AI Research
75 percent of APAC CFOs believe AI Agents will drive revenue, transform existing organizational structures: Salesforce research
Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) in Asia Pacific (APAC) have fundamentally shifted their approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI), according to new research from Salesforce, moving from cautious spenders to strategic investors who are betting on AI not just for cost-cutting, but as a crucial engine for long-term revenue growth.
Salesforce said in a statement on Tuesday that a striking 63 percent of APAC CFOs reported having a conservative AI strategy in 2020.
Fast forward to today, and that number has plummeted to a mere 3 percent.
This rapid transformation highlights a widespread recognition among financial leaders that AI is no longer just an emerging technology but a crucial tool for enhancing efficiency, optimizing operations, and, critically, driving long-term growth.
CFOs’ fundamental rethinking of tech investment return of investment (ROI), according to the data, explains this transformation.
Half (50 percent) of APAC CFOs say AI agents — digital labor capable of performing tasks autonomously — are changing how they evaluate ROI, measuring the success of technology investments beyond traditional metrics to encompass a broader range of business outcomes.
“The introduction of digital labor isn’t just a technical upgrade — it represents a decisive and strategic shift for CFOs,” said Robin Washington, President and Chief Operating and Financial Officer at Salesforce.
“With AI agents, we’re not merely transforming business models; we’re fundamentally reshaping the entire scope of the CFO function,
“This demands a new mindset as we expand beyond financial stewards to also become architects of agentic enterprise value,” he added.
Last year, in fact, 65 percent of global CFOs faced pressure to accelerate tech investment ROI.
Today, they recognize the value of AI isn’t just about short-term cost-cutting, but also long-term business outcomes like revenue generation, productivity gains and improved decision-making – things AI agents are uniquely suited to improve.
“The ROI of older technology often depends on immediate, measurable results,
“while AI’s returns may accrue over the long term through an ongoing process and new business models,” said a CFO survey respondent.
It is noted that more APAC CFOs shift from conservative to aggressive AI strategies.
Five years ago, almost two-thirds (63 percent) of CFOs in APAC adhered to a conservative AI strategy and a third (33 percent) did so until just two years ago.
Now, just 3 percent of APAC CFOs maintain a conservative AI strategy, and a third have officially adopted an aggressive approach.
APAC CFOs are dedicating nearly a quarter of their AI budget to agents, and it is fundamentally reshaping their spending perspectives.
On average, APAC CFOs report dedicating 23 percent of their current, total AI budget on AI agents.
Meanwhile, 60 percent of APAC CFOs say AI agents/digital labor are critical, and will continue to be critical, to compete in the current economic environment.
62 percent of APAC CFOs say AI agents/digital labor is changing their perspective on how their business spends money.
Almost a third (32 percent) say AI requires them to have a bolder mindset around technology investments.
APAC CFOs report AI agents both reduce costs and boost revenue by taking on routine and strategic tasks.
75 percent of APAC CFOs believe that AI agents will not only cut costs, but drive revenue.
CFOs implementing AI agents expect agents will increase company revenue by almost 20 percent.
77 percent of APAC CFOs say AI agents will transform their business model.
58 percent of APAC CFOs think AI agents will take on more strategic work than routine tasks.
Overall, APAC CFOs embrace AI as a strategic partner with 83 percent of APAC CFOs are increasingly using AI to make business decisions.
The top three tasks APAC CFOs are delegating to AI agents are risk assessments (85 percent), financial forecasting (65 percent), and profitability assessments (58 percent).
Agentic AI is changing how APAC CFOs evaluate ROI — moving beyond traditional metrics to encompass a wider range of business outcomes
50 percent of APAC CFOs say AI agents change how they evaluate ROI.
“Traditional technology investments mainly focus on immediate financial returns that can be easily visible, but AI benefits are a mix of long- and short-term duration,
“Key performance indicators (KPIs) are focused based on business outcomes,” said CFO survey respondent.
With the introduction of agents, top factors to evaluate AI ROI in APAC are now expansive, encompassing more than just direct savings and near-term benefits:
Productivity or efficiency improvements (#1)
Risk and compliance improvements (#2)
Cost savings or avoidance (#3)
CFOs also view AI as a valuable way to ensure ROI through better financial control.
“AI provides real-time budget tracking, which improves forecasting accuracy and helps protect ROI from overspending through better financial control,” said CFO Survey respondent.
