COMMENTARY

HIVE VENTURES

Taiwan was ranked 4th on Innovation Capability by the World Economic

Forum (WEF) World Competitiveness Report in 2020 and is recognized
in the world for its industry leading developments in the semiconductor,
electronics and hardware manufacturing sectors.
But as the paradigm continues to shift towards a software driven world,
powered by Machine Intelligence, where does Taiwan stand in this new
wave?
Through our engagements with start-ups and grown-ups in Taiwan and
around the world -in our current capacity and previous ones- we’ve
seen firsthand how economies have ridden tides during these paradigm
shifting times, coming from behind and leap-frogged ahead of the race.
Will Taiwan be able to ride this wave? Are Taiwan;s enterprises ready to
ride this tsunami, to enlarge the gap ahead of their competitors?
One of the key building blocks for Taiwan’s early economic success in
the semiconductor industry and the previous Made In Taiwan (MIT) era,
is Taiwan’s strong and steady supply of technological talent. Will this
talent pool cascade down into a vibrant AI powered startup ecosystem?
Can Taiwan incubate and become a hotbed for AI startups?
We hope this survey, and more to come in the coming years, will serve
to help answer these questions, helping start-ups, scale-ups and grown
ups alike to understand where they stand, and how they can progress
to the next level to harness this wave.

The Hive Ventures Team

COMMENTARY
TAIWAN AI ACADEMY
TABLE OF CONTENTS
 AI has been the raging buzzword globally and across industries over
the past few years. From governments to small medium businesses,
from North America to Australia, organizations have been pushing
towards digital transformation and even the adoption of some form of
artificial intelligence for the purpose of automation and deeper
applications.
However, whilst many have yet to take that bold leap, many others
have tried, paused, become disillusioned, and only few have managed
to cross that chasm.
“Where exactly am I in that cycle? What have others who have
succeeded done? What do I need in order to make this a successful
conquest? Where do I go next?” These questions arise in every board
room and meeting we’ve had with enterprises, both large and small, in

INTRODUCTION their quest to transform and optimize their business.

On the other hand, through our hundreds of meetings with data, AI,
software, and IOT startups across Taiwan, we’ve seen a plethora of
startups and solutions aimed at solving these problems. But, do these
offerings truly assuage a pain? Or are they shots in the dark hoping to
land the few customers? Or has the industry moved past solving that
problem, and on to the next biggest pain?
This year, Hive Ventures decided to answer these questions, by
embarking on a nationwide survey, to help business decision makers
and solutions providers alike, unveil the mystery behind the current
state of enterprise AI adoption in Taiwan.
• CLOSE TO 25% OF SURVEYED COMPANIES HAVE ENTERED
DEPLOYMENT OF AI/ML
According to this survey, most companies have already entered the
development and deployment phase of introducing AI/ML into their
Enterprise. Additionally, 24.8% of respondents have already
entered Level 4 and beyond on our Maturity Cycle.
• THE “COST DOWN ECONOMY” LOOKS BEYOND ADOPTING
AI FOR “COST OPTIMIZATION”
Taiwan is renowned for maintaining cost leadership in our contract
manufacturing industry globally. It would have been safe to assume
that most Taiwanese enterprises are adopting AI in pursuit of
maintaining their cost leadership position, further streamlining
costs in production. However, of all respondents, “Improving
Organizational Efficiency” is considered the core objective they
wish to achieve when adopting AI, whereas “Cost cutting” is
considered the least important objective.
• SIZE MATTERS, BUT AGILITY MATTERS MORE IN
ENTERPRISE AI ADOPTION
KEY FINDINGS
SUMMARY
Companies falling into the Mid-large enterprise segment (Between
200-500 employees) have the resources and ambition to adopt
Enterprise AI with more agility. They are poised to lead the new era
if they continue the momentum.
• HIGH MODEL DEPLOYMENT RATES CHARACTERISTIC OF
TAIWAN’S CULTURE
Whilst globally, only 13% of models developed eventually enter
production, Taiwan’s enterprises has exhibited over 20% (and even
50% in certain categories) model deployment rates, fully
characteristic of Taiwan’s history and culture of purusing efficiency
and high ROI.
OVERVIEW
 LEVEL OF URGENCY TO ADOPT AI
OVERVIEW OF
35.0%

30.0%
29.6%
ENTERPRISE ADOPTION
25.0% The notion of enterprise AI adoption has become
20.0% widely popularized thanks to the incessant
14.1% 14.1%
promotion by the government, industry think tanks,
15.0%
and media. Most people already understand that
10.2%
10.0% 7.8%
9.2%
adopting solutions powered by artificial intelligence
4.9% is important and urgent for the organization.
5.0% 2.9% 3.4%
1.9% 2.4%

0.0% In our survey, while 52.5% of respondents already

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 believe it is relatively urgent, 29.6% are still sitting
on the fence. In our past interviews and
YEARS OF EXPERIENCE ADOPTING AI conversations with business owners, most of these
fence sitters are unfamiliar with which facet of their
35.00% 33.33%
businesses should be and could be transformed,
30.00% and the actual impact that can be brought forth with
the transformation.
25.00%
This is precisely what sparked our interest in
18.97%
20.00% 18.39%
conducting this full study, to help more businesses
15.00%
understand real world cases within their sector of
12.64%
operations, and how the Taiwan startup sector can
10.00% help them in this quest.
5.00% 2.87%
4.02%
2.30% 1.72% 1.72% 2.87%
For those who have taken that leap, adoption
0.00%
1.15%
became a wave circa 2015-2016, with a strong
0.00% wave culminating in 2017-2018; Partially due to the
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
establishment of government initiatives pushing
towards Industry 4.0.
URGENCY OF AI ADOPTION
THE BIGGER THEY ARE, THE MORE URGENT IT While it seems that the majority in MFG and
SEEMS Healthcare are cold towards the urgency of AI
adoption, part of these responses are due to the fact
Overall, size does matter when it comes to AI adoption that they've already begun adopting, and are
urgency. considered advanced in their adoption, hence the
lesser urgency.
Across the respondents, larger companies seem more
eager to transform. This is due in part because of the
available resources at hand, and the ever higher need to
maintain continuous momentum to drive their business
forward.
B2B VS. B2C: EAGERNESS DISPARITY APPARENT URGENCY: BY COMPANY SIZE
Retail and FMCG lead the pack in terms of their 100%

eagerness to adopt AI. These industries have

traditionally been hungry for change, seeking new 80%
technologies to predict the dynamic tastes of their
customers. While the Gaming and Internet/Media 60%
industry, and even the Banking and Finance sector, trails
slightly behind, it is apparent that the end consumer-
facing industries have a generally higher eagerness to 40%

adopt AI to predict changing demands, generate new

revenue streams, and increase customer loyalty. 20%

On the B2B side, traditional AI adoption heavyweights, 0%

such as the Manufacturing and Healthcare industries, 1-10 11-50 51-200 201-500 501-1000 >1000

show mixed responses. This could be due to the wide 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

