-fluent practitioners organically as they learn from the engineers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fluency is the region’s next advantage<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The right operating model changes how a function actually works. Fluency hardens processes and compounds institutional knowledge, so outcomes improve with every cycle. Each problem a team solves on its own raises the ceiling on what it can tackle next. McKinsey’s research is blunt on this point: workflow redesign is the single biggest factor in whether an enterprise sees meaningful bottom-line impact from AI. And knowing what to redesign depends entirely on how well your teams understand and work with the technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everyone is adopting AI capabilities and Asia Pacific has already demonstrated that it can adopt more quickly and invest more aggressively than any other region. But the differentiator won’t be the scale of spend, it will be the operating model that equips their people to identify the highest-value applications for the capabilities they’ve already secured. If yours doesn’t, that\u2019s the gap to close first, before a competitor in the region closes it for you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Manu Narayan, Chief Information Officer, GitLab, argues that the APAC region has already won the AI adoption race and that the differentiator now is not the scale of spend but the operating model beneath it. He makes the case for a hub-and-spoke approach that embeds AI engineers inside business departments, on the basis that access […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":56328,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11969,1463,7975,20,1576,40,43,44],"tags":[1108,12121,280,7973,538,12120,91,1204],"class_list":["post-56327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","category-apac","category-expert-opinion","category-features","category-analysis-insights","category-software","category-thought-leadership","category-top-stories","tag-ai","tag-ai-fluency","tag-cio","tag-expert-opinion","tag-gitlab","tag-manu-narayan","tag-software","tag-thought-leadership"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56327"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56329,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56327\/revisions\/56329"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}