In an era where technology has reached a critical turning point, Thailand’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are facing major challenges—from limited capital during an economic slowdown to being ‘slow’ in digital investments, especially in AI technology, which represents a golden opportunity that shouldn’t be overlooked. 

On this occasion, Pochara Arayakarnkul, CEO of Bluebik Group, shared AI implementation strategies specifically for SME businesses at the SMEs Navigator to Tech-Driven Growth: Driving SMEs Forward with Technology and Innovation event by SCB KX, enabling SME entrepreneurs to use AI to optimize and increase productivity in their businesses while accessing new opportunities in the future. 

What are all the key points? Let’s dive in. 

Challenges and Opportunities for Thai SMEs 

Challenge: SMEs have capital constraints when investing in technology, unlike large organizations, and need to focus on survival during economic downturns, causing some to hesitate in investing in technology. 

Opportunity: SMEs don’t have the burden of legacy systems or old technology like large organizations. Therefore, SMEs that haven’t invested heavily in technology or large systems before can leapfrog directly to the latest technology. 

Digital Transformation: Transitioning to the ‘Digital First’ Era 

• Digital Life: Technology has transformed people’s lives. Everyone lives or conducts business through the digital world as a normal part of life, and this is just the beginning. There are many more services that can exist in the digital world. 

• Digital Native: The new generation that will grow up to become the largest consumer group in the next generation can be called Digital Natives—those who have grown up with digital technology since childhood and primarily choose digital channels to access various services. 

•  Digital First: The Digital Native generation is becoming the key force in every organization. Technology will be integrated into every work process. Therefore, everything digital will become the main work, the Core Business. Digital tools will always be present in every process, requiring every business to start planning to transform itself into a ‘Digital First Organization.’ 

Mindset and Skills Needed for SME Leaders in the AI Era 

• Use AI to create impact: Technology isn’t just an IT department matter. Business owners who understand the overall business picture need to experiment with technology themselves to understand and see business opportunities, because impact doesn’t come from the technology’s capabilities, but from the ability to apply technology to match critical business points. 

• Use AI to boost your own productivity: Organizational leaders can use AI to reduce time spent on certain tasks such as writing emails, summarizing reports, or analyzing data, and use that time for other important work instead. Moreover, once they understand, they’ll be able to scale and direct their team in applying AI to the right areas. 

• Focus on Quick Wins before Big Wins: Find ways to test that are cost-effective and fast, and focus on Quick Wins or small-scale projects that create some level of impact, rather than aiming for Big Wins or changing everything at once to create multiple times the impact, which is difficult and time-consuming. 

AI Implementation Strategies for SME Businesses 

• Use AI at the right points: Identify what’s critical to your business. For some businesses, it might be about differentiation from competitors, or for others it might be about customer experience, while for some it might be about cost reduction. Then choose the appropriate AI for your business to help develop or solve problems. 

• Use AI for Growth Hacking: Such as content generation for digital channel communication with customers. The faster you can create content that responds to the market, the more opportunities you have to reach customers. 

• Optimize communication efficiency: Use AI to create ads, copy, images, videos, or campaigns that deliver results at lower costs, or generate content in new languages to reach international customer groups, and conduct A-B testing to find the best option. 

• Tap into large market gaps, namely small segments: While large organizations can’t target small customer groups, this becomes an opportunity for SMEs. Using AI to help identify small customer groups and create content that matches the target audience is therefore important. 

• Apply AI to back-office operations: Use Agentic AI or create AI to act as agents for certain tasks instead of people, or implement workflow automation to reduce costs and increase operational speed, such as resume screening or appointment scheduling. 

Key Principles for Smart AI Usage 

• Understand language model limitations: Such as hallucination problems or generating incorrect information. Therefore, always verify data sources. 

• Have effective AI usage understanding: Learn good prompting techniques, have specific questions, and rely on business domain knowledge to gain deeper insights. 

• Use data to create competitive advantages: If everyone uses similar prompts, everyone gets similar answers. But having proprietary data that others don’t have, such as historical costs, top-selling products, etc., this data will create competitive advantages when used with AI. 

• Store structured data: If you don’t yet have a data storage system, at minimum, SMEs should focus on storing data digitally first, preferably in structured format or tables to make it easier for AI to work with. 

Other Technologies That Will Play Important Roles 

• Cloud: Helps reduce high-cost hardware investment, converting it to monthly, hourly, or per-minute expenses, helping improve cash flow management. Can scale up or down as business needs dictate. 

The Government’s Role in Supporting SMEs to Better Utilize AI 

• Technology Access: Support SMEs in accessing technology through funding support, incentives, or free basic AI services. 

• Knowledge Provision: Develop digital skills and AI literacy for all personnel groups, to survive in an era of disruption. 

• Regulation: Regulate large (foreign) platforms to prevent exploitation of SMEs and create a fair environment.