Vietnamese businesses are adopting AI, but a shortage of skills and organisational readiness could limit what they gain from it, AWS’s managing director for ASEAN told Vietnam News. His examples include a Vietnamese bank cutting a loan application from 150 fields to 20, and a dairy company using AI to process more than 50,000 delivery checks a day.
AWS AI Watch analysis
What happened
Jeff Johnson said a study by AWS and Strand Partners found that 54% of Vietnamese businesses named skills shortages as their most pressing obstacle to AI adoption. He said only 17% felt fully ready to embrace agentic AI, while 23% reported having a formal, comprehensive AI strategy, nearly double the previous year’s figure.
Johnson also pointed to deployments at Vietnamese businesses. He said Vinamilk uses generative AI to process more than 50,000 delivery verifications daily, saving about $3 million a year. VPBank, he said, redesigned a loan process from 150 fields across four pages to 20 fields in four steps, approving 300 cards in its first two days.
In the interview, Johnson also described AWS’s Hanoi Local Zone, launched in June, as allowing data to be processed in Vietnam with near-single-digit millisecond latency. The examples and figures are claims made by Johnson in the interview, including figures attributed to the AWS-Strand study.
Why it matters
The examples put a practical shape on AI adoption: less time spent on repetitive checks, shorter processes and infrastructure that can keep data in-country. But adoption is not the same as readiness. If companies lack staff skills, sound governance and a clear way to measure results, buying AI may be the easy bit.
That gap matters especially for smaller businesses. Johnson said small and medium-sized enterprises make up more than 97% of Vietnam’s businesses, and argued that cloud services and existing AI products could help them adopt tools without building everything from scratch.
Our read
The most useful point here is not another forecast about AI transforming an economy. It is the distance between trying AI and being equipped to use it well. The business examples are tangible, though they remain AWS’s account of customer results, not independent evaluations. Vietnam’s next challenge is turning individual success stories into skills, safeguards and benefits that reach beyond the largest firms.
What to watch
- Whether more Vietnamese companies report measurable results, with enough detail to compare them.
- Whether AI training and governance improve alongside adoption.
- How smaller businesses access useful tools without taking on unnecessary cost or complexity.
- Whether AWS’s local infrastructure investment supports broader adoption beyond its largest customers.
Discussion spark: Should governments and businesses prioritise broad AI skills training before pushing companies to adopt more advanced tools, or does hands-on adoption create the skills people need?
Sources and evidence
- Cloud and AI emerge as growth engines for digital economy – vietnamnews.vn (29 September 2026, 02:16 UTC)
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