2025 was the year AI in Asia-Pacific shifted from experimentation to expectation. Enterprises began moving beyond pilots, boards demanded clearer business outcomes, and industries from banking to healthcare pushed more aggressively toward automation. Yet a common pattern held the region back: AI could not scale because enterprise foundations were not ready. Data remained fragmented, systems were siloed, and governance practices lagged behind adoption.
In 2026, these constraints can no longer be absorbed at the margins. This will be the year AI shifts from adoption to activation, driven by two major changes — the verticalisation of agentic AI ecosystems, and the rise of invisible, embedded intelligence inside core enterprise workflows. Underpinning both shifts is the recognition that a modern integration platform as a service (iPaaS) like the Boomi Enterprise Platform, which provides clean data, interoperability, and governance, is the prerequisite for safe and scalable AI.
APAC’s AI Readiness: High Ambition, Uneven Architecture
Across APAC’s diverse economies, one theme is consistent: AI ambition is accelerating faster than enterprise readiness.
MIT’s “State of AI in Business 2025” found that 95% of organisations struggle to generate meaningful ROI from AI, largely due to weak data foundations and integration gaps. The same study revealed a significant governance gap: 90% of employees use AI tools informally, while only 40% of organisations officially support them, creating unmanaged operational risk.1
Boomi and FT Longitude’s “Navigating the AI Agent Governance Gap” report reinforces this urgency: just 2% of organisations have fully accountable AI agents, and nearly 80% lack visibility or control over agent behaviour.2
Across the region, this challenge takes different forms. Malaysia’s AIGE framework sets a strong governance baseline, yet many enterprises still lack unified data architectures. The Philippines continues to battle widespread integration gaps and data fragmentation, especially across financial services and the public sector. In Australia, boards have elevated AI oversight, but government digital modernisation has not progressed at the pace seen in neighbouring countries.
EY’s wider assessments reveal the same bottlenecks across the region: siloed systems, inconsistent data quality, and a shortage of AI-ready skills.3 Boston Consulting Group reports that although APAC is the second-fastest region globally for GenAI adoption, only around 30% of enterprise workflows are mature enough to support AI safely at scale.4
2026 is the year these gaps must close, beginning with the rise of vertical agent ecosystems.
Prediction 1: The Verticalisation of Agentic AI Ecosystems
AI in APAC is evolving beyond general-purpose models into sovereign and sector-specific ecosystems that reflect the data, regulations, and workflows of each industry.
Financial Services
Singapore’s MAS continues to set the region’s benchmark for responsible AI, emphasising fairness, explainability, and auditable decisioning.5 But this shift extends well beyond Singapore. Philippine banks are adopting AI to strengthen fraud detection and credit scoring. Malaysian financial institutions are modernising under Bank Negara’s risk governance standards. Globally, PwC estimates banking AI spend is projected to rise from US$6B in 2024 to about US$85B by 2030, and AI could generate US$2T in new banking value by 2028, increasing profitability by ~9% for early adopters.6
Insurance
Australia’s insurers are accelerating the use of agentic workflows to automate claims assessment and triage complex cases. Regionally, AI investment in insurance is expected to grow around 60% by 20276, with autonomous agents increasingly performing first-level assessment and anomaly detection.
Healthcare
IDC forecasts that APAC healthcare GenAI spending will double by 2026, and that up to 80% of patients across the region may rely on hybrid care by 2027.7 Malaysia is building a national data-sharing architecture to support AI-assisted health services. In Australia, aged care and disability support organisations are embedding automation and integration to modernise patient and member management. These developments reinforce that healthcare’s AI future depends on secure, governed interoperability and not standalone models.
Logistics & Manufacturing
APAC’s logistics hubs, from Singapore to Sydney, are adopting agentic systems for routing, fulfilment, and real-time exception handling. Manufacturers in Malaysia are integrating predictive agentic systems to reduce downtime, balance workloads, and optimise energy usage.
Across all industries, one trend is clear: context overtakes scale. The most valuable agents will be those trained on the nuances of specific domains including their risks, data models, decision pathways and regulatory constraints.
Yet as vertical ecosystems multiply, integration complexity increases. The Straits Times reports that M&A activity across APAC shows consolidation rising in fintech, healthcare, logistics, and digital infrastructure,8 each adding new systems and governance requirements.
This sets the stage for the second shift.
Prediction 2: Invisible, Embedded Intelligence — The Rise of Agentic Automation
Agentic automation will embed itself directly into finance, HR, supply chain, healthcare, and other workflows. These agents won’t feel like standalone AI systems but like operational infrastructure that continuously orchestrates decisions behind the scenes.