diversity of current adoption in these industries.
 ADOPTION IN VARIOUS
FUNCTIONAL UNITS
SALES AND MARKETING LEADS ADOPTION
Sales and Marketing represents one of the most
developed function that has applied AI in part of their
operations, other than manufacturing which is Taiwan’.
Applications and services that offer intelligent customer
REVENUE CENTERS LEAD ADOPTION
data segmentation, personalized or programmatic
advertising, and customer service chatbots have made it
Manufacturing 48.55% simple and alluring for the Sales and Marketing teams to
Sales & Marketing 47.40%
adopt these applications in the form of Software-as-a-
Service subscriptions.
User 31.21%
Globally, the same trend exists, as the Sales and
Security 28.32% Marketing function is generally the most outward facing
Backoffice Ops 25.43%
business function, and hence, has the most liberty to
engage external solutions in their operations.
Retail 17.34%
In our opinion, while there are already a myriad of
Logistics & WMS 12.14% MarTech/SalesTech companies in the region offering
0.00% 10.00% 20.00% 30.00% 40.00% 50.00% 60.00% simple integration and analytics, more savvy users are
already seeking more sophisticated solutions that are
able to extend the application services across more
business functions and data silos, enabling better
decisional intelligence across the organization, instead of
single point solutions solely for the sales and marketing
function.
FUNCTION UNIT ADOPTION
BY INDUSTRY
MANUFACTURING AND USER FOCUSED customer experience personalization, and digital
APPLICATIONS PERVASIVE ACROSS VARIOUS assistants are also on the rise and adopted widely
INDUSTRIES across industries for both internal and external
users.
While Sales and Marketing is generally regarded as
more critical by more consumer facing industries, AI
for manufacturing efficiency is pervasive across all
industries.
Thanks to a strong talent base and increasingly FUNCTIONS ADOPTED BY INDUSTRY
vibrant startup community, advanced optical
inspection (AOI), predictive maintenance, and even
machine learning for production parameter
optimization and management have become
commonplace.
These solutions are not exclusive for the
manufacturing and Oil and Gas industry only, but
also widely adopted in the Healthcare and Telco
sectors as well.
Also, as enterprises raise their awareness on
User/Customer experience (UX/CX), intelligent
solutions geared towards users, including
automated user identification, facial recognition,
THE ENTERPRISE AI
MATURITY CYCLE
 LEVEL 0 LEVEL 1 LEVEL 2 LEVEL 3 LEVEL 4 LEVEL 5 LEVEL 6

AWARE INFRA DEFINE R&D OPERATE INFUSE DEMOCRATIZE

Initial interest of Identifying use- AI is AI is within the
adopting AI into cases and operationaliz enterprise DNA. AI
the enterprise. establishing ed, with may no longer be
Aligning enterprise business cases. deployments an independent
towards a unified Experimenting with and showing initiative, but rather,
vision. data to achieve business an integral
Proof of Concepts value. component of
on use cases. most operations.
Establishing the Affirmation of AI is becoming
data infrastructure investment into the infused into a
to ensure access vision. Identifying wider scope of
to required data for tools, solutions, operations. More
AI visions and and partners to development,
objectives. complement more
organizational deployments, and
capabilities in more involvement
implementation. in wider teams.
 OVERVIEW OF ENTERPISE AI

Based on the survey, we’ve scored all respondent companies according to their data, team, and operations readiness to
derive their overall maturity levels.
Across various industries, its encouraging to see that the Banking and Finance industry is skewed towards a higher
level of maturity as a whole, whereas the manufacturing sectors, which represents a core economic driver behind
Taiwan’s economy, see a more even distribution with varying degrees of maturity. Of course, if we look at the absolute
leaders, the high-tech manufacturing sector occupies the majority of level 4 and 5 companies, leading the overall cohort
when it comes to representation in the most mature classes, whereas the Retail sector, another major contributor to
Taiwan’s economy, trails behind the rest of the pack.
MATURITY DISTRIBUTION: OVERIVEW
MANUFACTURING AND USER FOCUSED THE ENTERPRISE AI MATURITY CYCLE DISTRIBUTION
APPLICATIONS PERVASIVE ACROSS 40%
VARIOUS INDUSTRIES 35%
34.29%

We’re seeing a well distributed spectrum of 30%

24.29%
companies across the entire continuum. 25%
20% 18.10%
As we expected, the bulk of the companies 15%
are concentrated in the early adoption 10% 6.67%
9.05%
6.19%
period, between level 2 and 3 (58.6%): 5%
0.48%
Defining the business case, and early 0%
experimentation of AI and machine learning LV 0 LV 1 LV 2 LV 3 LV 4 LV 5 LV 6
to prove these business cases. And a AWARE INFRA DEFINE R&D OPERATE INFUSE DEMOCRATIZE

further 24.8% are already progressing

towards more mature adoption,
implementing and scaling their applications ENTERPRISE AI MATURITY CYCLE BY INDUSTRY
across more business cases and business 50%
units. 40%

30%

20%

10%

0%
Banking & Manufacturing Oil, Gas & Healthcare Internet & Media
Financial Services Chemicals

0 1 2 3 4 5
 MATURITY DISTRIBUTION: DOES SIZE MATTER

AGILITY: MATURITY NOT EXCLUSIVE TO THE

RESOURCEFUL
MATURITY LEVEL BY COMPANY SIZE (NO. OF EMPLOYEES)
Larger enterprises would inherently have more
100%
resources to invest in the management’s vision.
90%
However, its sheer size could become a bottleneck
80% towards organization-wide proliferation and
70% democratization of the cause. In contrast, small and
60% nimble organizations seem to fare well, generally in
50% terms of maturity. But, we see a strata of companies
40% that combines both power and agility: the mid-large
30%
corporation.
20%
These enterprises have between 200-500 people,
10% just past the definition of a small medium business
0% according to the Ministry of Economic Affairs.
0 1 2 3 4 5 TOTAL

1-10 11-50 51-200 201-500 501-1000 >1000 They combine the power of financial resources and
yet are small enough to maintain agility in its
responsiveness to change. More importantly, they
possess the willpower to take the leap towards
becoming a large enterprise through technology and
transformation.
OBJECTIVES FOR ADOPTING AI

THE COST DOWN ECONOMY LOOKS BEYOND

CUTTING COSTS
Most who are familiar with Taiwan would agree that
Taiwan is well known for its ability to manage costs
in production, thus achieving cost leadership
globally.
It would have been intuitive to see that the main
objective for enterprises to adopt AI would be to
further this cause. Instead, “Reducing Costs” ranks
OBJECTIVES FOR ADOPTING AI
the lowest in management’s AI vision.
Organizational efficiency and driving new revenue Others
Others
2.4%
streams are at the top of their priorities, as they
continue to transform their businesses into a new Improving Customer
Increasing Revenue
24.5%
paradigm, and bracing towards new challenges. Loyalty & Experience
21.8%

We see this as an especially encouraging indicator

of the management teams’ mentality and
motivation behind AI adoption. It is not solely for
the betterment of the bottom line, but a Reducing Costs
fundamental pursuit of business transformation and 15.4%

future performance. With their mentality in the right

Increasing Organizational
place, we believe companies and the economy as Efficiency
36.0%
a whole, will see the fruits of their labor in the near
future.
 DATA
READINESS
DATA READINESS
DATA ACCESSIBILITY
ACCESS TO QUALITY DATA ACCESS TO QUALITY DATA: BY INDUSTRY

Banking & Financial Services 銀行金融服務

Consulting 諮詢公司
Consumer Packaged Goods 消費品
YES Gaming 遊戲
32.37% Healthcare 醫療保健
Internet & Media 網路 & 媒體
Manufacturing 製造
Marketing 行銷
Oil, Gas & Chemicals 石油 & 化工
Others 其他
NO Public Sector 公共部門
67.63% Retail 零售
Telecommunications 電信

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

YES NO

ACCESS TO QUALITY DATA WITHIN THE ORGANIZATION A KEY OBSTACLE TO AI ADOPTION

Access to quality data is the fundamental cornerstone to any digital transformation. From obtaining business
intelligence metrics to developing autonomous AI applications, access to a continuous, high quality stream of data is
instrumental in fueling an entire data driven organization.
A vast majority of 67.6% of respondents feel that they are unable to access the data they need in order to deliver
their business applications and operations. The problem is especially obvious in industries which are largely offline
in nature, including FMCG, chemicals, and manufacturing industries. In these industries where data is siloed offline,
heavy integrations are necessary to keep data streaming in when it is needed. Whereas in more digital sectors,
such as gaming, telecommunications, and Internet and media, access is seen as more straightforward and unified.
 DATA READINESS
CONTINUOUS OPTIMIZATION
CHALLENGES IN MODEL TESTING CHALLENGES IN MODEL SCALING: BY INDUSTRY

