Indonesia Faces Challenge of Turning AI Adoption into Measurable Business Growth

Indonesia’s economy grew 5.11% in 2025, with GDP reaching Rp23,821.1 trillion. Businesses face increasing pressure to boost productivity, operate efficiently, and build resilience as the country pursues economic growth and competitiveness. Technology is expected to play a central role, but the challenge is increasingly shifting from merely adopting technology to proving its value.

AI is now a crucial part of that transformation. PwC’s 2025 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears survey found that 69% of Indonesian workers used AI for their jobs in the past year, while 16% reported using GenAI daily. Among daily GenAI users, 96% reported increased productivity, compared to 75% of infrequent users. These findings highlight AI’s potential to enhance productivity, while raising a critical question for businesses: How can these gains be translated into measurable and sustainable business value?

For organisations, adopting AI is just the starting point. The next challenge is proving the real value generated from that adoption. Technology investments have traditionally been assessed through IT-specific indicators, such as system uptime, infrastructure availability, or incident resolution time. These metrics remain important, but IT leaders are increasingly expected to connect them to meaningful business outcomes.

Faster IT incident resolution can mean reduced downtime for employees. Proactive monitoring can help prevent disruptions before they impact customers. Automating repetitive tasks can free up IT teams to focus on higher-value initiatives.

This shift is increasingly visible in how organisations manage IT, according to ManageEngine, the IT management division of Zoho Corporation. As businesses adopt AI alongside cloud services, automation, and increasingly distributed technology environments, IT leaders are being asked to demonstrate not just whether technology works, but how effectively it supports business performance.

“As AI adoption accelerates, the conversation is moving beyond how quickly organisations can implement new technology to how effectively they can turn it into measurable business results,” said Hanief Bastian, technical manager at ManageEngine. “This requires IT teams to have broader visibility across their environments, reduce operational complexity, and ensure technology investments align with business needs. A unified IT management approach can help organisations build that foundation, enabling them to improve operational efficiency today while creating the agility needed to support long-term growth.”

These changing expectations reflect a broader evolution in the role of IT. Technology teams are no longer solely responsible for keeping infrastructure running. They are now increasingly expected to contribute to productivity, cost optimisation, resilience, and growth.

However, achieving these outcomes is becoming more difficult as IT environments grow more complex. Employees rely on a wide range of applications and devices, while businesses operate across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. AI and automation add new layers to an already interconnected ecosystem.

When systems are managed in silos, even simple problems can become difficult to diagnose. For example, an employee unable to access an application might be facing an issue with the application itself, or with the network, endpoint, authentication, or underlying infrastructure.

Limited visibility can slow down resolution and make it harder for IT teams to understand the broader impact of an incident. The consequences extend beyond IT; unresolved issues can reduce employee productivity, disrupt customer experiences, and incur unnecessary costs.

This is where unified IT management becomes increasingly relevant. Organisations can move away from managing technology as separate components by gaining broader visibility across endpoints, networks, applications, infrastructure, and IT service operations. For ManageEngine, a more unified approach can help IT teams identify issues earlier, automate repetitive processes, improve service delivery, and make decisions based on a more comprehensive understanding of their technology environment.

This value becomes particularly relevant as AI is integrated into IT operations. AI can help recognise patterns, automate routine processes, and support faster decision-making, but its effectiveness depends on the surrounding operational environment. When data and processes are fragmented, insights become harder to translate into action.

With better visibility and integration, organisations can apply AI and automation to real operational challenges and measure their impact more effectively, shifting from simply using AI to leveraging it to improve how the business operates.

For Indonesia, the implications extend beyond individual organisations. As the country strengthens its digital capabilities and pursues economic growth, businesses need to ensure that investments in AI and emerging technologies translate into real productivity gains and stronger competitiveness.

Therefore, the next competitive advantage may not come from simply adopting more technology. It may come from managing technology more intelligently.