Students learn how to operate robots to perform designated tasks during an AI class in a primary school in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province, on March 12 (XINHUA) 

With companies racing to build ever-more powerful digital minds in 2024, embracing AI has become a new mantra that echoes through all aspects of everyday life.

It is no surprise, then, that AI was listed as one of the four overarching themes of this year's Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) Annual Conference, an event covering the latest trends in Asia and beyond that takes place, in Boao, a town in China's southern island province of Hainan, from March 25 to 28.

Though AI also featured prominently during the 2024 BFA Annual Conference, this year marks a major change in tone, which has pivoted from cheering on the many opportunities that AI innovation may bring to a more solemn focus on addressing the many risks the technology entails.

For Guo Yike, Provost of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a guest speaker at this year's conference, these risks are all rooted in a central paradox: the power of AI to at once promote equalities and perpetuate inequalities.

"On the one hand, AI has leveled the playing field by bridging the skills gap, as anyone can leverage the technology to tap into territories that were previously inaccessible," he said during a panel discussion on March 26. "On the other, the ability to harness AI depends on many factors, such as a country's economic prowess and its access to quality education, which may end up widening the global digital divide."

"What this has posed is a challenge that is perhaps even more urgent than that posed by global warming," he added. "Global warming may take decades, but the next AI leap may arrive at any moment, and it is a reality we must all confront."

Enter: enterprises

This year's conference came on the heels of a high note for AI—the launch of DeepSeek-R1, a Chinese reasoning model that rivals leading American chatbots on multiple key benchmarks but operates at a fraction of the cost.

Within days of its release on January 20, DeepSeek was the most downloaded app on Apple's App Store and has held that position globally since.

"The rise of DeepSeek and other similar models has allowed more players into the global AI race," Danny Quah, Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, told Beijing Review. "AI is no longer an industry monopolized by a small tribe of privileged tech giants. Instead, it is becoming a space that is accessible to anyone in a more inclusive manner through open source and free availability."

This trend has greatly accelerated over the past few months, as companies across all sectors are racing to incorporate AI models into their corporate strategies. However, anxieties have risen over whether some enterprises are merely clout-chasing, as well as how businesses can find their own competitive edge within this frenzied AI rush.

"One of the ways for enterprises to remain competitive is through customization," Carl Fey, a professor of strategy at BI Norwegian Business School and a panelist at this year's BFA Annual Conference, reckoned, noting that the ability to tailor products and services to individual needs is an essential aspect of AI innovation.

An example of AI-driven customization is the Talkback feature developed by Vivo, a leading smartphone brand in the Chinese market. According to Hu Baishan, the company's executive vice president and chief operating officer, Talkback enables people with visual impairment to control their digital devices and author text using their voice.

"We hope that, by deploying AI, we can bring needs that were previously little seen to light," Hu said at a panel discussion.

"By adapting AI to a wide range of real-life scenarios, Chinese enterprises are showcasing how industry-specific applications can drive efficiency, sustainability and scalable impact, not only in China but also the wider global community," Shen Dou, Executive Vice President of Chinese tech giant Baidu, said at the conference.

The digital havenots

While open-source models have the potential to "democratize" the use of AI by promoting digital inclusion, they also risk increasing the digital divide, which is the gap between those who have access to digital technologies and the knowledge to use them effectively, and those who do not.

Despite mobile network coverage extending to 92 percent of the world, this access remains out of reach for more than 2.5 billion people, which is about a third of the world's population, a report published by the World Economic Forum in September 2024 read.

"In the next five to 10 years, AI is very likely to further increase inequalities across different demographics and regions, as machines will be gradually taking over

repetitive jobs," Ian Goldin, a professor of globalization and development at the University of Oxford, told Beijing Review.

According to multiple panelists present at this year's BFA Annual Conference, this workforce divide has already begun to crack wider on various fronts, including gender, urban and rural development and between the Global North of developed nations and the Global South which features developing and underdeveloped nations.

"A vital question we must ask is who defines progress," Amakobe Sande, the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund's representative to China, said at the Women's Roundtable of the conference, adding that, while Asia is a major powerhouse for global tech innovation, nine out of 10 young women and teenage girls in the region's low-income communities lack Internet access.

"We need to reset multilateralism and the global value system," she said. "And the upcoming International Conference on AI and Education, which will be held in China in May, presents an opportunity to foster global commitment to close the digital divide for girls."

Having pursued a path of AI deployment that prioritizes openness and equity, China commits to improving AI literacy in its vast rural regions.

"China's use of AI-powered tools to bridge urban-rural education gaps offers valuable insights for other parts of the world, especially its commitment to building digital educational infrastructure in rural schools," Cheng Qun, Vice President of Yuanli Technologies, a Chinese online course provider, told Beijing Review.

Cheng said during his many visits to the Chinese countryside he found that digital teaching tools have found their way into even of the country's most remote regions. The country has also initiated a program combining human instructors with AI tutors to address the critical shortage of well-trained teachers in rural areas.

Infrastructure and education are two words that frequently surfaced in another broader theme that was touched upon in almost all of the conference's panel discussions—digital inequalities in the Global South.

As a frontrunner in global digital transformation, China is committed to helping developing countries across the Global South build energy infrastructure, digital

networks and large-scale data centers.

In April 2024, Egypt launched its first data and cloud computing center, a project co-built by Energy China and Chinese tech titan Huawei.

At Peru's Chancay Port, a new shipping terminal located about 80 km north of Lima, the country's capital, driverless container trucks manufactured by Chinese carmaker SAIC Motor have greatly streamlined local logistics.

Starting in 2022, Hangzhou in east China's Zhejiang Province has initiated a partnership with Santiago, Chile, to help the local government develop an intelligent public transportation network.

However, attendees at the conference all agreed that individual efforts are not enough to fully close the digital gap.

"Every country has its own solution to AI governance, and right now we don't have a globally accepted mechanism to control how far we are allowing AI to develop," Youngsuk 'YS' Chi, President of Public Affairs at RELX, a multinational information and analytics company, said at a panel discussion. "The problem we are facing is so huge that we should abandon our current nationalistic winner-take-all mindset and move toward the creation of an ecosystem where every player is a winner." BR

(Reporting from Boao, Hainan Province, with Li Qing contributing to this story)

(Print edition title: The Boao Barometer)  

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson 

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