86 percent of Southeast Asian (SEA) organizations will use artificial intelligence (AI) agents within the next 12 months, a survey showed Wednesday.

A new IDC InfoBrief, “Agentic Automation: Unlocking Seamless Orchestration for the Modern Enterprise”, commissioned by UiPath, has revealed that around 42 percent of organizations in SEA have already implemented agentic AI, and close to 44 percent are planning to use the technology within the next 12 months.

The findings reflect the growing adoption of AI agents and a broader trend of organizations shifting from AI experimentation to large-scale implementation, positioning 2025 as a pivotal year for AI integration in SEA.

According to the survey, the shift to large-scale AI implementation is fueled by businesses’ desire to improve employee productivity, accelerate new product development, and enhance product and service quality.

SEA organizations also realize the tangible benefits that agentic AI offers, as 75 percent report that it supports better decision-making, while 72 percent say it helps increase productivity.

The survey showed SEA’s growing digital transformation and the need for more efficient, autonomous systems to support business operations and customer engagement are accelerating the adoption of agentic AI.

In particular, financial services, manufacturing, as well as retail and wholesale, are among the top industries with agentic AI adoption. SEA organizations also rank customer support automation (58%), risk management and fraud detection (58 percent), and productivity enhancement (56 percent) as some of the most promising use cases of agentic AI in 2025.

While SEA countries have adopted varied approaches to AI initiatives, the region still faces several challenges in their widespread implementation, said the survey.

Notably, AI governance and risk management (22 percent), followed by a shortage of skilled professionals (18 percent) and high infrastructure costs (18 percent), are the top challenges hindering the growth of AI technologies in SEA.

Specifically with agentic AI, SEA organizations are concerned that data privacy breaches (51 percent), security vulnerabilities due to their autonomous actions (48 percent), and unintended consequences arising from complex interactions (47 percent) would pose business risks.

On the implementation front, data security concerns (57 percent), high implementation cost (48 percent), and integration with existing systems (42 percent) are key challenges.

Despite challenges, the pace of agentic AI adoption continues to accelerate in SEA, the survey showed.

About four in five organizations (79 percent) are actively developing potential use cases for agentic AI, even if they have not yet made substantial investments.

At the forefront of this shift is agentic automation, a key enabler for AI-powered businesses.

Agentic automation allows organizations to integrate the power of agentic AI and RPA into their enterprise workflows and deploy autonomous AI agents to handle complex tasks, unlocking new levels of efficiency, scalability, and innovation.

To maximize impact, businesses are leveraging agentic orchestration to bridge isolated AI tasks, dynamically managing workflows and scaling agentic automation across the organization.

“Agentic automation is rapidly redefining business operations across Southeast Asia,

“While enterprises in this region are embracing the full potential of AI agents to streamline workflows and autonomously execute complex business processes, trust and security remain barriers to widespread implementation,” said DebDeep Sengupta, Area Vice President, South Asia, UiPath.

Meanwhile, Deepika Giri, Associate Vice President, AI Research IDC Asia/Pacific, said that becoming an AI-fueled business is no longer an option in today’s unpredictable climate.

“For many organizations, it’s fast becoming a strategic necessity. Across the region, organizations are embracing agentic AI and agentic automation at scale,

“It is clear that many leaders see its potential to drive unprecedented levels of productivity, innovation, and growth, which will be key in building organizational resilience against future disruptions,” she added.

As SEA organizations embrace agentic AI solutions, UiPath opined that business leaders must prioritize building transparent human-agent ecosystems and implementing automation solutions with robust governance frameworks, transparent decision-making capabilities, and strict compliance with data security and privacy standards.

At the same time, it highlighted that technology leaders will need to evaluate and identify the right agentic tools, prioritizing platforms that not only scale with their organization’s needs but also integrate seamlessly with existing systems and applications.

To ensure responsible and effective deployment of AI agents, it noted SEA countries must strengthen governance frameworks with clear policies, standards, and regulatory guidelines for ethical AI use.

Addressing data security, ethical concerns, and compliance challenges also requires transparent risk management, robust security measures, and targeted upskilling programs to address the talent shortage as well as foster public-private partnerships to lower infrastructure costs, it added.

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