Mr. Truong Duc Luong
Founder and Chairman of the Vietnam Network Security JSC (VSEC)
TAs someone active in the technology field, particularly in network security technology, in various roles, I believe attracting investment is very important. The essence of investment is to drive the application of technology into practice, delivering value sooner and more effectively.
Vietnam has implemented many policies and, leveraging its geopolitical advantages, has attracted many major investors to set up factories here. From the perspective of a technology company, I am more concerned with the practical aspects, specifically, delivering “value sooner” and “more effectively” with high technology.
When it comes to high technology, we should view it on a broader scale, whether at a regional, continental, or global level. Delivering value sooner to a business can be through revenue or the level of human resources. With investment, businesses can introduce new knowledge or capital into the research process to create new products, features, tools, or technologies for existing business processes.
Research is a repetitive process of experimentation, error, and learning to create something new that fits business processes and markets. This process is often difficult to implement without systematic investment, and with investment, businesses will better serve customers and enhance financial value. This is particularly true in the current context where AI has matured and requires application in specific industries to demonstrate its superiority. In Vietnam, I have not yet seen many applications of AI in key economic sectors such as agriculture, healthcare, and education.
In practical terms, high technology and high-tech businesses find it very challenging to “do everything”. Practicality is measured by the usefulness of technology when it is brought to market, and to make its usefulness increasingly relevant to users or markets, high-tech businesses tend to specialize in different stages of the technology chain. This makes each small stage of high technology “perfect” for the market.
Businesses need to choose the stages that suit them, and this is probably a challenging task for Vietnamese companies. On a broader level, we have not yet mastered the choice of stages we want. However, recognizing this will lead to solutions. High-tech fields like AI or semiconductors are similar; the greatest added value often lies in tasks that require the highest intellectual input.
For AI technology in specific industries, the lowest value task is data collection and cleaning, while the highest value task is researching and developing optimized AI algorithms applicable to each industry and specific requirements. Businesses are lacking investment support for high-quality human resources and there is a market need for these applications.
Financial investment and cross-border human resource cooperation can help businesses solve staffing challenges. However, the output market is a much tougher problem and requires investment at various levels, from the government to associations. Attracting investment along with the output market is currently the biggest challenge for high-tech companies in Vietnam. ■