{"id":6876,"date":"2026-07-27T22:41:50","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T02:41:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/2026\/07\/ai-hr\/look-before-you-leapfrog-why-asias-ai-shortcut-may-be-a-mirage\/"},"modified":"2026-07-27T22:41:50","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T02:41:50","slug":"look-before-you-leapfrog-why-asias-ai-shortcut-may-be-a-mirage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/2026\/07\/ai-hr\/look-before-you-leapfrog-why-asias-ai-shortcut-may-be-a-mirage\/","title":{"rendered":"Look before you leapfrog: Why Asia’s AI shortcut may be a mirage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Share with your CHRO<\/h2>\n

The leapfrog narrative dominating Asia Pacific’s AI conversation<\/a> is flattering and mostly wrong, argues Anand Shankar, Chief Transformation Officer at Deloitte South Asia. BCG’s July 2025 survey of 4,500 employees found India at 92% AI adoption, yet Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand report the highest job-loss anxiety in the region. Deloitte’s own 2026 enterprise survey puts mature AI governance at just 21% of organizations, even as agentic AI deployment is set to triple within two years. Adoption is racing while the human capability to govern it is not keeping pace.<\/p>\n

What this means for your business<\/h2>\n

The organizations most at risk here are not the laggards; they are the confident early adopters who read high adoption rates as proof the strategy is working. Shankar’s argument, written from inside Deloitte’s advisory practice and therefore tilted toward the “build deliberate capability” prescription that Deloitte sells, is nonetheless empirically grounded. An MIT Media Lab EEG study from June 2025 found that ChatGPT users showed the lowest neural engagement of three writing groups, and that reduced brain connectivity persisted even after the tool was removed. The capability had been offloaded and did not bounce back. If your organization is two years into aggressive AI adoption without compensating practices, the atrophy has already started.<\/p>\n

The historical comparison Shankar makes is the sharpest part of the argument. South Korea’s technology rise, routinely cited as a leapfrog, was actually two decades of deliberate imitation and incremental skill accumulation inside factories and labs. What looked like a leap from the outside was a slog from the inside. The same pattern holds for Taiwan’s semiconductor industry and India’s UPI payments stack, which took fifteen years of patient institutional construction before it could support the “instant” leap everyone now celebrates. Organizations claiming to leapfrog with AI are claiming that tacit knowledge, the kind built through practice and repetition, can be bypassed. It cannot be. The bill is just deferred.<\/p>\n

The CHRO who pushes back on the board’s headcount-reduction framing of AI is not being conservative; they are doing forensic accounting on a cost the income statement will not show for two or three years. When the capability erosion arrives, it will look like a talent problem or a quality problem, not an AI problem, and the causal link will be invisible to anyone who is not watching for it now. The falsification condition is this: if your AI-assisted workforce in 2027 can still perform the underlying analytical and judgement tasks without the tool, the atrophy concern is overblown. If it cannot, the leapfrog landed somewhere you did not intend to go.<\/p>\n

Based on reporting from Look before you leapfrog: Why Asia’s AI shortcut may be a mirage<\/a>, originally published 2026-06-28 03:00:00.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Share with your CHRO The leapfrog narrative dominating Asia Pacific’s AI conversation is flattering and mostly wrong, argues Anand Shankar, Chief Transformation Officer at Deloitte South Asia. BCG’s July 2025 survey of 4,500 employees found India at 92% AI adoption, yet Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand report the highest job-loss anxiety in the region. Deloitte’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6877,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[149],"tags":[174],"tmauthors":[],"class_list":["post-6876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai-hr","tag-chro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6876\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6876"},{"taxonomy":"tmauthors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workai.tv\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tmauthors?post=6876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}