26.9
39.1 %
%

34.0
%

Different Outputs Training set diversity Insufficient Data

We see a continuous trend towards solutions that can work at the heart of manufacturing execution systems
(MES), bringing operational technology (OT) with information technology (IT) together in tandem, channeling
data from the front lines of execution to the back office war room seamlessly. While many of these solutions are
still focused on single pain points, solutions aiming to be the "brains of the operations" are emerging and battling
for dominance from big tech and startups alike.
Nonetheless, the desire and expectations for high quality data is ever changing. As enterprises and teams
continue to advance in their quest for faster, deeper insights and more advanced AI applications in production,
there will be a continual need for data access optimizations. Companies who are more advanced in its adoption
journey will continue to see ever higher needs, and should continue to optimize its infrastructure to meet the
needs of the enterprise and market alike.
DATA READINESS
DATA INFRASTRUCTURE

CLOUD AND MULTI-CLOUD ADOPTION RATES

LOWER THAN GLOBAL AVERAGES
According to Flexera’s 2020 State of the Cloud
report, 93% of global respondents have adopted a DATA INFRASTRUCTURE: TOOLS & SERVICES
multi-cloud strategy, of which 87% are adopting
hybrid cloud structures; Compared to Taiwan with 2.60%
47.9% in Taiwan adopting cloud and 25.3% with 7.40%
multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies.
On Premise 地端部署
HYBRID CLOUD TO TAKE SHAPE
3rd Party Cloud 第三方雲
15.30%
Due to the industrial nature of Taiwan, we strongly Hybrid Cloud 混合雲
believe a hybrid cloud infrastructure will continue
52.10%
to accelerate due to its compatibility with Taiwan's Managed Cloud 供應商管
overall industrial and regulatory landscape. 22.60% 理私有雲
Multi Cloud 多雲佈署
According to IBM Taiwan’s 2021 Enterprise IT
Transformation survey, 67% of respondents
expect to embrace a hybrid cloud infrastructure
within 2021, suggesting strong intent towards this
transformational shift.
 DATA READINESS
VARYING INDUSTRY LIMITATIONS

REGULATIONS CURTAIL CLOUD ADOPTION

Taiwan's data infrastructure has been largely
dominated by on-premise. Over 61.2% of
DATA INFRASTRUCTURE: BY INDUSTRY respondents continue to adopt on-premise or
some form of on-premise solution, leaving only
Telecommunications… little over 38% adopting a strong cloud strategy.
Retail 零售
Public Sector 公共部門 Despite gradual shifts towards the cloud, driven
Others 其他 largely by the speed and flexibilities that cloud
Oil, Gas & Chemicals… offers, some forms of on-premise solutions
Marketing 行銷
Manufacturing 製造
(including hybrid cloud solutions) still better
Internet & Media 網路… assuage the needs of the various industries in
Healthcare 醫療保健 Taiwan.
Gaming 遊戲
Consulting 諮詢公司 While trust and security continue to be key
Banking & Financial…
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
challenges in the willingness to adopt cloud, one
of the key factors that curtailed the growth of
On Premise 本地伺服器 cloud adoption in Taiwan can be attributed to
Hybrid Cloud 混合雲
regulatory control over certain industries. The
Banking and Finance sector, for example,
previously saw strict restrictions over storage of
data on the cloud, making it extremely challenging
for transformation. Since then, the government
has passed new legislation to allow the sector
controlled cloud adoption, and a gradual shift
towards it, accounting for later adoption.
DATA READINESS
TOOLS & SERVICES

FLEXIBLE INFRASTRUCTURE DESIGN

REQUIRED TO ENABLE ADOPTION OF A
PLETHORA OF FAST EVOLVING TOOLS
In order to keep quality data streaming from the right
places to the right users at the right time in the right
format, various different tools have solutions have
been created to cater to enterprises of different
scales and requirements. DATA INFRASTRUCTURE: TOOLS & SERVICES
Of these, BI tools, data warehousing solutions, and
ETL tools are the staples, most widely adopted in BI Tools 44.74%
data infrastructures today.
Data Warehouse 34.74%
BI tools that facilitate faster data-driven business ETL Tools 32.11%
decisions are the most popular, especially in the
initial phases to analyze and present operational data Data Preparation 29.47%
and insights. Microsoft’s Power BI and Salesforce’s
Data Lake 19.47%
Tableau are the most popular 3rd party software
amongst the lot, while the remaining respondents still Data Pipeline 17.89%
rely mostly on custom developed legacy systems or
Excel to deliver that purpose. While these bespoke Data Virtualization 16.32%
solutions may still work for the time being, Data Mart 15.26%
enterprises with these solutions will find it
increasingly difficult to keep up with the changing Operational Data Store (ODS) 10.53%

data streams and requirements their business is 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
facing without upgrading their infrastructure.
 DATA READINESS
TRENDS: DATA TOOLS & SERVICES

DATA PREPARATION TOOLS ADOPTION DATA VIRTUALIZATION TOOLS ADOPTION

CannerFlow 23.95%
RStudio 32.84%

Others 20.88% TIBCO 19.56%

KNIME 14.90% DeNodo 17.37%

RapidMiner 11.96%
AtScale 6.49%
Alteryx 10.49%
Other 32.63%
Qlik Sense 8.93%

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

Data preparation and data virtualization tools that enhance data transformation, processing, and enrichment have
also picked up its pace in its presence in the data infrastructure.
These tools enable better integration, flexibility, and analysis of large datasets when working with advanced
analytics solutions and machine learning applications. Its flexible nature also allows enterprises to adjust itself
quickly to changing business and data environments without large scale infrastructure adjustments and investments.
Data preparation tool wise, tools with open source versions, Rstudio and KNIME, are the most widely adopted,
whereas enterprise user driven Rapidminer and Alteryx are also represented amongst the top solutions.
Data virtualization is relatively new, and enterprises have been experimenting between overseas offerings such as
Denodo and AtScale, as well as local player CannerFlow*, in search of solutions balancing performance, value, and
support.

Disclaimer: *CannerFlow (CannerData) is a Hive Ventures portfolio company.

DATA READINESS
TRENDS: DATA LAKES & DATA WAREHOUSES
Data lakes and data warehouses are largely ubiquitous in all the industries. However, depending on the velocity
of the data stream and requirements for data processing, prevalence varies across the industries.
In the gaming and marketing sectors, where multiple data streams in large volumes happen concurrently in real-
time, data warehouses are prevalent, processing and storing data towards specific objectives, i.e. to make user
responses and decisions in milliseconds, at a scale of tens of thousands of decisions per second.
This speaks to the difference between the purposes of data lakes and data warehouses. While both are used
for storing large amounts of data, data lakes focus on the storage of raw data, whereas data warehouses are
typically used as a repository for structured data that has already been pre-processed towards clear
applications.

