Help SMEs use AI to their advantage

Taiwan’s export orders surpassed US$100 billion for the first time last month, reaching a record US$102.96 billion and amounting to an increase of 71.4 percent year-on-year. Sustained demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing has fueled growth in semiconductors, servers and related supply chain industries.

Although this is certainly a commendable achievement, behind these impressive figures lies a more pressing question for the nation to consider: Can the economic momentum generated by the AI boom extend to Taiwan’s vast community of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)?

Taiwan holds a crucial position in the global AI hardware supply chain, but for many SMEs, AI use remains limited to chatbots, copywriting or personal productivity support. What truly affects a company’s competitiveness is whether it can integrate AI into its everyday operations.

For example, can customer service be made more efficient? Can repetitive workloads involving quotations and administrative data be reduced? Can inventory and sales information be organized more quickly? Can employees shift time spent on routine tasks toward serving customers and creating value?

The next stage of Taiwan’s AI policy should not focus solely on chips, computing power and large-scale investment — it should also assist SMEs in streamlining their processes, developing talent, managing data and putting AI into practical use.

What Taiwan’s SMEs truly need might not be expensive AI systems, but a path to digital transformation that is affordable, accessible and genuinely useful.

Taiwan’s export orders surpassing US$100 billion demonstrates that the nation has already secured an important position in the AI wave. The next step is to enable more SMEs to use AI to boost productivity, which would help ensure that the benefits of AI become more than just growth export figures, allowing them to instead translate into enhanced corporate competitiveness and higher value work.

Taiwan has already proven its ability to manufacture AI technology — now, it has to empower the nation’s vast network of SMEs to properly utilize it.

Liu Dian-ke is a pharmacist and a doctoral student of business administration at National Chung Cheng University.