In the Philippines, AI-enabled back-office augmentation is accelerating across the IT-BPM sector. In Australia, higher education institutions and utilities are integrating autonomous assistants into scheduling, student engagement and load management. Malaysia’s airlines and hospitality providers are piloting conversational and operational agents to improve service responsiveness.
But autonomy brings risk. Healthcare and financial services, two of the most regulated industries in APAC, continue to highlight gaps in AI guardrails, auditability, and real-time oversight.9 When AI is embedded deeply and silently, trust cannot be an afterthought.
This is why the region is moving rapidly toward data quality, governance and observability being built into the architecture rather than layered on top.
Modern iPaaS: The Foundation for Responsible Agentic Transformation
Modern iPaaS has become the architectural backbone for agentic AI. It is no longer just middleware or connectivity. It is the enterprise nervous system enabling:
- Consistent data quality and lineage
- Secure, governed API pathways
- Real-time event orchestration
- Multicloud interoperability
- Full lifecycle visibility over agent behaviour
It ensures AI agents operate with the right connections, context, and controls. Without this, autonomy becomes unpredictable, especially in high-stakes environments such as banking, healthcare, transportation, and public services.
Modern iPaaS also supports the full agent lifecycle: design, activation, monitoring, auditing, and, when required, intervention. This aligns directly with regional policy momentum. APEC’s AI Initiative 2026–2030 calls for cross-border AI cooperation, trusted data exchange, and resilient digital infrastructure, all of which depend on a modern integration foundation.10
The 2026 Mandate for APAC Leaders
- Modernise integration architecture to eliminate silos and reduce AI risk.
- Adopt sector-specific agentic strategies aligned with local regulation.
- Embed agentic automation into core workflows.
- Implement full lifecycle governance for autonomous agents.
- Strengthen data quality, flow, and lineage, the region’s biggest AI bottleneck.
Agentic transformation is no longer optional. It is becoming the operating model of the modern enterprise.
APAC’s Defining Role in the Agentic AI Era
With sovereign AI ecosystems forming, industry models accelerating, national governance frameworks maturing, and digital adoption rising across Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia, and Singapore, APAC is uniquely positioned to define the global blueprint for agentic transformation.
2026 will not simply be another year of AI progress. It will be the year vertical agents reshape industries. The year invisible intelligence becomes operational reality. And the year a modern iPaaS like the Boomi platform becomes essential infrastructure for safe, scalable autonomy.
The organisations that lead in APAC will be those with the best-integrated, best-governed, and most contextually intelligent ecosystems and not necessarily the biggest models.
APAC is ready. Now it must execute.
Contact Boomi experts in your region to find out how we can help you transform your business with a modern iPaaS.
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Sources
[1] MIT Project NANDA Review – State of AI in Business 2025, https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Business_2025_Report.pdf
[2] Boomi and FT Longitude – Navigating the AI Agent Governance Gap, https://boomi.com/content/report/navigating-ai-governance-gap/
[3] EY – AI Readiness in Singapore 2025, https://www.ey.com/en_sg/newsroom/2025/07/ai-adoption-outpaces-governance-as-risk-awareness-among-the-c-suite-remains-low
[4] Boston Consulting Group –In the Race to Adopt AI, APAC Is the Region to Watch, https://www.bcg.com/publications/2025/generative-ai-adoption-in-asia
[5] Monetary Authority of Singapore – Guidelines for AI Risk Management, https://www.mas.gov.sg/news/media-releases/2025/mas-guidelines-for-artificial-intelligence-risk-management
[6] PWC – AI’s next frontier in banking and insurance, https://www.pwc.com/m1/en/publications/documents/2024/graph-llms-the-next-ai-frontier-in-banking-and-insurance-transformation.pdf
[7] IDC – AI-Powered Healthcare in Asia Pacific: What’s Next for 2025 and Beyond?, https://www.idc.com/resource-center/blog/ai-powered-healthcare-in-asia-pacific-whats-next-for-2025-and-beyond/
[8] The Straits Times – More healthcare, digital asset M&As in S’pore expected in 2026, http://straitstimes.com/business/companies-markets/more-healthcare-digital-asset-mas-in-spore-expected-in-2026-but-mega-deals-on-the-wane
[9] Corporate Compliance Insights – Navigating APAC’s Mixed Approach to AI Regulation, https://www.corporatecomplianceinsights.com/navigating-apac-mixed-approach-ai-regulation/
[10] APEC Artificial Intelligence (AI) Initiative (2026-2030), https://www.apec.org/meeting-papers/leaders-declarations/2025/2025-apec-leaders–gyeongju-declaration/apec-artificial-intelligence-(ai)-initiative-(2026-2030)