BI tools
Data Lakes
Data Marts
Data Warehouses
Data Pipeline
Data Preparation
Data Visualization
ETL Tools
Operational Data Store (ODS)
 TEAM
READINESS
TEAM READINESS
AI LEADERSHIP: AN EVOLVING TEAM GAME

AI adoption is a painstaking process that requires CTO: THE FRONTLINE COMMANDER

strong leadership to look beyond short term barriers
in order to achieve the long term vision. As such, it is The CTO's role on the other hand, plays a
important to look at the leadership roles that play an complement to the CEO, taking a smaller spotlight
instrumental part in each stage of the process. during the business objectives definition phase
(Level 2), and retaking the helm once the
company goes into R&D and further
AI LEADERSHIP IS A TEAM GAME operationalization.
While it is certainly important for a top down AI LEADERSHIP: BY MATURITY
approach to align the teams towards the
100%
organizations' common AI vision, the role of the CEO
90%
sees shifts throughout stages of AI adoption.
80%
70%

CEO: THE RALLY CRY 60%

50%
In the earlier stages, the CEO is seen as the critical 40%
figure to unite the company's vision and resources 30%
towards the common cause (Level 0-1), but starts 20%
dipping in importance as the teams' business goals 10%
have been established (Level 2), as the company 0%
moves towards R&D and operationalization. 0 1 2 3 4 5
CEO CTO CDO(Chief Digital Officer) CIO CMO Project Office Others IT Team None
 TEAM READINESS
AI LEADERSHIP: AN EVOLVING TEAM GAME
MOVING TOWARDS AI DEMOCRATIZATION (Level 6)
As observed in the composition of Level 5 stakeholders, we see a clear trend, as organizations move towards a
culture where AI is already in its DNA.
There is no longer a need for a solitary leader to lead an AI initiative, characterized by a lower CEO dominance,
lower Dedicated Project Office presence, and even a higher percentage of organizations without a dedicated AI
leader.
In these organizations, AI is becoming a part of everyday life, with no need to emphasize the "introduction" of AI,
but a return to pure business operationalization.

Banking & Financial Services 銀行金融服務

Consumer Packaged Goods 消費品
Gaming 遊戲
Healthcare 醫療保健
Internet & Media 網路 & 媒體
Manufacturing 製造
Marketing 行銷
Oil, Gas & Chemicals 石油 & 化工
Others 其他
Public Sector 公共部門
Retail 零售
Telecommunications 電信

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

CEO CTO CDO (Chief Digital Officer) CIO CMO Project Office Others IT Team None
TEAM READINESS
DATA SCIENTISTS: THE ARSENAL
NO. OF DATA SCIENTISTS IN ENTERPRISE: US DATA SCIENTISTS IN ENTERPRISE: 2018 vs. 2020
US VS. TAIWAN
70% 63% 70%
58%
60% 60%
50% 50%
50% 50%

40% 40%

30% 30%
20% 20%
20%
17% 14% 20% 14%
9% 7%
8%
10% 5% 6% 10% 2% 5%
0%
0%
1-10 11-50 51-100 >100 1-10 11-50 51-100 >100

US Taiwan 2018 2020

DATA SCIENTISTS: THE ARSENAL FOR AI PROLIFERATION

One metric signaling an organization's readiness for AI is its data science talent reserves. According to Taiwanese
jobs bank 104, AI related job openings in Taiwan have risen 3.2x between 2014 and 2019, and we expect this
growth to accelerate to a CAGR of over 30%.
As of now, 63.1% of our respondent enterprises have data scientists teams of 10 and under, and the vast majority
with teams smaller than 5. Comparing against US research from Algorithmia, Taiwan's overall distribution follows
trends in the US closely. If the trends persist, we expect that the percentage of enterprises with 11 or more scientists
within the organization to gradually increase progressively, as observed in previous research by Algorithmia,
signaling continued investment to grow and scale AI operations.

Source: “2020 State of enterprise Machine Learning”, 2020, Algorithmia

 TEAM READINESS
DATA SCIENTSTS: EXPERIENCE LEVELS

AVERAGE EXPERIENCE OF AI TEAM YOUNG SUPPLY OF DATA SCIENTISTS

35% 31.47%
30%
In line with the average vintage of AI adoption in
25%
the Taiwan enterprise, the median years of
20.98%
20%
experience for data scientists is 3 years in
13.29% surveyed enterprises. Although the talent pool is
15%
10.49% 10.49% still relatively young in its experience, they continue
10% 7.69%
5.59% to mature as the industry grows. Talent supply wise,
5%
Python, R, C++, and other machine learning
0% languages have been popularized in university
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Average experience of AI Team (No. of yrs)
education across various majors and even in
secondary education in Taiwan. Private institutions
such as the AI Academy of Taiwan, ALPHACamp*,
and other vocational training institutes have been
established to provide various levels of AI and
coding education to up-skill and re-skill talent and
equip industries with AI ready talent.

Disclaimer: *ALPHACamp is a Hive Ventures portfolio company.

TEAM READINESS
DATA SCIENTSTS: EXPERIENCE LEVELS

DATA SCIENTISTS GROWING WITH THE

ENTERPRISE
The level of experience of data scientists has been THE AI TEAM: NO. OF DATA SCIENTISTS
observed to increase alongside the maturity level of VS. AI TEAM EXPERIENCE LEVEL
the enterprise itself. This is a positive signal
100%
phenomenon, suggesting that both organizations and
90%
talent are willing and able to mature together towards 80%

No, of Data Scientists

the fruition of the AI adoption lifecycle. 70%
Simultaneously, it is also observed that more mature 60%
and larger enterprises with scalable AI operations 50%
have also been able to attract more experienced 40%
talent to collaborate. These trends suggest that a 30%
collaborative and mutual growth environment, where 20%
10%
AI talent learns and improves with a team of varying
0%
experience levels and expertise, will be able to 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
persist and carry forward the enterprises' Average Experience of AI Team
transformational vision, which can be arduous and
long. 1-5 6-10 11-20 21-50 51-100 >100
 TEAM READINESS
THE DIGITAL TALENT SKILLS GAP

AVERAGE DAYS OF RESKILLING NEEDED, 2018-2022 The World Economic Forum forecasts that by 2022,
54% of the world's workforce will require re-skilling
and up-skilling in order to keep up with the
dynamic digital nature of their existing roles.
Asia represents economies with the highest need
and willingness of investing into reskilling in the
world. 6 of the top 10 countries are Asian, and
centered around North and South East Asia.
As businesses continue to transform, new
technologies are required to be learned to improve
job quality and efficiencies. The technological
change is also changing the demand for skills at a
faster pace than before. Hence, driving a strong
need for up-skilling and re-skilling of the work force,
especially in developing economies.
Taiwan's strong supply of technological talent,
supported by machine learning education at all
levels, from secondary to tertiary education and
vocational training institutes such as the AI
Academy and ALPHACamp, positions Taiwan
favorably to offer a technically-ready talent pool to
Source: “Future of Jobs Survey”, 2018, WEF fill the gap across the region.
Source: “Future of Jobs Survey”, 2018, WEF
TEAM READINESS
AN AI FRIENDLY CULTURE
ARE YOU AI FRIENDLY? INDUSTRIES WITH AI FRIENDLY CULTURES

Banking & Financial Services

Consumer Packaged Goods
Gaming
Healthcare
42% Internet & Media
Manufacturing
58% Marketing
Oil, Gas & Chemicals
Others
Public Sector
Retail
Telecommunications
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%
YES! We are AI Friendly!
NO! We're still building it. YES! We are AI Friendly! NO! We're still building it.

MORE CONSUMER FACING COMPANIES HAVE STRONGER AI CULTURES

Overall, a surprising majority of respondent companies believe that they have an AI embracing organizational
culture, that facilitates open collaboration across business and functional teams to mutually achieve their objectives.
The leaders in this category are generally companies which are more consumer facing in its business nature, and
may already have a generally strong, open corporate culture to build upon. On the other hand, we encourage
Manufacturing and Oil and Chemicals companies to embrace a more open and collaborative culture for AI adoption
within the organization.
A more agile and responsive culture that embraces new technology to open up new opportunities for the business
means keeping employees content and productive. Reassuring employees that the introduction of new technology
are not a threat to their livelihood, but rather, tools that can help alleviate their pains and achieve their business
goals more easily, as they shift towards higher value roles within the organization. This culture would serve to be the
bedrock for scaling transformation within the enterprise.
 TEAM READINESS
A CROSS DISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION AI TEAM LINE-UP
When implementing AI within the enterprise, it is most effective to bring business operation leaders together with
data experts to work side by side, to ensure organization-wide issues are addressed instead of singular objectives
and predict the operational issues involved with every implementation decision. These issues might relate to the
IT infrastructure overhaul, but also impact fundamental manufacturing process and software development
processes.
The manufacturing management teams are already seen to play a prominent role in the Oil, Gas and Chemicals
sector as well as the manufacturing sector, while the software developer teams are the indispensable leaders to
experiment and implement these initiatives within the enterprise across all industries.
Involving operational stakeholders can also help build trust in the system and its recommendations, beyond
personal subjectivity and intuition from past experiences, and can also alleviate any anxiety of AI adoption
disrupting future work.

