While Thailand was an early regional leader in 5G rollout, unlocking the full potential of next-generation connectivity, the “Industry 4.0” stage will require bridging a substantial adoption gap among small businesses to help the country stay competitive, according to Ericsson.
Anders Rian, president of Ericsson Thailand, said the potential of 5G technology will be unlocked only once the benefits cascade throughout the economy for small and large companies alike.
“This needs to be a big educational effort, I think from everyone. From industry partners, from communication service providers, from government, from academia. It’s not something you can solve alone,” he said.
More innovation labs and sandboxes are needed to encourage companies to experiment and develop new applications, tapping into the higher bandwidth and lower latency that 5G technology offers, said Mr Rian.
While Thailand is experiencing a wave of multi-billion-baht data centre investments, signalling its ambition to become Southeast Asia’s digital and artificial intelligence (AI) hub, centralised computing alone is not sufficient to deliver nationwide benefits, he noted.
“The big hyperscalers are now coming with regional centres. It’s a massive investment in data centres,” said Mr Rian.
“But you need to think about improving your network capabilities because the data lives in the data centre. It has to be transported out and back.”
The explosion of AI-generated data traffic and shift from download-heavy consumer use to more upload-intensive industrial applications all require advanced 5G architecture with real-time, mission-critical processing, he said.
The move towards “physical AI”, where machinery, autonomous vehicles and robotics interface directly with their environments, also places a high requirement on reliability.
Mr Rian acknowledged that consumer adoption of technology has outpaced enterprises due to the wide breadth and complexity of industrial transformation.
“Consumer adaptation requires little behavioural change,” he said.
“When you look at industrial adaptation, you need skill sets in process redesign, for instance. Operational digitalisation — you don’t learn that from using AI tools on your phone. Industrial transformation is much bigger. You need to redesign your processes, you need to enhance the skills of your workflow, you maybe need to change your whole production flow based on what you’re doing, and you also need to motivate your owners and investors for the capex investment.”
Swedish giant Ericsson is one of the world’s leaders in mobile infrastructure, powering around half of the global 5G traffic outside of China.
This year the company celebrated its 120th year in Thailand, entering the country in 1906 when it delivered Bangkok’s first central telephone exchange.
Mr Rian said Thailand’s future economic competitiveness will depend on bridging knowledge gaps and ensuring that transformation includes small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
“If you look at SMEs and micro-businesses in Thailand, there are 3.2 million. What’s really going to push the country forward is to bring those SMEs with you,” he said.
“Not only the big multinationals and Thai conglomerates that have the resources [for digital transformation]. But you also need to enable small businesses to benefit so you don’t create a digital divide.”
Competitiveness in the future will rely less on low labour costs, and more on “AI skill sets, robotics skill sets and connectivity skill sets,” noted Mr Rian.
He said he is optimistic about innovation, as Thai consumers rank among the highest in the world in terms of digital consumption.
“When you look at Thailand’s consumption side, it has been the highest in the region for years,” Mr Rian said.
“But where is the creativity? My dream would be the digital skill sets and the way we use AI, the way we use our infrastructure, will result in creativity coming out of Thailand, with innovation we export across borders to surrounding countries.”