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Natalie Wong

Smaller, family-run businesses in mainland China are embracing advanced artificial intelligence (AI) more readily than large enterprises, while market agility and steady power supplies will determine the winners of the global AI race, industry leaders have said at a forum in Indonesia.
Panel speakers at the inaugural Nusa Dua Forum in Bali, organised on Friday by the South China Morning Post and Indonesian sovereign wealth fund Danantara Indonesia, discussed their views on the AI economy and the digital transformation of factories.
Zhou Yuxiang, founder and CEO of Shanghai-headquartered industrial software firm Black Lake Technologies, said during one panel discussion that his company had shifted its focus from serving large companies to small and medium-sized enterprises and family-owned or independent businesses in response to demand.
“It’s an interesting trend that I feel mom-and-pop shops are more open to agentic technology,” he said.
Black Lake Technologies, founded in 2016, develops cloud-based solutions to help factories digitise their manufacturing operations. It also provides tools to help small businesses measure the results and returns from using an AI agent rather than a human worker, so owners can make immediate, practical decisions.
“Actually smaller companies are benefiting from it already, but the bigger ones are still talking about it,” Zhou said. “When we talk to large enterprises about AI, their chief risk officers step in. Everyone will have a voice.”
He added that using AI to remain “agile and responsive” would be the defining trait of successful firms in the future.
“They are focusing on agility. How do we be more responsive to the market? How do we digitise operations so we can be more reactive? So I think that’s an interesting paradigm shift,” he said.
Anindya Novyan Bakrie, chairman of the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, also known as Kadin Indonesia, highlighted the importance of resource-rich countries such as Indonesia becoming efficient energy producers and providing steady electricity supplies to power technology development.
“When we talk about data centres, energy is always the bottleneck,” said Bakrie, who is also the CEO of Bakrie & Brothers, one of Indonesia’s oldest conglomerates.

“In the future, there [will be] ... a lot of technologies that make solar, hydro and geothermal very efficient. Once you find your own niche, then you have the immune system to withstand geopolitical shocks that happen.”
In a separate panel, Kenneth Gaw, president and managing principal of Gaw Capital Partners, a Hong Kong private-equity firm focused on real estate, cited Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s “five-layer cake” analogy to describe the AI ecosystem, with energy as the most important factor in the sector’s growth, above chips, cloud infrastructure, models and applications.
“[Energy] is the most difficult to solve because private enterprise with money cannot solve it alone. It must be paired with governments, public policy, and also you have to balance [the need for more energy] against climate change,” he said. “And in a lot of places there is nimbyism. People don’t want nuclear power in their neighbourhood.”
Gaw also noted that building data centres in mainland China was significantly cheaper than in other parts of Asia, costing around US$3 million per megawatt, compared with US$8 million in Indonesia or Malaysia, and US$14 million in Japan.
He suggested the mainland could leverage its cheap supply chain to fuel the AI revolution, saying that “the real AI spending in [mainland] China hasn’t really been unleashed until it can produce its own AI chips at scale”.
Hong Kong Executive Council member Jeffrey Lam Kin-fung said that the newly established Hung Shui Kiu Industry Park Company, whose board of directors he chairs, had received “many applications” to build data centres in the Northern Metropolis hub.
Interested parties were attracted by Hong Kong’s affordable and reliable electricity supply, he noted.
Sean Glodek, vice-chairman of CT Bright Holdings, an investment arm and family office for the Thailand-based conglomerate CP Group, said that the speed of AI adoption, especially at the business-to-business level, remained “very slow”.
Finding and training employees across an entire organisation to deploy AI effectively was a challenge, he said, citing Thailand’s labour pressures and declining population.
Lai Lipeng, co-founder and chief innovation officer of Xtalpi, an AI-driven biotechnology company headquartered in Shenzhen, said that major bottlenecks in drug and materials discovery could be addressed through better data exchange.
“One hospital [in mainland China] can see more than 3 million outpatients per year,” Lai said. “For drug discovery, most of the negative data was ignored in the past, but such data is very good material for training AI models.”
Lai, whose company partners with more than 400 firms globally, added that “true potential would be unlocked” when there were breakthroughs in data exchange between institutions and regions.


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Small firms in mainland China adopting AI more readily than large ones, experts say

(From left) SCMP senior correspondent Natalie Wong; Kenneth Gaw, managing principal of Gaw Capital Partners; Sean Glodek, vice-chairman of CT Bright Holdings; Lai Lipeng, co-founder and chief innovation oﬃcer of Xtalpi; Executive Council member Jeffrey Lam; and Steven Xiao, deputy head of enterprise business of China Mobile International. Photo: Nora Tam

Anindya Novyan Bakrie, chairman of Kadin Indonesia, says having a reliable power supply is key to developing the AI sector. Photo: Nora Tam

Zhou Yuxiang (right), founder and CEO of Black Lake Technologies, and Edmund Lee, general manager of Gold Peak Technology, speaking at the Nusa Dua Forum in Bali on Friday. Photo: Nora Tam

(From left) SCMP Hong Kong news editor Denise Tsang; Anindya Novyan Bakrie, CEO of Bakrie & Brothers and chairman of Kadin Indonesia; Edmund Lee, general manager of Gold Peak Technology; and Zhou Yuxiang, founder and CEO of Black Lake Technologies. Photo: Nora Tam

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The Hong Kong Embodied AI Lab at the Hong Kong Science Park is focused on training talent and developing humanoid robots. Photo: Edmond So

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Hong Kong

Hong Kong Economy

Market agility, steady power supplies and data exchanges also key to gaining edge and dominating AI sector, tech leaders at Bali forum say


Market agility, steady power supplies and data exchanges also key to gaining edge and dominating AI sector, tech leaders at Bali forum say.


Artificial intelligence (AI)

Indonesia

China

Gaw Capital

Small firms in mainland China adopting AI more readily than large ones, experts say

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Market agility, steady power supplies and data exchanges also key to gaining edge and dominating AI sector, tech leaders at Bali forum say

Market agility, steady power supplies and data exchanges also key to gaining edge and dominating AI sector, tech leaders at Bali forum say