Before you buy the software

Vietnam is enthusiastic about technology, and rightly so. Vietnamese consumers are among the most digitally active in Southeast Asia, and a survey commissioned by Amazon Web Services in 2025 found that around 18 per cent of Vietnamese businesses were already using artificial intelligence, up from 13 per cent a year earlier. The same survey, however, found that most of them used it only at a basic level, and that the most common obstacle was a shortage of skilled staff.

In other words, buying technology is the easy part. Getting value from it takes more.

What the numbers say

Large technology projects are notoriously hard to steer. A study by McKinsey and the University of Oxford of more than five thousand IT projects found that large ones ran, on average, 45 per cent over budget and delivered considerably less value than expected. In a separate McKinsey survey, fewer than one in five digital transformations was reported to have both improved performance and kept that improvement. Interestingly, smaller organisations reported better results than large ones. Size and complexity are risks in themselves.

Process first, then technology

The most common mistake we see is automating a process that does not work well in the first place. A confusing approval procedure does not become clear because it moves into an app; it simply becomes confusing faster. So before choosing any system, it helps to draw how work really flows today, remove the unnecessary steps, and agree who is responsible for what.

Start with one real problem

Rather than a company-wide programme, pick one problem that costs time or money every week: quotations that take too long, stock that is never quite right, reports that arrive after the decision has been made. Try a modest solution, measure the difference, and learn. If it works, extend it. If it does not, you have lost little and learned a lot.

Invest in people as well as tools

The best system is of little use if nobody feels confident using it. Training, a clear owner for each tool, and patience in the first months matter as much as the licence itself. AI in particular rewards staff who understand the business well enough to ask it good questions and to check its answers.

Used this way, digital tools and AI are not a leap into the unknown. They become one more practical way of doing good work a little better every month.