Adobe, the global technology leader that unleashes creativity, productivity and customer experiences through innovative tools and platforms, today released the Southeast Asia findings from the Adobe 2026 State of AI Readiness Report. The study of 461 senior executives across Southeast Asia examines what separates organizations that scale AI from those that stall.
According to the findings, approximately 57% of organizations in the region are stuck in the “Frozen Middle”, piloting or deploying AI without the coordination needed to scale it. For agentic AI specifically, the figure is 40%. Only 6.3% of Southeast Asian companies, or 27 organizations in the dataset, have scaled AI across multiple workflows and built the operating model to sustain it. These Leaders convert pilots to production at nearly four times the rate of other companies.
Investment is not the constraint. While 73% of companies are lifting AI investment year-on-year, 48% are still working on their first AI use case or have stopped after an unsuccessful attempt.
Jeremy Willmott, Senior Director, Digital Strategy Group Asia Pacific, Adobe said, “As AI investment grows, the gap between experimentation and enterprise-wide value is becoming harder to ignore. Organizations that establish clear ownership, shared measures of success and stronger collaboration between business and IT will be best placed to move beyond isolated pilots and achieve sustainable impact.”
Why AI stalls between pilot and production
- Approval bottlenecks: Approximately 36% of AI proposals do not make it past IT evaluation, and a further 18% are rejected at security review, a rate that nearly doubles in highly regulated industries.
- Ownership vacuum: Only 12% of Southeast Asian companies have an AI owner with budget authority, compared with 89% of Leaders.
- Measurement gap: Only 8% measure AI return on investment comprehensively, with most tracking usage rather than quality.
- Persistent skills shortage: 81% of businesses say their AI skills shortfall stayed the same or worsened over the past year.
What Southeast Asia’s AI Leaders do differently
- Structure and workflows first: Leaders outscore the regional average by 67% on ownership and accountability, and by 59% on embedding AI into processes.
- Failure treated as learning: Leaders keep their destructive-failure rate under 1%, while over a third of companies repeat the same AI mistakes.
- Champions with real backing: 41% of Leaders say funding the employees already making AI work is their single most effective move.
Methodology
This report is based on global research conducted by Incisiv on behalf of Adobe. The study surveyed 5,633 senior executives across 12 industries and 11 global markets and included more than 50 in-depth interviews. All respondents held formal decision-making authority over AI investment, and 52% held positions at the VP level or above. They worked for organizations with at least $100 million in annual revenue, with 60% representing organizations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue. The Southeast Asia sample comprised 461 senior executives with authority over AI investment.
The analysis identified 342 organizations as Leaders, representing 6% of the 5,323 active respondents. These organizations combine high deployment velocity with high operating model maturity. Organizational structure was a meaningful predictor of leader status, while company size, industry, and reported AI spend were not.
