The Agentic Shift: Asia Pacific Insights (Google Cloud)

Summary

• The IDC Asia Pacific Generative AI Adoption Study 2025, commissioned by Google Cloud, surveyed 950 organizations across the region.p.3
• The IDC study predicts that by 2025, about 76% of Asia Pacific organizations will implement agentic AI use cases across functions.p.7
• 66% of organizations expect over 3x returns from gen AI investments.p.7
• Gen AI platform adopters deployed agentic AI in production at 52.0%, versus 23.0% for non-adopters.p.11
• First movers, which invest heavily in AI skills, achieve 3.5x ROI on average, the highest segment.p.10
• In China, 55% of organizations plan to deploy agentic AI within the next 12 months, which would bring adoption to 80%.p.20
• Agentic AI adoption in India is 41%, compared with 36% for Asia Pacific.p.25

Key insights

1. Driving digital business innovation is the most common objective for initiating AI projects, cited by 28% of organizations.p.5
2. In financial services, fraud detection and risk management is the planned gen AI use case, at 52%.p.6
3. Data engineering ranked fourth for AI investments in the last 12 months but is now second only to security for the year ahead.p.9
4. IDC clusters enterprises into slow movers (37%), functional masters (44%), fast followers (13%) and first movers (7%).p.10
5. First movers show the highest adoption of agentic AI at 59.4%.p.10
6. Firms with gen AI platforms are nearly twice as likely to deploy agentic AI in production.p.11
7. In China, 25% of organizations have already deployed agentic AI, 55% plan to deploy it in the next 12 months and 19% are considering it.p.22
8. In India, 41% have already deployed agentic AI, 38% plan to in the next 12 months and 19% are considering it.p.27