Microsoft says that Asia goes up to the value chain, from ‘made in’ to ‘created in’, a center for the adoption of AI will do it

Asia-Pacific companies are frantically trying to explore how to use AI to improve productivity, according to the new data of the Microsoft survey, that the new president of the company accredits the rapid escalation of the region in the value chain.

“We have gone through a turning point where the two decades of ‘made in’ – ‘made in China’ and ‘made in Vietnam’ – is changing to the ‘created in'”, said Microsoft Asia president Rodrigo Lima. Fortune.

Asian companies are doing more design and technology work, which is creating a basis for the adoption of AI. Asia has 70% of all patents, is home to two thirds of developers worldwide and consumes more GPU than anywhere else, Lima said.

“We are consuming more than the rest of the world,” he said. “The region is ahead of AI.”

Lima assumed the role in September after leading Microsoft’s business business in the Americas. Before that, he served as president of the company for Latin America, who believes he prepared for work in a “multicultural, multilingual” region. “Asia is Latin America with steroids,” he said.

However, Asia’s narrative has already turned at least once in the short time of Lima on paper, thanks to the head -based startup in Hangzhou Deepseek.

Before the Chinese startup shook the markets, the large US technology companies, since the only entities with sufficient capital to invest in the expensive computer power to train and execute models, seemed to dominate the new technology. However, Depseek models require much less computer power, which can allow more companies to get involved in AI.

The actions in the magnificent 7 have dropped approximately 16% on average for the year. However, Microsoft has had a better performance than its great technology companions amid the tariff uncertainty, only 6% for the year so far, not much worse than the S&P 500.

For Lima, Depseek “demonstrates the point that AI is really happening, and that it will become cheaper and more widespread everywhere.” In more general terms, he believes that we will begin to see more “small language models” or adapted to specific domains, such as medicine.

And customers will adopt the choice offered by a more competitive AI market. “A model could be a bit worse (compared to others), but it will be good enough and much cheaper for certain tasks,” he said.

What do the Asian companies want to use?

On Friday, Microsoft launched its annual Work trends indexthat uses the responses of the survey and the data collected from the software products of your office to examine trends and behavior in the workplace.

According to Microsoft data, just over 60% of leaders in the Asia and Pacific region want to increase productivity. However, almost 85% of business leaders and Asia headquarters complain that they don’t have more time or energy to give. (Both figures are slightly higher than the global average).

Microsoft’s report blames almost constant interruption in the work of this productivity gap. The data collected from the company’s products suggest notifications (measures of measures, emails or even only one ping) interrogated workers every two minutes on average.

The American technology company suggests that “AI agents”, programs that use the user -defined tasks, can help cover that gap between commercial demands and resources limitations. Lima suggested an example: an AI tool could attend a meeting instead and report whether its name is mentioned.

Even so, the emergence of AI agents could even put white collar work at risk based on the knowledge of automation.

Fortunately, Microsoft Data suggests that Asia-Pacific leaders want to use AI to do things that humans cannot do, such as being available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week or providing “unlimited ideas on request.”

Lima is optimistic that AI will create new jobs by increasing economic productivity so that, in balance, employment increases. “I don’t believe in the elimination of work, I believe in changes in work,” he said.

Even so, he believes that understanding how AI works will be key to future workforce. “AI is the new mathematics,” he said. “You will create agents in the same way that you create a spreadsheet. And if you don’t do that, you will not be as productive as the person sitting next to you.”

This story originally appeared at Fortune.com