This was heard at a seminar “From AI applications to productivity advantages,” organized by Anphabe and OpenAI, took place in Ho Chi Minh City today.
According to the 2026 Workers and Jobs Survey conducted by Anphabe in the third quarter of 2026, 58 percent of Vietnamese employees have taught themselves and regularly use AI at work, while only 13 percent of companies have formally implemented AI adoption programs within their organizations.
This gap shows that AI adoption among individuals is advancing faster than organizations' governance capabilities.
When AI enters businesses through unofficial channels, the use of AI and information flows that are not managed or directly guided by companies, known as Shadow AI, can create significant consequences. These include data leaks that lead to business decisions based on unverified outputs, accountability gaps when AI produces incorrect results, and inconsistencies in work quality standards.
More concerning is the fact that when employees enter or upload data to public AI tools, that information may be stored and used to train AI models.
Even when employees become highly skilled at using AI, they may remain isolated “productivity islands” that organizations cannot observe, learn from, or replicate. Productivity gains generated by AI remain trapped at the individual level and are not scaled across the organization.
Le Truong Duy, Director and Vice Chairman of the Management Council of the Fourth Industrial Revolution Center in Ho Chi Minh City, said that the dynamism of Vietnamese businesses provides a foundation for the center to elevate AI thinking among leadership teams.
Achieving genuine productivity improvements necessitates consideration of both the technological instruments employed and the organizational frameworks through which companies facilitate collaboration between human personnel and artificial intelligence systems. In addition to capital allocation toward technological infrastructure, enterprises must establish and oversee the comprehensive transformation initiative.