For CFOs, redefining ROI requires a mindset shift from valuing short-term to long-term success.
The two main concerns keeping APAC CFOs up at night regarding their AI strategy are security or privacy threats (68 percent) and the long time to ROI (62 percent).
“Other technology does not typically involve the ethical risks AI does, if AI goes wrong, the reputational cost affects ROI in ways regular tools never would,” said CFO survey respondent.
“The ongoing investment required for retraining, monitoring, and improving AI models makes ROI more fluid than for fixed-function tools,” noted CFO survey respondent.
Asia Pacific’s next AI breakout: Why the future belongs to builders of agentic and vertical AI
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has said her party will remove all net zero requirements on oil and gas companies drilling in the North Sea if elected.
Badenoch is to formally announce the plan to focus solely on “maximising extraction” and to get “all our oil and gas out of the North Sea” in a speech in Aberdeen on Tuesday.
Reform UK has said it wants more fossil fuels extracted from the North Sea.
The Labour government has committed to banning new exploration licences. A spokesperson said a “fair and orderly transition” away from oil and gas would “drive growth”.
Exploring new fields would “not take a penny off bills” or improve energy security and would “only accelerate the worsening climate crisis”, the government spokesperson warned.
Badenoch signalled a significant change in Conservative climate policy when she announced earlier this year that reaching net zero would be “impossible” by 2050.
Successive UK governments have pledged to reach the target by 2050 and it was written into law by Theresa May in 2019. It means the UK must cut carbon emissions until it removes as much as it produces, in line with the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.
Now Badenoch has said that requirements to work towards net zero are a burden on oil and gas producers in the North Sea which are damaging the economy and which she would remove.
The Tory leader said a Conservative government would scrap the need to reduce emissions or to work on technologies such as carbon storage.
Badenoch said it was “absurd” the UK was leaving “vital resources untapped” while “neighbours like Norway extracted them from the same sea bed”.
In 2023, then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak granted 100 new licences to drill in the North Sea which he said at the time was “entirely consistent” with net zero commitments.
Reform UK has said it will abolish the push for net zero if elected.
The current government said it had made the “biggest ever investment in offshore wind and three first of a kind carbon capture and storage clusters”.
Carbon capture and storage facilities aim to prevent carbon dioxide (CO2) produced from industrial processes and power stations from being released into the atmosphere.
Most of the CO2 produced is captured, transported and then stored deep underground.
It is seen by the likes of the International Energy Agency and the Climate Change Committee as a key element in meeting targets to cut the greenhouse gases driving dangerous climate change.
Esme Stallard and Justin RowlattClimate and science team
Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesIt is smaller than your fingernail, but this hairy beetle is one of the biggest single threats to the UK’s forests.
The bark beetle has been the scourge of Europe, killing millions of spruce trees, yet the government thought it could halt its spread to the UK by checking imported wood products at ports.
But this was not their entry route of choice – they were being carried on winds straight over the English Channel.
Now, UK government scientists have been fighting back, with an unusual arsenal including sniffer dogs, drones and nuclear waste models.
They claim the UK has eradicated the beetle from at risk areas in the east and south east. But climate change could make the job even harder in the future.
The spruce bark beetle, or Ips typographus, has been munching its way through the conifer trees of Europe for decades, leaving behind a trail of destruction.
The beetles rear and feed their young under the bark of spruce trees in complex webs of interweaving tunnels called galleries.
When trees are infested with a few thousand beetles they can cope, using resin to flush the beetles out.
But for a stressed tree its natural defences are reduced and the beetles start to multiply.
“Their populations can build to a point where they can overcome the tree defences – there are millions, billions of beetles,” explained Dr Max Blake, head of tree health at the UK government-funded Forestry Research.
“There are so many the tree cannot deal with them, particularly when it is dry, they don’t have the resin pressure to flush the galleries.”
Since the beetle took hold in Norway over a decade ago it has been able to wipe out 100 million cubic metres of spruce, according to Rothamsted Research.
‘Public enemy number one’
As Sitka spruce is the main tree used for timber in the UK, Dr Blake and his colleagues watched developments on continental Europe with some serious concern.
“We have 725,000 hectares of spruce alone, if this beetle was allowed to get hold of that, the destructive potential means a vast amount of that is at risk,” said Andrea Deol at Forestry Research. “We valued it – and it’s a partial valuation at £2.9bn per year in Great Britain.”