IT
Software Development Team
Dedicated Data Engineers
Dedicated Data Scientists
Manufacturing Manager

AI TEAM COMPOSITION ACROSS INDUSTRIES

OPERATIONAL
READINESS
 OPERATIONAL READINESS
TECH STACK ADOPTION
AN INTERCONNECTED FABRIC OF
TECH STACK ADOPTED TECHNOLOGIES

Machine Learning 52.70%

Very often, various technologies are employed
interconnectedly to establish the fabric of the
Deep Learning 36.94% application the enterprise is attempting to
Computer Vision 32.88%
accomplish.

Anomaly Detection 25.68% Of these, respondent companies most frequently

adopt some form of machine learning or deep
NLP/NLU 25.23%
learning. When applied in conjunction with
Deep Neural Networks/Deep Learning 24.77% computer vision or natural language processing
(NLP), enterprises can employ different forms of
Data Labelling & Annotation Services 23.42%
predictive analytics and robotic process
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) 20.72% automations to enhance workflows and business
efficiencies.
Decision Intelligence 14.86%
It is also notable that there is an especially wide
AI Acceleration (GPU/FPGA) 13.96%
array of solutions providers in Taiwan that provide
Smart Robots/CoBots 13.06% computer vision based applications, such as on-
premise security, advanced optical inspections, and
AutoML 12.61%
license plate and personnel recognition services.
Digital Twin 4.05% This stems partially from the fact that Taiwan
supplies approximately 25-30% of IP cams and
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% 120%
digital video cameras for home surveillance to the
Yes Not Yet
world. With this edge in hardware, startups have
been rushing to deliver intelligent software solutions
that leverages on the hardware advantage to tackle
various challenges for enterprise customers.
OPERATIONAL READINESS
TECH STACK ADOPTION: BY INDUSTRY
COMPUTER VISION IN MEGA MANUFACTURERS HAVE REACHED MATURITY
Computer vision has been the most widely adopted by the manufacturing industry, largely in quality inspections
through advanced optical inspections (AOI) and process optimization and automation. Through our interviews and
conversations, we’ve found that most large manufacturing players have begun the wave of adopting computer vision
in production circa 5-6 years ago, and have already experimented and adopted 3rd party solutions or developed their
own solutions in the process.
SHIFT TOWARDS QUANTITATIVE DATA FOR PRODUCTION PARAMETER AND PROCESS OPTIMIZATION
For many of these large manufacturers, their focus has now shifted from computer vision towards employing
machine learning across their processes to optimize production parameters (i.e. SMT parameter optimizations or
PCB ENIG process improvements). The petrochemical industry is also widely adopting these technologies for
quality prediction while the semi-conductor industry has been actively practicing automated virtual metrology in their
processes.

NLP/NLU
Computer Vision
AutoML
Machine Learning
Deep Learning
AI Acceleration
Deep Neural Networks/
Deep Learning
Data Labeling & Annotation
Services
Smart Robots/CoBots
Decision Intelligence
Robotic Process Automation
(RPA)
Digital Twin
Anomaly Detection

TECH STACK ACROSS INDUSTRIES

 OPERATIONAL READINESS
TECH STACKS VS. ADOPTION OBJECTIVES
From the perspective of delivering organizational objectives, natural language processing (NLP) technologies
matched with machine learning are most widely adopted in enterprises seeking to increase revenue and raise
customer loyalty. These can stem from providing personalized user experiences (i.e. personalized marketing and
incentives) or in automated customer support and conversational commerce.
A noticeable trend is towards the rising adoption of automated machine learning (AutoML) services to drive
increasing revenue and organizational efficiency. Global unicorns such as DataRobot and H20.ai, and the
recently public C3.ai, have been delivering these services to various industries. Home grown players such as
ProfetAI* have also helped leading manufacturers in SMT parameter optimization and drive increased efficiencies
and revenues.

TECH STACK ADOPTED FOR DIFFERENT AI ADOPTION OBJECTIVES

Disclaimer: *ProfetAI is a Hive Ventures portfolio company.

OPERATIONAL READINESS
MODEL DEVELOPMENT ACCELERATING

MODELS DEVELOPED TO DOUBLE THIS YEAR

When polled on the number of models developed to
date and the number of models currently under
development, we see that respondents are generally
accelerating their model developments.
For companies who have spent the past 1-2 years
developing their first models, they are now picking MODEL DEVELOPMENT ACCELERATION
up pace, increasing the number of concurrent
projects and models under development, surpassing 50% 45.65%
their historical developments. Even for companies 45%
who have already developed more than 10 models, 40% 35.92%
they are expecting to double the number of models 35%
they’ve developed to date within this year. 30%
25.36%
25% 22.54%
This acceleration is fueled by clearer business and 20%
development goals, stronger infrastructure 15% 11.97%
11.59%
established and an accelerated development 10% 5.63%
2.90% 3.52%
workflow. 5% 2.17%
2.82%
2.17%
0%
1-3 3-10 10-50 50-100 100-1000 >1000

No. of Models Developed No. of Models Being Developed per Year

 OPERATIONAL READINESS
FROM LAB TO PRODUCTION: DEPLOYMENT

Apart from development velocities, most teams

will face challenges moving from experimenting
and testing models within the development
environment towards deploying the models into
the production environment.
MODEL DEPLOYMENT SPEEDS
Currently, most models are developed within a
sandbox of data to allow the most flexibility and
9%
20% 0-7 Days least obstruction to production. However, when
8% 8-14 Days faced with deployments, several uncontrollable
15-30 Days real-world conditions come into play, making it
2% 8% 1-3 Months arduous for the model to work effectively in these
9% 3-6 Months
real-world environments.
6-12 Months
As such, model deployment becomes a next
>1 Year
16%
critical phase that sets successful teams apart
28% Don't know/Unsure from the rest.
Despite the nascence of adopting machine
learning within the enterprise in Taiwan, the
majority of surveyed companies (53.7%) are
already able to deploy their models into production
within a 3 month cycle. While many are still
unsure how long it may take before they deploy
the first model, this speed of deployment shows
great promise in the proliferation of ML in these
enterprises and others going forward.
OPERATIONAL READINESS
MODEL DEPLOYMENT: TAIWAN VS. US

MODEL DEPLOYMENT SPEED: TAIWAN VS. US

How does Taiwan’s deployment speeds compare to HIGH PERFORMERS
MID PERFORMERS
more developed ecosystems? LOW PERFORMERS

Breaking down the respondents into tiers vis-à-vis 30.00% 28% 28%

the US in similar research, Taiwan currently seems 25.00%

24%
22%
to trail the US in the high performers segment. Only 20%
20.00% 18%
approximately a quarter of respondents are able to 17%

deploy their models within 1 month, whereas 42% 15.00%

14%
13%

of US companies are already able to deploy at 10.00%

9%

these speeds, catching up with software DevOps 5%

cycle times. 5.00%
2%

0.00%
Yet, Taiwan’s ecosystem shows a bulk mid 0-7 Days 8-30 Days 1-3 Months 3-12 Months >1 Year Don't
know/Unsure
performers segment, who can continuously Taiwan US

improve their processes and performance to speed

up deployment times and move towards the high
performers segment.
 OPERATIONAL READINESS
HIGH DEVELOPMENT TO DEPLOYMENT RATES

