Interview series - Part 1: APAC CEO Chong-Win Lee shares regional trends from the 2024 Logicalis CIO Report

Australia, Jul 16, 2024

Chong-Win Lee (Win) recently became CEO of Logicalis Asia Pacific, after the company combined its Asian and Australian operations in May 2024. Win first joined Logicalis in 2017 as the CEO of Asia after several leadership roles with companies including NCR, F5 and Avaya. He now leads a combined team of more than 1600 people across 10 countries.

Antoinette Georgopoulos, Content and Communications Manager at Logicalis Australia, caught up with Win during his recent visit to Australia. They discussed his thoughts on the Asia Pacific trends and results from the Logicalis Global CIO Report for 2024.

Hi, Win and welcome to Australia. 

Win: Thank you, it’s good to be here in person and meet even more of our growing team.

The latest Logicalis CIO Report highlighted that integrating generative AI technologies is the number one priority for CIOs across Australia, APAC and the world. How are you seeing this integration play out throughout the region? 

Win: Without a doubt, generative AI is the hottest technology right now. Not just in the tech industry, but also across many other industries. In less than two years since OpenAI released its first public demonstration, gen AI has spurred everyone’s imagination and has gotten us excited for what it can do.
While everyone sees the potential for what AI can do, customers are now trying to decipher what the high impact use cases might be for specific areas of work. They are yet to crystallise how to embrace this technology across their business.
There’s a lot of buzz and everyone seems to be keen about gen AI, however it’s also very nascent. The CIO Report showed us that two thirds of CIOs in APAC have concerns about the challenges of regulating AI, and are worried it could even threaten core business propositions. Despite this, 86% of CIOs in the region are actively looking to incorporate AI across their business.
At Logicalis we are the Architects of Change, and these challenges are exactly why we’re here. This is our mission, to look at what technology can potentially deliver to customers, working with them to formulate high impact use cases and build a bridge to get them there.
Right now, many customers are looking at developing proof of concept or low risk projects to get themselves familiar with gen AI. At the same time, many of the major technology companies are going all in on integrating AI throughout their products. This has helped to fuel the interest in AI even further.
Around the APAC region, we’ve also seen interest with customers wanting to build their own small language models (SLMs). Many organisations, particularly government agencies, are looking into this due to data sovereignty and privacy issues. They can’t deploy these in the public cloud, so they need to be able to adapt the language model on-premises or in private cloud. This is a rising area of interest for us, particularly driven by government, healthcare and education institutions. 

You mentioned some of the major companies are going “all in” on gen AI. Microsoft comes to mind with its recent Copilot announcements. How can customers stay ahead of what’s next? 

Win: Firstly, let me remind you that Logicalis has a very strong and close partnership with Microsoft globally and here in the region. We have twelve advanced specialisations across Azure, Modern Work and Security and recently achieved MXDR partner status. In Singapore, we were a finalist for Asia in the Microsoft Global Partner of the Year awards for security and here in Australia, we were recently announced as the 2024 Australia Partner of the Year for Microsoft Azure. We were also recognised recognised by ISG as a Microsoft Leader for Azure and Microsoft 365 Services.
This is why I can say with confidence that I believe Microsoft has cleverly come to the table with its Copilot System. It’s not a separate tool, and instead offers deep integration with their range of products. Copilot isn’t just useful for its suite of productivity apps but also for development, security, CRM, ERP and other workstreams.
This system is a great low risk way for customers to get their feet wet, develop initial projects and from there extrapolate their experiences with gen AI. By developing the right use cases for high impact, customers can internally demonstrate their efficacy to the business. Afterwards, they can apply their learnings as they begin to develop more customer focused gen AI solutions.
At Logicalis, we take the same approach for ourselves as well. We signed up early on as a developer for OpenAI interfaces and have been developing our own solutions to solve our challenges.
A recent use case for AI that we’ve developed is around ingesting all our Logicalis proprietary data and documentation. We then apply gen AI as a natural language interface to interact with its contents, allowing us to retrieve elements or ask questions. Many customers have similar needs, and we’re bringing our experience and our own learnings to help build solutions for them.

Stay tuned for part two of our interview with Win where we discuss security and sustainability around the APAC region. 

Topic

CIO insights