There are more than 1,400 pests and diseases on the government’s plant health risk register, but Ips has been labelled “public enemy number one”.
The number of those diseases has been accelerating, according to Nick Phillips at charity The Woodland Trust.
“Predominantly, the reason for that is global trade, we’re importing wood products, trees for planting, which does sometimes bring ‘hitchhikers’ in terms of pests and disease,” he said.
Forestry Research had been working with border control for years to check such products for Ips, but in 2018 made a shocking discovery in a wood in Kent.
“We found a breeding population that had been there for a few years,” explained Ms Deol.
“Later we started to pick up larger volumes of beetles in [our] traps which seemed to suggest they were arriving by other means. All of the research we have done now has indicated they are being blown over from the continent on the wind,” she added.
Daegan Inward/Forestry ResearchThe team knew they had to act quickly and has been deploying a mixture of techniques that wouldn’t look out of place in a military operation.
Drones are sent up to survey hundreds of hectares of forest, looking for signs of infestation from the sky – as the beetle takes hold, the upper canopy of the tree cannot be fed nutrients and water, and begins to die off.
But next is the painstaking work of entomologists going on foot to inspect the trees themselves.
“They are looking for a needle in a haystack, sometimes looking for single beetles – to get hold of the pioneer species before they are allowed to establish,” Andrea Deol said.
In a single year her team have inspected 4,500 hectares of spruce on the public estate – just shy of 7,000 football pitches.
Such physically-demanding work is difficult to sustain and the team has been looking for some assistance from the natural and tech world alike.
Tony Jolliffe/BBCWhen the pioneer Spruce bark beetles find a suitable host tree they release pheromones – chemical signals to attract fellow beetles and establish a colony.
But it is this strong smell, as well as the smell associated with their insect poo – frass – that makes them ideal to be found by sniffer dogs.
Early trials so far have been successful. The dogs are particularly useful for inspecting large timber stacks which can be difficult to inspect visually.
The team is also deploying cameras on their bug traps, which are now able to scan daily for the beetles and identify them in real time.
“We have [created] our own algorithm to identify the insects. We have taken about 20,000 images of Ips, other beetles and debris, which have been formally identified by entomologists, and fed it into the model,” said Dr Blake.
Some of the traps can be in difficult to access areas and previously had only been checked every week by entomologists working on the ground.
The result of this work means that the UK has been confirmed as the first country to have eradicated Ips Typographus in its controlled areas, deemed to be at risk from infestation, and which covers the south east and east England.
“What we are doing is having a positive impact and it is vital that we continue to maintain that effort, if we let our guard down we know we have got those incursion risks year on year,” said Ms Deol.
Tony Jolliffe/BBCAnd those risks are rising. Europe has seen populations of Ips increase as they take advantage of trees stressed by the changing climate.
Europe is experiencing more extreme rainfall in winter and milder temperatures meaning there is less freezing, leaving the trees in waterlogged conditions.
This coupled with drier summers leaves them stressed and susceptible to falling in stormy weather, and this is when Ips can take hold.
With larger populations in Europe the risk of Ips colonies being carried to the UK goes up.
The team at Forestry Research has been working hard to accurately predict when these incursions may occur.
“We have been doing modelling with colleagues at the University of Cambridge and the Met Office which have adapted a nuclear atmospheric dispersion model to Ips,” explained Dr Blake. “So, [the model] was originally used to look at nuclear fallout and where the winds take it, instead we are using the model to look at how far Ips goes.”
Nick Phillips at The Woodland Trust is strongly supportive of the government’s work but worries about the loss of ancient woodland – the oldest and most biologically-rich areas of forest.
Commercial spruce have long been planted next to such woods, and every time a tree hosting spruce beetle is found, it and neighbouring, sometimes ancient trees, have to be removed.
“We really want the government to maintain as much of the trees as they can, particularly the ones that aren’t affected, and then also when the trees are removed, supporting landowners to take steps to restore what’s there,” he said. “So that they’re given grants, for example, to be able to recover the woodland sites.”
The government has increased funding for woodlands in recent years but this has been focused on planting new trees.
“If we only have funding and support for the first few years of a tree’s life, but not for those woodlands that are 100 or century years old, then we’re not going to be able to deliver nature recovery and capture carbon,” he said.
Additional reporting Miho Tanaka
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