MODEL DEPLOYMENT RATES: MEASUREMENT The move from the sandbox to production is challenging,
OF EFFICIENCY and we encourage companies to build out efficient
workflows and environments as they go, to further
When we compare models developed against accelerate deployment rates.
models actually deployed, it is encouraging to see
that most companies who have developed more
than one model have deployed at least part of
these models into actual production. Despite the
long and challenging deployment time, this signifies
an effectiveness in moving beyond the sandbox into
MODEL DEPLOYMENT RATES
real world environments.
100%
According to various industry reports, globally, only 90%
80%

Models Deployed
less than 20% of models progress beyond model 70%
development and experimentation. Our survey 60%
50%
shows a significantly higher deployment rate than 40%
this global reference, with the majority of 30%
20%
companies deploying over 20% to 50% of their 10%
developed models. 0%
1-3 4-10 11-50 51-100 101-1000 >1000
Models Developed
As companies grow through the maturity cycle, the
deployment rates (no. of models developed / no. of 0 1-3 4-10 11-50 51-100 101-1000 >1000
models deployed) increases as the experience
level rises and workflows are improved, thus
encouraging higher development velocities with the
aim of achieving even more business outcomes.
OPERATIONAL READINESS
IMPROVING WITH EXPERIENCE
DEPLOYMENT VS.
DEPLOYMENT SPEEDS BY INDUSTRY
ENTERPRISE AI EXPERIENCE
100%
Banking & Financial Services 銀行金融服務
90%
No. of models deployed

80% Consulting 諮詢公司

70% Healthcare 醫療保健
60% Internet & Media 網路 & 媒體
50% Manufacturing 製造
40% Marketing 行銷
30% Oil, Gas & Chemicals 石油 & 化工
20% Others 其他
10% Public Sector 公共部門
0% Retail 零售
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 10 Telecommunications 電信
No. of years AI introduced into enterprise
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

1-3 4-10 11-50 51-100 100-1000 >1000 0-7 days 8-14 days 15-30 days 1-3 months 3-6 months 6-12 months >1 Year Don't know/Unsure

EXPERIENCE MATTERS IN SPEEDING UP MODEL DEPLOYMENT RATES

According to our survey, deployment times are observed to improve with the enterprises’ experience with data
science. Most companies who have deployed over 1,000 models generally have 5-10 years of experience with
machine learning. However, the younger wave of companies also show promise, developing and deploying models
faster despite the vintage of the company.
The nature of these businesses may also limit the progression up the curve, but we believe these will gradually
improve as more up-to-date data infrastructures and experienced data teams are introduced, and gaps between
front-line production and experimentation are bridged.
 OPERATIONAL READINESS
POST DEPLOYMENT CHALLENGES

LIFE AFTER DEPLOYMENT While the 5G era may solve connectivity issues,
other critical issues, such as edge model design
Model deployment is not the end of the road for the and acceleration still pose challenges, leading to
life cycle of a model. In reality, it is the beginning of heightened research in the field of high power and
a new life cycle for the developed model, as it takes low power inference engines to bring together the
in new data and learns even more in the real world. best of both worlds.
This inadvertently leads to deviation and
degradation of the model due to variances in the
data stream in actual production environments, data
entry errors, glitches in the database, and errors in
the data pipeline. MODEL MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES

As such, 40.9% of respondents see the greatest

challenges after deployment as model health check
(19.4%) and model retraining (21.5%) to constantly
keep the model aligned and performing well.
Edge inference has also been mentioned as a
leading challenge. As discussed, Taiwan still adopts
a largely on-premise infrastructure. The introduction
of edge inference is alluring, taking deep learning
models and running it on the edge device to run
faster and with less reliance on the network.
CHALLENGES & CONCERNS OF
ENTERPRISE AI ADOPTION
 OPERATIONAL READINESS
GROWING PAINS OF AI ADOPTION
CHALLENGES IN AI ADOPTION

Data Collection
Data Applicability
EARLY GROWING PAINS STILL A MAIN
Data Accessibility CHALLENGE
Business Case POC
Model Development for production
Scale Up
82% of Taiwan’s adoption woes are early stage
Duplicating organizational efforts growing pains, with the top concerns being in data
Organizational Alignment
collection, proving business case, and developing
Cross Programming
Language support useful models for production. In comparison, US
ML Versioning and
reproducibility counterparts are more concerned with scaling up
Talent Supply
Model performance monitoring
their ML operations, versioning, and reproducibility
Data Scientists Performance of their models; yet approximately 69% of US
enterprises are still bothered by early stage
growing pains of proving business case and
90%
getting organizational buy-in.
82%
80%
69% While the distribution of these challenges
70%
60%
suggests that most of Taiwan’s enterprises are still
50%
in its nascent stages of AI and ML adoption, these
40%
concerns are common growing pains shared by
31%
30% enterprises all around world, and no less easy in
20%
18% more developed economies.
10%
0%
We expect continued shifts from early stage woes
Early Growing Pains Operational Challenges towards more advanced operational stage
Taiwan US challenges in the years to come as companies
grow through the maturity cycle.
OPERATIONAL READINESS
GROWING THROUGH THE LIFECYCLE
Model performance monitoring and ML versioning issues rise as more models are developed and deployed, and the
teams get larger, with more projects and more specialized teams. As these teams start working in smaller pods,
platforms that allows for better collaboration becomes more critical to avoid duplicated efforts, creating different
versions of a model simultaneously, and other issues that arise from disconnected data resources.
Software platforms such as MLOps platforms have risen in popularity over the past 2 years to alleviate these issues.
Many companies currently use tools such as GitHub or MS Visual Studio, which are geared towards software
developers for these purposes. Open source tools such as Kubeflow or enterprise software such as Anaconda,
Algorithmia, and InfuseAI* are also picking up in popularity as more data scientist specific platforms are required to
bridge the divide between software developers and data scientists workflows.

AI ADOPTION CHALLENGES THROUGH THE LIFECYCLE

Data Scientists Performance
Model Performance monitoring
Talent Supply
ML Versioning and reproducibility

Cross programming language support

Organizational Alignment

Duplicating organizational efforts

Scale Up
Model Development for production
Business Case POC
Data Accessibility
Data Applicability
Data Collection

Disclaimer: *InfuseAI is a Hive Ventures portfolio company.

 OPERATIONAL READINESS
CONCERNS OF AI ADOPTION
RISING COSTS
Adopting machine learning and deep learning doesn’t come cheap. And as more models are developed, and
consume more data in their self-learning process, they demand more GPUs and power to continue to learn and grow.
Despite cloud computing, costs continue to burgeon. As such, cost concerns come in at the top at 19.2% of our
respondents concerned about rising costs to keep the system running going forward.
TRUST THROUGH EXPLAINABILITY AND RESPONSIBILITY
As we advance towards autonomous systems, we begin to rely on the systems to make decisions on our behalf, that
can be explained and attributed to. Algorithms today work in black boxes, without its creators fully appreciating the
model’s rationale beyond pure math. 16.9% of respondents are concerned with the explainability of their AI, and
10.5% have concerns fully trusting their systems to make autonomous decisions on their behalf. This is a global
phenomenon, and data scientist teams around the world are now seeking solutions, in hopes of lifting this obstacle in
our next step towards full autonomy.
LOOKING TOWARDS THE
FUTURE
 LOOKING FORWARD TO THE FUTURE
TRENDS IN APPLICATION ADOPTION
FUTURE APPLICATION ADOPTION SHIFTS TOWARDS THE BACKEND, AND TOWARDS PROLIFERATION
We observe that overall AI/SaaS adoption has started from more revenue generating functions, but will move towards
back-office functions in the coming years.
Foremost functions such as sales and marketing will stay largely as a staple for adoption in Taiwan. But
manufacturers and retailers alike will shift investments towards logistics and warehousing to speed up organizational
efficiency, including areas such as warehouse automation, inventory forecasting, and pick-up automation.
Buyers are also expected to ramp up on investments into security, especially in light of the heightened level of cyber
attacks over the past few years. Coupled with government incentives for small medium businesses and select
industries to invest in cybersecurity, this has become another hot sector for adoption in the coming years.

