Jaime Valles is managing director for Asia Pacific, Japan, and China at Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Across Asia, our innovation journey is accelerating and there is an ever-evolving set of digital tools with which we can create and build. Companies have spent two years proving that artificial intelligence works. It drafts the memo, writes the code, clears the backlog. Hours are saved and dashboards are green. That is genuine achievement, but only the opening act.

Asia is making a substantial bet on AI. Across the region, 59% of IT leaders expect to increase AI investment by more than 25% this year. The ambition is extraordinary.

However, most have used AI to do yesterday's work in half the time, then filled the other half with more of the same. The analyst who built one forecast now builds three; the team that shipped in six months now ships in six weeks. All useful. But the organizations pulling ahead are not dedicating that freed-up capacity to doing more, faster. They're focused on learning and innovating so they can build things that did not exist before.

A recent study, "Reimagine: Turning AI into Value," explored how companies turn AI into value, drawn from candid conversations with C-suite leaders across industries and continents. The report found that leaders in AI changed how their organizations work, transforming their AI strategy from cost-savings to value-creation. While AI has improved productivity and efficiency, that can only take you so far. The organizations leading with AI are not those with the most tools and agents, but those who are deliberate in deciding where the freed-up time will go before it is reabsorbed into doing more of the same.

This is where leaders in Asia have an advantage. Asia has embraced a digital-first approach and spent years modernizing to break free from rigid legacy processes, so many of our businesses have the foundations to rebuild and innovate fast. When Dennis Omila, chief transformation officer at Union Bank of the Philippines, had his team redesign how customers open a digital account, they did not ask how to do it faster. They asked a different question: forget the technology, what do we want the experience to be?

Technology is only the enabler. It is the opportunities it creates that will unlock the true transformation that is possible in Asia. For a century, our processes have been built around one stubborn constraint: human speed limits. Every approval, handover, and batched review exists because a person needed time to read, decide, and check. As Takao Suzuki, who leads digital transformation at Chugai Pharmaceutical in Japan, puts it, once you accept that those human-speed limits no longer apply, you stop improving the old process and rethink the whole thing.

Reaching for efficiency is easy because it is measurable, while transformation demands imagination. Companies need to combine intelligence with context, leveraging AI tools available to everyone with the information and data that makes you, your company and your community distinct.

India's leading food-delivery app, Zomato, shows the harder path. It built an AI tool to handle its own customer support, then turned that tool into a product, Nugget, and sold it to others. Within seven months, Nugget was handling over a billion messages and lifting agent productivity by 40% across 44 companies. A cost center became a new line of business. That is the real leap: not doing the same work faster but creating something new.

The real advantage will not come from the technology alone. It will also come from the culture we build around it and the unique learnings, data and ways of working that organizations bring to the table. Four kinds of readiness decide who wins. The first is technology: the right data foundation, security and tools. It matters, but it is only one of the four.

The other three are all human. The second is the team: Leaders have to create an environment where people are free to experiment with the tools and treat failure as part of the journey to learning, not a career risk. The third is who we hire and grow. For years we prized people who already knew everything about their field; the new premium is on people willing to learn, experiment and build bold ideas.

The fourth readiness is the one most leaders avoid: our own. The honest question is not whether my company is ready for AI, but whether I am? Am I experimenting with these tools myself, building and learning, or am I delegating that discomfort two levels down? Am I willing to step out of my comfort zone and change how I learn and lead?

Businesses should choose one place to start experimenting and see where AI could genuinely change how they operate. The risk of moving slowly is bigger than it looks: Companies that experiment and get things wrong lose a few weeks but companies that sit and wait lose months, and risk losing their place in the sector. When AI makes it easier and more efficient to build, a newer rival with no old systems to protect can catch up in months on what took years to build.

So the question for leaders in Asia is not whether to adopt AI; that decision is behind us. It is whether we're brave enough to start reimagining the way they work and deliver for customers. Our culture of innovation across Asia, when combined with the discovery of new tools to help us build, means the very best is yet to come.