Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant promise in Asia—it is already reshaping how small businesses operate, how scientists study the climate, and how doctors interpret medical scans. The choices governments and companies make now will determine whether these benefits spread widely or remain concentrated in a few hands.
A new survey commissioned by Meta and conducted by YouGov across nine Asia-Pacific markets found that 84% of nearly 4,000 small business owners say their businesses already use AI, with 58% using it at least several times a week. Among those users, 76% report a positive impact on productivity and 71% on revenue or sales, while only 6% report a negative effect. More tellingly, the vast majority say AI lets them do things that once required significantly more money or resources, and 80% say it helps them compete with much larger companies.
The impact is visible beyond small firms. In Singapore, telecom operator M1 rebuilt its phone pre-ordering as a conversational journey on WhatsApp, replacing queues and call centers. Sales rose 55%, and the time customers spent ordering fell by more than 60%. In Japan, JAMSTEC—one of the world's leading ocean research agencies—uses Meta's open model Llama to monitor climate changes along the country's coasts. In South Korea, researchers at Seoul National University employ another open model to interpret medical scans.
Open models vs. closed systems
As AI evolves toward superintelligence, two questions come into focus: how to spread the benefits as widely as possible, and how to ensure the technology is built safely and aligned with human intentions. Meta's answer to the first question is openness. The company's agent, Muse, will soon be available in Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, offering users a personalized AI assistant. But the broader strategy is to make advanced models freely downloadable, allowing developers, universities, and countries to fine-tune them on local data, run them on domestic infrastructure, and work in their own languages—without building a frontier lab from scratch.
Open models offer sovereignty, not just access. If a closed API disappears, users lose everything; with an open foundation, they retain what they have built. This is why JAMSTEC and Seoul National University's medical program were built on Meta's open models. Closed models, by contrast, offer access but not control.
On safety, openness is an advantage, not a concession. For most categories of risk—especially cybersecurity—broad access allows far more people to find and fix problems than any closed process can. Open models put powerful tools in the hands of defenders, and allow researchers, developers, and policymakers to scrutinize and improve them, ensuring higher standards of transparency and accountability.
Trust is becoming the capability that separates one model from another. People will not use an agent that is misaligned with them, so every lab has both the responsibility and the incentive to train its models carefully. Meta delayed shipping Muse for several months to focus on safety and security, and the company has committed—alongside other leading AI labs—to a set of controls for responsible development.
Asia's regulatory path
While some regions respond to AI fears with regulation that stifles innovation, many Asian governments are choosing policy grounded in science rather than reaction. Japan's AI Promotion Act rests on principles, official guidance, and voluntary cooperation rather than rigid enforcement. South Korea has legislated, building its framework around promotion and trust, concentrating rules on the highest-impact systems. Singapore launched the world's first Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI and is leading the development of Guides for AI Governance and Ethics at ASEAN.
These approaches reflect a broader regional trend: balancing innovation with oversight. The choices made now about how to regulate this remarkable technology will be hard to unmake. Policymakers should meet this extraordinary moment with optimism, demanding openness, responsibility, and access for everyone. As Asia's AI future takes shape, the decisions made in Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, and other capitals will resonate far beyond the region.
