NVIDIA sees opportunities everywhere in Southeast Asia

Ang explains NVIDIA's go-to-
market strategy.

Singapore is a great place to be for NVIDIA. Dennis Ang, Director, Enterprise Business, ASEAN and ANZ Region, NVIDIA, said during a Q&A session for media at AI Innovation Day in Singapore earlier this month that Singapore's interest in artificial intelligence (AI) is aligned with NVIDIA's own goals.

"Singapore is a very key city for NVIDIA because of the test-bedding. We see this as an opportunity to create a lot more reference solutions," he noted, listing the national agenda for AI and the government-backed AI ecosystem in the country as proof points.

"The other piece which is very good for NVIDIA is the push to make Singapore a smart city. AI is a key component of being a smart city."

Ang said that NVIDIA sees many opportunities in Southeast Asia, and hopes to bring best practices from Singapore to some 30 cities in ASEAN which are working on digital transformation and using big data analytics to improve their capabilities.

"We are expanding into Southeast Asia. It's a very fertile area for NVIDIA to support. We are helping them to harness their data," he said.

Ang elaborated that successful AI projects require data, a good use case, and GPU hardware. "NVIDIA makes the foundational technology that is designed to allow organisations, companies, and innovators to ...create the (AI) models," he said. "Without GPUs it's going to take a very long time to develop that kind of model."

Deep learning has been a breakthrough for AI as it allows people to create a model without writing applications, he added. "The model can optimise itself," he said. "We want to help people understand this new technology and enable them to use the technology that NVIDIA provides today."

He noted that deep learning use cases that are more mature in the Asia Pacific region involve speech and vision, such as video analytics, natural language processing and real-time translation for text-to-speech and speech-to-speech scenarios.

"Five percent of call centre calls are (monitored for) efficiency,  with AI we can do 100%," he said. "We can use this technology to improve customer service and handle calls to be much more effective. The number of use cases is up to your imagination."

NVIDIA currently sees a 60:40 split between government and industry customers in Southeast Asia. "We're seeing industry catching up over time," Ang said. "Once the industry understands better how to take advantage of AI and with more push and support from country governments the uptake will go up."