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PwC released its 2026 AI Performance Study this week, surveying 1,217 senior executives across 25 sectors worldwide and finding that nearly three-quarters of AI's economic gains are flowing to roughly one-fifth of organisations. The leading companies share a common trait - they are using AI primarily to pursue growth rather than just cut costs. Growth-focused firms are two to three times as likely as their peers to deploy AI for identifying opportunities across industry boundaries, such as partnering with companies outside their core sector. The study found that efficiency-only strategies deliver diminishing returns, while companies combining AI with cross-sector expansion are pulling sharply ahead.

Google DeepMind released Gemma 4 in early April, a family of four open-source models ranging from a compact 2B-parameter edge variant to a 31B dense model that currently ranks third on the Arena AI text leaderboard. All four models support native image and video processing, with the smaller variants also handling audio input for speech recognition. The 31B model runs entirely on a single 80GB Nvidia H100 GPU while matching or exceeding benchmarks set by proprietary models many times its size. The entire family ships under a fully permissive Apache 2.0 licence, meaning unrestricted commercial use, modification, and redistribution with no royalty obligations.

Stanford University's 2026 AI Index Report and a new survey highlighted by TechWire Asia show that Southeast Asian populations are the most optimistic about AI anywhere in the world, but the region's governance infrastructure has not kept pace. In Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Singapore, more than 80 per cent of respondents say AI will profoundly change their lives within three to five years. Singapore leads all 30 surveyed countries at 81 per cent public trust in government AI regulation, followed by Indonesia at 76 per cent, Malaysia at 73 per cent, and Thailand at 70 per cent. Yet most ASEAN nations still rely on voluntary frameworks and soft-law guidance rather than binding AI-specific legislation, with Vietnam the sole exception after enacting an AI law in December 2025 that takes effect in phases from March 2026.