Malaysia in the process of maturing towards Artificial Intelligence - Steve Bennett
03 Aug 2022 02:47pm
Director of the Global Government and Financial Services Practice at SAS, Steve Bennett - BERNAMA Photo
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He said this could be achieved by starting small with AI projects showing value and success and gradually developing the technology from there.
"Many governments including Malaysia are not ready to implement enterprise-wide AI across large agencies across the government, but we see them succeeding in well-defined projects like immigration projects, biometric information or image analysis.
"What we see is that those initiatives are a great starting point for a broader scale of AI,” Bennett who is Director of Global Government and Financial Services Practice at SAS, recognised leader in analytics, based in United States told Bernama in an exclusive interview at SAS Institute Office here, recently.
While AI poses all kinds of challenges and pitfalls along the way, success can be achieved by starting a well-defined project that can show value and build confidence among citizens and subsequently develop into enterprise-wide AI compared with rolling out AI capabilities across the entire government agency.
The Global Government Practice lead who has led numerous efforts to provide analytic decision support to senior officials in the White House and across the US government over the course of his career, said in government AI is a pretty big deal and the adoption among government entities appears to be uneven and generally lags behind the private sector.
"AI provides the opportunity to unleash a lot of the power of the data the government already has. Much of the data the government tend to have like written record or video images, a lot of the data isn’t well suited to be analysed using traditional methods.
"So, AI presents an opportunity to do things with government data that traditional analysis method wont allows,” he added.
Prior to SAS, Bennett held a number of leadership positions during his 12 years in the US Department of Homeland Security.
Asked on the current maturity level of AI adoption in the government sector in Asia Pacific, Bennett said it is a maturing process where governments tackle well-defined projects and subsequently work towards broader maturity and adoption of AI.
Research from the International Data Corp (IDC) shows that Asia Pacific companies are expected to increase their spending on AI systems from US$17.6 billion in 2022 to US$32 billion in 2025, at a compound annual growth rate of 25.2 per cent. This would represent a significant increase in AI adoption in the region. - BERNAMA
