Vietnam is making great strides in its digital transformation journey – establishing policies and regulations, laying all the relevant infrastructure in place and forging new international partnerships.
The nation has been on its digital ambitions that are well articulated in its National Digital Transformation Programme. Strategies have been put in place to ensure Vietnam’s digital economy accounts for 20% of the nation’s GDP. By 2025, Vietnam is aiming to be one of the 50 leading countries for IT development. Targets to 2030 are even more aspiring and Vietnam wants to be in the group of 30 leading IT countries in the world, universalise fibre and 5G cables, have 100,000 digital technology businesses and have digital technology human resources of 1.5 million people.
Artificial and Augmented Intelligence (AI) is a big part of the nation’s journey. With heavy investments in AI by large corporations such as FPT, Viettel, VNPT and Vingroup, many overseas Vietnamese experts in AI have returned to Vietnam. Most recently, the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) held a launch for the comprehensive AI platform FPT.AI. This was part of a chain of events to introduce Make in Vietnam digital platforms to implement the national program on digital transformation.
FPT.AI provides products that help automate repetitive tasks, improving the efficiency of business operations and customer care. After three years of launch, the platform has provided services to hundreds of domestic and foreign enterprises.
The ecosystem includes a variety of products and services such as automatic conversation platform – chatbot (FPT.AI Conversation), FPT.AI Virtual Agent for Call Center, online customer identification and image information extraction solution (FPT.AI Vision and FPT.AI eKYC), and automatic synthesis and voice recognition Solution (FPT.AI Speech).
According to a representative of FPT, the chatbot used in the customer care process at FPT Shop’s retail system has had results. The system has helped answer the questions to more than 160,000 users, reducing 60% of the workload and increasing online sales by 20%. The figures, they believe, are clear evidence of the effectiveness of the application of AI to change the traditional working method.
As part of the country’s digital ambitions for the region and the world, Vietnam aims to become AI hub. FPT.AI is the second AI platform introduced by MIC. Prior to that, the Viettel AI Open Platform, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform, developed by the military-run telecoms group Viettel, was launched by the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) at a ceremony in late August.
Do Cong Anh, deputy director of the MIC’s Authority of Information Technology Application, said AI has been developed by Vietnam in recent years. According to some reports, Vietnam ranks 21st in the world in AI. However, Vietnam’s investment in AI remains modest. The investment is $155 per capita in the US, $68 in Singapore. Meanwhile, the figure is less than $1 in some Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Explaining the gap in the figures, Anh said the surveys might have been conducted in previous years, and therefore, there is some certain latency. In Vietnam, investments in AI are not always made public. According to Anh, though the investment is not high, Vietnam’s position in AI technology application has improved rapidly. With the investments to develop AI technology by large corporations such as FPT, Viettel, VNPT and Vingroup, Vietnamese experts from overseas have come to Vietnam.
Anh believes that AI will bring value to the digital economy. He cited a forecast as saying that AI could make up 12% of Vietnam’s GDP by 2030. The MIC is encouraging businesses to prioritise development in eight fields in the national digital transformation program, namely healthcare, education, banking and finance, agriculture, transportation, energy, resources and environment, and industrial production.
To stimulate the demand for digital transformation in businesses, FPT.AI Platform provides an unlimited free trial version for every individual and business.