Retail

Logistics/Warehousing

Backoffice Operations

Users

Security

Manufacturing

Sales/Marketing

0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140

Today Next 12-24 months

LOOKING FORWARD TO THE FUTURE
TRENDS IN TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION
FUTURE TECHNOLOGIES ADOPTION MOVING TOWARDS SPEED AND DEPTH
We see a shift in tastes towards deeper applications and faster experimentation.
Computer vision, which has been popular, especially in the fields of quality inspection and anomaly detection, will
slow down as most major players already have smooth operating solutions, and investments will come from late
adopters of these technologies, most likely in medium sized manufacturing and chemicals players.
Pureplay machine learning will slow down, especially as infrastructure and SOPs have been established.
Instead, adoption of AutoML for faster experimentation and solving many more business problems simultaneously
and driving decision intelligence will increase in spending.
Digital twin investments are expected to increase as we move beyond the innovators, towards the early adopters of
the technology.
Anomaly Detection
Digital Twin
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Decision Intelligence
Smart Robots/CoBots
Data Labelling & Annotation Services
Deep Neural Networks/Deep Learning
AI Acceleration (GPU/FPGA)
Deep Learning
Machine Learning
AutoML
Computer Vision
NLP/NLU
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140

Today Next 12-24 months

RECOMMENDATIONS TO SHIFT
THE MATURITY
RECOMMENDATIONS TO SHIFT THE MATURITY
THE ENTERPRISE VISION AND KEY OBJECTIVES
FOR ADOPTING AI
What do we as an enterprise want to achieve from
adopting AI? This should not be for the purpose of
SHIFTING TO LEVEL 1 adopting a fancy buzzword, but helping enterprises
achieve their overall organizational vision, and

ORGANIZATIONAL achieving business objectives such as revenue growth,

increased organizational efficiency, stronger customer

ALIGNMENT
retention, and cost reductions in certain processes,
amongst many.
IDENTIFYING AND ALIGNING THE KEY
STAKEHOLDERS
Who will these new initiatives benefit and impact? Who
are the stakeholders that will best be involved to
LEVEL 1: ORGANIZATIONAL ALIGNMENT impact these changes? These should include top level
management down to key working level stakeholders,
As we act upon the urgency of AI adoption into in order to get organization-wide buy in and alignment
the enterprise, the leadership should consider for execution purposes.
and decide upon the following questions in order
to realize a successful kickoff. IDENTIFYING THE KEY OPPORTUNITIES AI CAN
OPTIMIZE
What are the pain points and friction of our target users
in their workflow? How can our automation and AI
initiatives help with that? A good vision and objective
will be rooted in real world operational environments
and will ensure the initiatives developed will see
smooth deployment and actual business impact.
 RECOMMENDATIONS TO SHIFT THE MATURITY
IDENTIFY HIGH VALUE DATA
Experts advise that a data audit be conducted to
identify which data points are most relevant to tackle
the identified challenges and opportunities. Very often,
SHIFTING TO LEVEL 2 some required data sets might not be readily available,
so teams may need to devise ways and retool

TOWARDS DATA processes to collect these additional data points.

ACCESSIBILITY
BUILD UP THE DATA INFRASTRUCTURE TO
COLLECT THE RIGHT DATA FROM THE RIGHT
PLACES AND DELIVERED TO THE RIGHT PEOPLE
For many large enterprises, data collection has already
been at the heart of their operations. However, these
legacy systems might not be keeping up with the latest
data streams and data structures, or are stored in
LEVEL 2: TOWARDS DATA ACCESSIBILITY various different data silos across the organization.
These will need to be broken down, so that data flows
As identified in our survey, access to quality data seamlessly into data lakes, warehouses, or a
that are valuable towards the objectives and virtualized repository for users to access and work
applications to be achieved are the bedrock of the upon these data sets.
initiative.
Enterprises should also build flexibility into this
infrastructure as you continue to experiment with
enterprise’s objectives and applications, as these might
change over time with your experimentation and as
objectives evolve.
RECOMMENDATIONS TO SHIFT THE MATURITY

MAKING A QUICK WIN

SHIFTING TO LEVEL 3
FAST
In order to gain trust and confidence in the initiatives,
early experiments should focus on singular use cases
that can quickly prove the business value of the

EXPERIMENTATION
initiative and can be built and expanded upon to drive
momentum. Good pilot use cases should also tactically
be projects that have a high probability of success with
minimum impacts to current business operations. This
is likened to the minimum viable product (MVP)
BUILD THE TEAM concept in the product management school of thought.
Picking these issues to experiment on also allows the
Bring the identified stakeholders into the team at newly established team to break into the new tasks and
a start. Team members can be generalists with scope and also build rapport across the team.
broad skill sets who are familiar with the subject
matter, complemented by technology experts from EXPERIMENT WITH TECHNIQUES AND TOOLS
the IT and software development teams to
support the experimentation. Data scientists can While a scalable process and state of the art tools will
be gradually added to the team to run the enable scaling much faster later on, companies in this
experiments. As unveiled in our research, higher current stage should focus on delivering the MVP and
maturity teams have included members from the proof of concept as quickly as possible.
operations to data science under one roof to
expedite the discovery process. Teams may also find it helpful to work with external
partners who can help speed up the experimentation
process with their experience and solutions within your
field.
 RECOMMENDATIONS TO SHIFT THE MATURITY

An experienced team leader with product management

SHIFTING TO LEVEL 4 expertise can be brought on to continuously align the

TOWARDS
development teams towards the core enterprise
objectives, and more data engineers and scientists can
be brought on to continuously develop and optimize

OPERATIONALIZATION the process as they go along.

As model health and performance will begin posing its
challenges to your quest, consider bringing on
specialists to continuously validate and monitor the
SCALING THE TEAM quality of your models and deployments to minimize
operationalization setbacks.
As companies start tasting the first fruits of
success of experimentation, it is time to speed up REPEATABLE PROCESSES
development and deployment. More specialists in
your line of operations should be brought on to As your organization grows, processes should now be
expedite this process. put into place to smoothen out the workflow. While it is
beneficial to bring in teams of different backgrounds
and expertise, the different workflows associated with
their respective fields might start posing challenges.
While agile development styles can help get work
delivered in the experimentation phase, more machine
learning focused techniques and tools should be
considered to cement an iterative development flow.
MLOps platforms should be adopted to keep workflows
and performance monitoring in sync and collaborative.
RECOMMENDATIONS TO SHIFT THE MATURITY

More business units should be enrolled into the program,

and specialized task forces or pods can be spun off
SHIFTING TO LEVEL 5 from the original AI team to help spread the new

PROLIFERATION
capabilities to these business units, disseminating their
expertise and experience across the organization.
These pods should become more specialized in certain
interconnected business processes or business units,
developing solutions that have the enterprise’s overall
architecture in mind.
WIDER TEAMS AND MORE SPECIALIZED
PODS STABILIZING YOUR TECH STACK

As the fruits of operationalization have been As processes have shaped into SOPs in the previous
promoted and recognized across the enterprise, phase, the infrastructure and tech stack should see a
more business units and functions will want to certain stability in this phase.
participate and leverage on organizational
A truly stable tech stack should consider modularity in
resources to accelerate their goals. This will spark
its design, allowing for experimentation and adoption of
a renewable momentum within the enterprise.
new software and solutions as the landscape evolves.
The overall space is still highly dynamic with new
offerings emerging and older ones retired at light speed.
Hence it is imperative to keep an open eye on new
relevant technologies to ensure the entire system stays
up to date.
 RECOMMENDATIONS TO SHIFT THE MATURITY
TRANSCENDENCE
While none of our respondents have currently arrived
at this phase yet, we envision that in this stage,
enterprises will no longer see AI as an independent
SHIFTING TO LEVEL 6 initiative. AI is already part of the organizational DNA,
with all employees, top to bottom, harnessing the

TOWARDS applications that have been developed to assist them in

their daily work. Many models are already in production,

DEMOCRATIZATION
enabling management to rise above their competitors
and achieve high levels of business efficiency.
Businesses seeking to achieve this stage should start
deploying easy to use (no code/low code) software and
applications for everyday users, that allow for smooth
intuitive human-system interface.
Business leaders should continue to build and
evangelize an AI embracing culture, continually
facilitating open cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Enterprises should also continuously help employees
improve their competency to harness these
technologies to enhance their work efficiency and
workflow.
THE STATE OF TAIWAN ENTERPRISE AI 2021
A FINAL WORD
In this report, we hope we’ve provided a glimpse into the current
state of enterprise AI adoption in Taiwan, and the challenges posed
to companies across each different stage of the AI maturity cycle.

