Adobe Finds 57% of Southeast Asian Firms Stuck in AI's Frozen Middle
About 57% of organisations in Southeast Asia are stuck in what Adobe calls the frozen middle, running AI pilots or early deployments without the coordination needed to scale them. For agentic AI, the share is 40%. The figures come from Adobe's 2026 State of AI Readiness Report, built on a survey of 5,633 senior executives across 12 industries and 11 markets, including 461 in Southeast Asia, and conducted by Incisiv for Adobe.
Only 6.3% of the region's companies, 27 organisations in the dataset, have scaled AI across several workflows and built the operating model to sustain it. Those leaders convert pilots into production at nearly four times the rate of everyone else. Adobe's conclusion is that the organisation a company builds matters more than the technology it deploys.
But money is not the obstacle. Some 73% of companies in the region raised AI investment year on year, and almost 60% believe they are still underinvesting. Nearly half, at 48%, are either working on a first AI use case or stopped after an attempt that failed.
The stalls cluster at approval. Around 36% of AI proposals in the region do not make it past IT evaluation, because business teams lack the technical capabilities to scope them. A further 18% are rejected at security review, and that rate nearly doubles in highly regulated sectors including financial services, healthcare, and life sciences.
Ownership is the second gap, and it is the one that separates the leaders. Only 12% of Southeast Asian companies have an AI owner with budget authority, against 89% of the organisations Adobe classes as leaders. Almost eight in 10, or 79%, sit at an early stage of AI maturity, above the global figure of 71%.
And measurement lags alongside both. Just 8% of companies in the region measure the return on their AI investment in full, against 11% globally, with most tracking usage rather than output quality, rework, or the cost of reviewing work produced by AI. Time is another cost, with six in 10 companies taking at least six months to move from experimentation to initial deployment and almost a third taking a year or more.
Skills have not kept pace with spending. 81% of businesses said their AI skills shortfall stayed the same or worsened over the past year, even as more than half expanded existing roles to include AI work. Only 41% of the leaders, by contrast, said funding the employees already making AI work was their most effective single move.
Jeremy Willmott, a senior director in Adobe's Digital Strategy Group for Asia Pacific, said the gap between experimentation and value across the whole enterprise is becoming harder to ignore as investment grows. Organisations that establish clear ownership, shared measures of success, and stronger collaboration between business and IT are best placed to move beyond isolated pilots, he said.
So the report's argument is about structure rather than tools. Leaders outscore the regional average by 67% on ownership and accountability and by 59% on embedding AI into processes, and the analysis found that company size, industry, and reported AI spend did not predict which organisations reached that level.
Adobe's 2026 State of AI Readiness Report finds 57% of Southeast Asian organisations stuck in the frozen middle, piloting or deploying AI without the coordination to scale it
Only 6.3% of companies in the region have scaled AI across several workflows, and they convert pilots to production nearly four times faster
36% of AI proposals stall at IT evaluation and 18% are rejected at security review, a rate that nearly doubles in regulated industries
Just 8% measure AI return on investment comprehensively, and 81% say their AI skills shortfall stayed the same or worsened
Source: Adobe
