At Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud and AI Day Hanoi on September 29, Eric Yeo, country general manager, AWS Vietnam, shared his interest and impression about AI transformation among businesses in Vietnam.
“Last year, the narrative centred on adoption–the arrival of AI. This year, the focus has shifted to impact. Vietnamese businesses have moved from asking "Should we try AI?" to "How do we scale what is working,” he said. “The next wave will reward businesses ready to scale.”
| Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud and AI Day Hanoi on September 29. Photo: AWS |
Moving beyond experimentation
He presented findings from the Unlocking Vietnam’s AI Potential 2026 study, released at AWS Cloud and AI Day Hanoi, highlighting the rapid uptake of AI among Vietnamese businesses. Some 26 per cent of businesses, equivalent to around 245,000 enterprises, have adopted AI, with 78 per cent of adopters expecting AI-driven growth over the next year.
Conducted by Strand Partners, the study surveyed 1,000 business leaders and 1,000 members of the public to assess AI and cloud adoption across Vietnam.
Among AI adopters, 73 per cent consider the technology critical or important to their business strategy, while 72 per cent report productivity gains, up from 66 per cent last year. Meanwhile, 64 per cent say AI has boosted revenue, with an average increase of 15 per cent.
He highlighted TCBS and VPBank as examples of Vietnamese businesses using AI to accelerate development, improve efficiency, and strengthen competitiveness.
Techcom Securities JSC (TCBS) launched Vietnam’s first fully online initial public offering (IPO) subscription service as one of three major capabilities delivered in a single quarter, supported by AI. More than 460 TCBS employees now use Kiro, AWS’s agentic AI-powered software development environment, reducing development time by nearly 25 per cent, with 70 per cent of AI-generated code passing initial reviews.
Trinh The Thanh, head of technology at TCBS, highlighted the company’s rapid expansion. “Over the five-year period from 2020 to 2024, our customer base grew ninefold. By the end of 2024, we reached the milestone of one million customers for the first time. Concurrently, regarding stock trading market share, we rose from zero to the top three - a truly remarkable growth achievement.”
VPBank has also turned to AI to improve efficiency across its operations. Previously, AI initiatives were fragmented across departments, including customer service, sales, operations, legal, and compliance.
To address this, the bank partnered with OneByZero and AWS to develop the NEO Agentic AI Platform, built on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. The platform brings together enterprise data, knowledge bases, reusable capabilities, and governance safeguards, enabling teams to develop and deploy AI assistants more quickly while scaling solutions consistently across the organisation.
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| Eric Yeo, country general manager, AWS Vietnam. Photo: AWS |
“While momentum is building, sustaining it will take more than ambition. As more businesses move from experimentation to implementation, three foundations will determine their pace: a clear AI strategy backed by governance, reliable ways to measure return on investment, and the right skills to use AI responsibly,” Yeo said.
Different businesses, different journeys
According to AWS, Vietnam’s businesses have ambitions to transform with AI, with 69 per cent of businesses saying AI adoption is a top or high priority, and 84 per cent expect their use of AI to increase over the next year. This adoption spans large enterprises, small and medium-size enterprises, and AI-native startups, with each of them having their own priorities and needs. Even though 61 per cent of AI adopters say they're still experimenting, the early returns are promising with 71 per cent reporting that their AI investment has either broken even or delivered a positive return.
Among sectors, the healthcare and financial ones are showing how that ambition is shaping up. Specifically, in financial services, 41 per cent of businesses have adopted AI, compared with 26 per cent overall, and 79 per cent report productivity gains.
In healthcare, 23 per cent have adopted AI, compared with 26 per cent overall, and 69 per cent report productivity gains.
Some of Vietnam’s businesses have already embedded AI agents into their workflows, accelerating innovation and supporting international growth. Accordingly, 38 per cent of businesses surveyed have heard of agentic AI. Of those, 8 per cent have already embedded AI agents in core workflows, and 19 per cent are experimenting with or piloting them.
Early movers are reaping outsized rewards, with 81 per cent experiencing overall productivity gains. Among these businesses, 68 per cent of adopters report increased operational efficiency or productivity, 61 per cent report faster decision-making and execution, and 49 per cent report improved scalability of operations.
NoteX is an AI-powered voice intelligence and speech platform built in Vietnam and scaling globally. Running on AWS, it has reduced its AI processing costs and latency by 30 per cent and scaled to over one million users across Vietnam and over 20 countries in its first year.
Built on AWS services including Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker, NoteX trains and deploys its own voice models at scale. This allows its two-way voice translation tool, Saydi, to deliver accurate multilingual live translations and automatically identify different speakers across Vietnamese, English, and Japanese conversations in natural voice outputs. It also runs on the AWS Local Zone in Hanoi to serve data residency needs of regulated industries.
“AWS gives us the infrastructure to train, deploy, and scale our proprietary voice models across over 20 countries without managing foundational model infrastructure ourselves, allowing us to focus on our tech while reducing costs. With the AWS Local Zone in Hanoi, we run our proprietary language models closer to regulated Vietnamese customers. This allows us to deliver low latency and full compliance while scaling across 20+ countries at lower cost.” said Nguyen Luu, CEO, NoteX & Saydi.
Accelerated journey of AI-native startups
Vietnam’s AI-native startups are outpacing their peers. Free from legacy IT, they are shipping AI-powered products that scale faster and reach further. As a result, these cloud-first startups have reported 147 per cent average annual revenue growth in the past year.
They are also 4.8 times more likely to earn more than $1 million in annual revenue, and 96 per cent expect AI to drive revenue growth in the coming year. 74 per cent of startups say that their timelines for innovation are accelerated thanks to AI, compared to 66 per cent across all businesses.
Diaflow shows what’s possible. Founded by a Vietnam-based team, this enterprise AI agent orchestration service already counts over 40,000 users, 75 per cent of them in the United States. Built on Amazon Bedrock, Diaflow handles agent orchestration and governance while giving customers the freedom to adopt frontier AI capabilities of their choice. Users have executed over 100 million AI tasks to date.
Yeo added that what is evolving, however, are the types of AI skills required. As AI systems become more capable, businesses have identified that human judgement is the critical capability for an AI-enabled workforce. 62 per cent of business leaders say critical thinking and judgement will be crucial, while 57 per cent of leaders say the ability to interpret, validate and importantly challenge AI-generated outputs will become more important in the next five years.
“Vietnam's goal of becoming an ASEAN AI hub by 2030 is on track, marked by strong interest and adoption of the technology,” he said. “Every organisation is at a different point in its AI journey, but the direction is clear. Businesses that move thoughtfully from experimentation to implementation, supported with cloud infrastructure, regulatory clarity, and skills will be best positioned to compete and grow."