The era of “playing” with AI is over. A new forecast from IDC reveals that by 2030, half of all new economic value in Asia/Pacific will be driven by AI. But as the region shifts from passive tools to autonomous agents, leadership faces a stark choice: orchestrate the future, or be replaced by it.
For the past two years, the corporate world has been in a state of frenetic experimentation. We have marveled at chatbots that write sonnets and image generators that dream up surrealist art. This was the “AI Pivot”—a phase defined by novelty, pilots, and the scramble to understand generative capability.
According to new intelligence unveiled in Singapore last Friday, that phase is dead. We are now entering the “Agentic Future.”
At its FutureScape 2026 event, IDC laid out a forecast that reframes artificial intelligence from a technological upgrade to a macroeconomic inevitability. The headline figure is arresting: by 2030, 50% of all new economic value generated by digital businesses in the Asia/Pacific Japan (APJ) region will stem directly from organizations investing in and scaling AI today.
This is not a projection of efficiency gains or cost savings. It is a projection of value creation. It suggests that in less than five years, the primary engine of GDP growth in the digital economy will not be human labor alone, but the “composite intelligence” of humans directing autonomous, agentic systems.
The ROI Reckoning
However, the path to this 50% dividend is paved with failure. The transition from “AI as a tool” to “AI as a catalyst” is exposing deep structural cracks in the modern enterprise.
IDC predicts that in 2026, 45% of AI-fueled digital use cases in APJ will fail to meet their ROI targets. The culprits are familiar to any seasoned executive: unclear business objectives and, more critically, poor data foundations. The “garbage in, garbage out” adage has scaled up. When you feed bad data to a chatbot, you get a bad answer; when you feed it to an autonomous agent responsible for supply chain logistics or financial forecasting, you get a corporate disaster.
This failure rate signals a necessary maturation in how we measure success. The era of the traditional Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) is ending. In its place, IDC forecasts that by 2027, half of the region’s top 1,000 CIOs will be tasked with creating “Enterprise AI Value Playbooks”. The mandate is shifting from “how much money can this save?” to “how much new business value can this create?”
The C-Suite on the Block
If the economic stakes are high, the personal stakes for leadership are higher. The FutureScape report offers a sobering prediction for the C-suite: by 2029, 55% of CEOs at the region’s largest companies who lack a clear, executable AI strategy will face “replacement pressure”.
This is the “CEO’s AI Reckoning.” While 66% of APJ CEOs currently believe AI offers a chance to fundamentally reinvent their business models, belief is no longer enough. Shareholders and boards are beginning to demand precision-guided growth. The “Agentic Future” requires a leader who can look beyond the hype cycle and commit to the messy, expensive work of centralization and governance.
IDC notes that by 2027, 45% of AI applications will stall at the Proof of Concept (PoC) stage. To break through this “scale wall,” successful CEOs will be those who launch dedicated AI Centers of Excellence, centralizing strategy not as an IT function, but as a core business driver.
The pressure extends to the CIO. By 2028, 60% of CIO roles in the top 1,000 companies will be held by “transformational leaders” actively implementing AI-powered business models. The caretaker CIO, the erstwhile custodian of servers and emails, is seemingly a relic. The new CIO is the architect of the agentic workforce.
The Rise of the Agent
What does this “Agentic Future” actually look like? It is defined by a shift from passivity to intent.
“2026 marks the dawn of the Agentic Era,” notes Sandra Ng, Senior Vice President at IDC Asia/Pacific. “Enterprises are moving beyond experimentation… to a future where AI acts with intent, autonomy, and accountability”.
In the previous paradigm, a human used a tool to perform a task. In the Agentic paradigm, the AI executes, and the human interprets. The AI predicts, and the human prioritizes. By 2027, IDC predicts that 60% of organizations will manage “multi-agent experiences” that span across suppliers, channels, and applications.
Imagine a scenario where a customer inquiry isn’t just answered by a bot, but triggers a cascade of autonomous actions: an agent checks inventory, another negotiates a restocking order with a supplier, and a third updates the financial forecast—all without human intervention, but within strict human-set guardrails. This is “orchestration,” and it is the key to unlocking the promised 50% economic value.
The Catalyst, Not the Tool
The implications of this shift are profound. It requires a reimagining of human capital. As machines take on the repetitive execution of tasks, human capacity is liberated for “context and imagination”.
“In this new era,” Ng argues, “AI executes, people interpret and decide; AI predicts, people prioritize and act; AI scales knowledge, people shape purpose and impact”.
This is the optimistic heart of the IDC forecast. It envisions a future where technology does not replace the human, but amplifies our most human qualities: judgment, ethics, and creativity.
However, the window for this transformation is closing. IT spending in the APJ region is set to grow by 7%, reaching US$1.123 trillion in 2026. The capital is being deployed. The algorithms are maturing. The “Agentic Future,” as the report concludes, “doesn’t wait for readiness, it rewards motion”.
For business leaders, the message is clear. The time for dipping a toe in the water has passed. The current has shifted. The next decade belongs to those who can build the infrastructure, govern the data, and lead the workforce into an era where the software doesn’t just listen; it acts.
