KUALA LUMPUR: Exabytes aims to help one million businesses adopt and grow with artificial intelligence (AI) by 2030, as the digital solutions provider shifts its focus from helping companies go digital to turning AI adoption into measurable business outcomes.
Founded in Penang in 2001, the regional digital, cloud and business solutions group, which currently supports more than 160,000 businesses, expects Malaysia to account for about 300,000 of the one million businesses targeted, with the remainder coming from other parts of Southeast Asia and potentially other markets, founder and group CEO Chan Kee Siak said.
“As a homegrown market, we expect at least the numbers to double up from our existing numbers. Currently, we have 160,000 businesses, so ideally by that time, 300,000 businesses will be from Malaysia,” he told reporters at the Exabytes GROW AI Summit 2026 today.
Chan said Exabytes has directed more than half of its overall budget and resource allocation towards AI-related initiatives as the company makes the technology central to its next phase of growth.
He said the shift extends across infrastructure spending, employee training and the development of solutions for customers, with AI increasingly becoming the starting point for investment and operational decisions.
“More than half of our budgets and allocations are now AI-related. For example, when we look at infrastructure, CapEx and hardware that we are purchasing, it has to be for the AI business first.”
The same approach is being applied to workforce development, with the company using its training programmes to equip employees with AI skills and ensure they can work with the technology as it becomes more deeply embedded across the business.
Chan said Exabytes is also changing how it approaches recruitment, with the company first assessing whether AI can perform certain tasks before deciding to hire for or replace a vacant position. However, he stressed that the shift does not mean employees are being made redundant in favour of AI.
Instead, existing and new employees are being given access to AI tools and training to help them understand and use the technology more effectively, both internally and in serving customers.
“For our existing talent and the new talent we are hiring, we will ensure they have access to AI tools and are provided with various AI training and upskilling, so that we understand AI better and can serve our customers better,” Chan said.
Exabytes, Chan disclosed, is pivoting from its “Go Digital” strategy to “Grow AI” after 25 years of helping businesses build their digital presence, amid a growing need to move AI discussions beyond experimentation and into practical applications.
“That is why there are still too many talks out there, but not enough action. The focus now should be on moving beyond theory, presentations and experimentation, and showing businesses how AI can actually be applied to solve specific problems, improve productivity and deliver measurable results,” he said.
Chan said Exabytes’ AI agent, Eve, which has been deployed for almost two years, is now able to handle about 80% of the company’s level-one workload, allowing employees previously focused on repetitive tasks to be reskilled into account management and customer-facing roles.
“In the past, we always had to firefight in terms of hiring fast enough and training fast enough people to handle all these repetitive level-one workloads. But today, because this workload is effectively handled by AI, it actually frees up our level-one executives. We reskill and upskill them to become account managers.”
Chan said businesses should not expect AI to be an instant solution to growth, but companies that implement it with clear objectives and the right context should see significant productivity gains.
“AI is not like a super magician. Today I sign up for AI, tomorrow my business grows 10 times. Unfortunately, it doen’t happen that way,” he said.
“But with the right onboarding context and with a clear objective, we would expect, within three to six months of investing or implementing AI, it should at least double up efficiency.”
AI could operate around the clock and process data, customer interactions and historical information at a scale that would be difficult for human workers, potentially improving productivity, targeting and decision-making, Chan said.
“AI can work 24/7. With the right context, it can also significantly increase the quality of targeting,” he said, adding that AI can help businesses scale capabilities more easily than relying solely on replicating human talent.
At the summit, Exabytes signed a three-year memorandum of understanding with Nasdaq-listed Aurora Mobile, through its enterprise AI platform GPTBots.ai, to jointly develop AI solutions for businesses across Southeast Asia.
The collaboration will combine Exabytes’ cloud infrastructure, managed services and regional customer network with Aurora Mobile’s capabilities in AI agents, knowledge management, workflow automation and AI application development.
Chan said cybersecurity will remain a key consideration as businesses increasingly integrate AI into their operations.
