Philippine enterprises are among Asia’s most enthusiastic adopters of artificial intelligence, with 91% expressing a positive outlook toward AI adoption and 57% already actively exploring or implementing AI initiatives, according to a new survey commissioned by Alibaba Cloud.
The report, titled The AI Business Application Readiness and Accessibility Survey, found that local businesses view AI primarily as a driver of innovation and growth rather than a cost-cutting tool. Among Philippine respondents, 68% identified innovation and new business opportunities as the top objective for AI adoption, followed by cost savings and efficiency (54%), customer experience improvement (51%), competitive advantage (50%), and revenue growth (39%).
The strong AI appetite is supported by growing cloud adoption, with 74% of Philippine companies reporting that they have migrated all or most of their IT infrastructure to the cloud.
Across Asia, AI is rapidly moving from experimentation to production. About 75% of surveyed organizations said AI has become indispensable to business operations, while nearly 90% have already adopted AI development platforms and AI models. Only 1% said AI is not a priority.
The study also revealed aggressive investment plans. In the Philippines and across the region, 95% of companies plan to increase spending on AI technologies, including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and model-as-a-service (MaaS). More than half expect AI budgets to grow by over 20% in the coming years.
Despite the optimism, organizations continue to face significant challenges. In the Philippines, data privacy and security concerns emerged as the biggest barrier to broader AI adoption, cited by 51% of respondents. High implementation costs followed at 41%, highlighting the need for secure and cost-effective AI deployment strategies.
The survey also found strong demand for integrated AI and cloud platforms. Nearly half of respondents (45%) preferred fully integrated AI-plus-cloud solutions that simplify deployment, governance, security, and cost management.
“The research findings reinforce Alibaba Cloud’s belief that AI, delivered on top of scalable, secure cloud infrastructure and models, will be the defining technology platform for the next decade,” said Dr. Feifei Li, Chief Technology Officer and President of International Business at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group.
Grant Gong, Head of Solutions Architect at Alibaba Cloud Philippines, noted that AI adoption in the country is being driven by both large enterprises pursuing digital transformation initiatives and small and medium-sized businesses seeking operational efficiencies. He added that the financial services and retail sectors are showing particularly strong interest in AI technologies.
The report also highlighted the growing importance of multilingual AI models in Asia. As businesses increasingly seek AI tools that support local languages, solutions such as Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen models are gaining traction for their ability to support more than 200 languages and dialects.
The survey was conducted by NielsenIQ and gathered responses from 1,000 IT decision-makers across eight Asian markets, including the Philippines, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Hong Kong.