We are in the early days of technological developments, and in the

harnessing of these technologies. But we believe that these
findings are encouraging signals to our fledgling state, that
promises to mature quickly into a stronger system for growth in the
near future.

We strongly believe that the AI adoption maturity is a cycle. And the

ecosystem of technologies and solutions continue to evolve
dynamically. Even the most developed companies should keep an
eye on the latest industry developments to sustain their edge, and
maintain the most current technologies to stay relevant.

We look forward to the survey in years to come, and continue to

chronicle the developments of the industry going forward.
 In this report, we hope we’ve provided a glimpse into
the current state of enterprise AI adoption in Taiwan,
and the challenges posed to companies across each
different stage of the AI maturity cycle.
We are in the early days of technological developments,
and in the harnessing of these technologies. But we
believe that these findings are encouraging signals to

A FINAL WORD
our fledgling state, that promises to mature quickly into
a stronger system for growth in the near future.
We strongly believe that the AI adoption maturity is a
cycle. And the ecosystem of technologies and solutions
continue to evolve dynamically. Even the most
developed companies should keep an eye on the latest
industry developments to sustain their edge, and
maintain the most current technologies to stay relevant.
We look forward to the survey in years to come, and
continue to chronicle the developments of the industry
going forward.
 METHODOLOGY

The purpose of the Hive Ventures State of Taiwan

Enterprise AI 2021 report is to study the adoption of
artificial intelligence and machine learning
technologies and its applications across enterprises
in Taiwan across the ecosystem, and draw
comparisons with other economies to help local and
global communities understand and evangelize
enterprise transformation with artificial intelligence.
The online survey was conducted between January
10, 2021 to February 28, 2021, and collected
responses from 247 respondents, representing a
range of industries, company sizes, and functional
specialties.
Respondents were then classified into the various
maturity levels based on a weighted average score
on each component category, in data readiness,
team readiness, and operational readiness. These
readiness scores in each component were
calculated based on their respective weighted
average responses in the survey pertaining to each
component category.
ABOUT
Hive Ventures is a global venture capital firm
committed to accelerating technological advancements
from Taiwan to build a smarter, hyperconnected world.
Led by a team of entrepreneurs with deep expertise in
AI and big data, the firm invests in early-stage
companies developing the building blocks of AI, SaaS,
Software and other future technologies. It is Taiwan’s
leading fund focused on startups in these industries in
Taiwan.
With an extensive global network and a strong
entrepreneurial and technological background, Hive
Ventures aims to raise the profile of Taiwanese-led
startups and drive Made in Taiwan 2.0 internationally. It
has a track record of backing companies that break
data silos, accelerate development and enterprise
collaborations/processes, and enhance Taiwan’s brand
as the leading market in AI and SaaS innovations,
including successful co-investments with other leading
strategic and financial investors in the region.

To find out more, visit https://www.hiveventures.io/

Origin
As President Tsai’s inaugural address on May 20, 2016
indicated that “The new administration will pursue a
new economic model for sustainable development
based on the core values of innovation, employment
and equitable distribution”, the government will
promote the innovation economy on the basis of the
5+2 industrial transformation such as ASVDP and
Biotech and Pharmaceutical, jointly develop Taiwan’s
new economy development model, and implement
digital transformation of national development.
Vision
In order to connect with advanced technology R&D
capabilities globally for the development of next
generation industry, NDC, MOST, MOEA, and other
ministries will jointly promote the "Asia Silicon Valley
Development Plan," the government will build a R&D
oriented innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem.
This plan was approved at the No.3514 Cabinet
Meeting by Executive Yuan on Sep 8th, 2016, and was
composed of two core elements —“Promoting IoT
Innovation and R&D” and “Optimizing Startup &
Entrepreneurship Ecosystem”—, linking with global,
local and future, and promoted with four major
strategies.
TAIWAN AI ACADEMY

Established by the Science & Technology Ecosystem Development Foundation and the Taiwan Data Science
Foundation, the Taiwan AI Academy is operated by the Artificial Intelligence Foundation with support from the
Institute of Information Science (IIS) and the Research Center for Information Technology Innovation (CITI) of
Academia Sinica.
At the Taiwan AI Academy, we endeavor to nurture generations of top AI talent through our intensive four-month
training programs. To cultivate a fertile ground for AI growth, we have marshalled the professional strength of the
industrial, academic, and governmental sectors in Taiwan and gathered leaders across disciplines under one roof to
serve as our faculty.
Our goal is to help industries in Taiwan gain a competitive edge in the AI revolution and open doors of infinite
opportunities for industrial development. We look forward to a future where professionals across fields can solve
problems in their domains through AI, ultimately becoming the driving force that takes industries to new heights.
ALPHA Camp is a tech and startup school present in Canner is a data management software company that
Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Our mission is to provides data access control, pipelining, and
help talents in Asia build meaningful careers in collaboration tools to enterprises, maximizing data
technology. We help you develop future-ready skills, an intelligence control, efficiency, and minimizing cloud
entrepreneurial mindset, and the professional network
to succeed in the digital economy costs in one single virtualized database.

InfuseAI is a prime machine learning company founded Profet AI (JWII) was established by a group of experts
by elite industry experts in 2018. The company serves familiar with operation systems across R&D,
corporations who are striving to offer related manufacturing, IoT, AI machine learning, and cloud
development and data analysis results to their native technologies, aiming to build high value-
customers. With assistance from InfuseAI, corporations, added auto machine learning solutions that solve
organizations, and institutions are empowered to business and factory management problems, thus
acquire, process, and obtain insights from data and helping customers achieve digital and intelligent
quickly see the results through the tailor-made factories.
solutions.`
Cacafly is a leading Taiwanese Full service Digital Marketing group, serving thousands of Fortune 500 and SMB
clients for over an decade. Cacafly provides MarTech solutions and services spanning campaign planning, media
buy, analytics and ROI optimization.
Its parent holding company funP group (BVI) was founded by a group of NCTU EECS alums in 2006, who
developed in-house AI-powered proprietary adtech platforms such as Tenmax.io, Adhub and Lychee Acho.
Cacafly now operates offices in Taipei, Hsinchu, Tokyo, Vietnam, and Malaysia.
Please visit us at www.cacafly.com.
National Development Council 國家發展委員會 Richie Tsai Acting CEO, Taiwan AI Academy
Asia Silicon Valley Development Agency Ning Ning Yu VP, R&D, LA , Taboola
ASVDA亞洲·矽谷計劃執行中心
Edward Chen Strategy Consultant
Taiwan AI Academy 台灣人工智慧學校
Yves Huang CEO, Cacafly
ALPHACamp
Brian Yang Co-Founder, Cacafly
Canner, Inc.
Wufu Chen Chairman
InfuseAI
Joseph Yang Chairman
ProfetAI

Our sincere gratitude to all the friends, partners and advisors who have painstakingly assisted and advised us in
designing, producing, distributing and participating in this survey and report.
Report Download