OpenAI in APAC: Enterprise Adoption Is Real, and So Is the Skills Work

OpenAI's enterprise footprint across Asia Pacific has moved from forecast to fact. The open question for 2026 is whether organisations can build the skills to match the platform they have already bought.

Adoption stopped being a question

For two years, enterprise AI came wrapped in conditionals. Would it hold up in production, would finance sign off, would anyone actually use it. Those questions have largely been answered. OpenAI now reports more than one million paying business customers, and by its own count more than seven million enterprise seats are active, close to nine times the figure a year earlier. More than 90 percent of the Fortune 500 use its products in some form. Whatever else is true about the market, OpenAI enterprise adoption is no longer speculative. It is operational.

The part that matters for anyone working in Asia Pacific is that the region is not watching this from the sidelines. It is one of the places the growth is concentrated.

OpenAI is building in the region, not just selling into it

In May 2026, OpenAI committed S$300 million, about US$234 million, to Singapore and opened its first Applied AI Lab outside the United States, under a programme it calls OpenAI for Singapore. Regional reporting put the lab at more than 200 technical roles, anchoring the company's forward deployed engineering teams in the region.

A month later, the company named Kiran Mani as its first Managing Director for Asia Pacific, based in Singapore and covering India, Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia and Australia. Around the same time it introduced data residency for ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu and its API across Japan, India, Singapore and South Korea, which removes one of the practical blockers that used to slow regulated industries here.

The usage data backs the investment. Asia Pacific accounts for close to a third of the global market for these tools and has grown roughly fourfold year on year. South Korea is OpenAI's second largest paid market anywhere in the world, and Singapore sits among the top three for use per head of population. Named enterprise deployments already include Singapore Airlines, Grab, Sea and the Singapore Tourism Board.

Read together, these are not gestures made for a press release. They are the moves a company makes when it expects the region to be a primary source of revenue, not a follower market.

The constraint is not the technology anymore

Here is where the honest version of the story starts. The platform is in place, the contracts are signed, and the models are more than capable for most commercial work. The constraint has shifted to the people expected to use them.

The research on this is consistent and worth reading plainly. IDC projects that more than 90 percent of enterprises will feel a critical AI skills shortage in 2026, and puts the cost of that shortfall, in productivity never realised, in the trillions of dollars. Deloitte's State of AI in the Enterprise work found only a low single digit share of organisations describe themselves as operating at genuine AI maturity. Most companies have bought far more capability than their teams currently know how to apply.

Asia Pacific feels this sharply. Industry research reported by Staffing Industry Analysts found that only 21 percent of employers in the region believe they can recruit and retain enough people with AI skills, below an already modest global figure of 24 percent. Adoption here is ahead. Confidence in the workforce behind it is not.

None of this argues against the technology. It argues for the layer most organisations underfund, which is capability. A licence for every employee does not produce a workforce that knows how to prompt well, check the output, redesign a process around it, and recognise where the tool should not be trusted.

What this means for APAC enterprises

The organisations getting real value are the ones treating adoption and skills as a single project rather than two. They pair the rollout with structured enablement, they invest in the trainers and specialists who can translate a general platform into their own workflows, and they measure whether usage is actually changing how work gets done.

That is the work VMS Group APAC exists to support. The platforms have arrived, and the regional commitment behind them is now a matter of record. The advantage in 2026 belongs to the companies that build the human layer with the same seriousness they brought to the procurement.

If you are planning AI enablement across your APAC teams and want the skills to keep pace with the platform, talk to us.