As artificial intelligence (AI) evolves from experimentation to enterprise-scale deployment, it is redefining how industries create value, innovate, and compete. For investors focused on real assets, industrial transformation, and sustainable growth, such as Gunung Capital, AI represents far more than a technological upgrade. It marks a turning point for productivity, efficiency, and transformation strategy.
According to McKinsey & Company’s The State of AI: How Organizations Are Rewiring to Capture Value (2025), 88% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function. Yet, two-thirds remain in the “pilot” phase, and only 6%, the AI high performers, report more than a 5% EBIT impact from their AI initiatives. The gap reveals a critical truth: AI’s transformative potential lies not in incremental efficiency, but in fundamentally reimagining how industries operate.
From Efficiency to Transformation
Most organizations begin their AI journey to enhance efficiency by automating workflows, cutting costs, or improving accuracy. However, those capturing the greatest value do more: they redesign their business models around AI decision-making. Half of the AI high performers, McKinsey finds, have restructured workflows to embed intelligent systems at the core of their operations, and they are three times more likely to deploy agentic AI, an autonomous system that can plan and execute multistep tasks independently.
This evolution mirrors what’s happening across asset-heavy sectors like steel, construction, and logistics, where traditional cost efficiencies are no longer enough. The new frontier is AI-enabled decision intelligence where predictive analytics, digital twins, and autonomous systems empower companies to anticipate rather than react.
For example, AI-driven process optimization in steel manufacturing can simultaneously cut energy consumption and carbon emissions, aligning profitability with sustainability. Similarly, infrastructure operators adopting predictive maintenance can minimize downtime and extend asset lifecycles by delivering compounding value for investors seeking long-term returns.
Agentic AI and the Green Transformation
The rise of AI agents is also influencing the way real-world workflows across manufacturing, supply chains, and finance working. Although only 23% of organizations have scaled such systems, those that do achieve significantly faster transformation outcomes.
This dovetails with the growing relevance of “Green AI” in Southeast Asia. Bain & Company’s Southeast Asia’s Green Economy 2025 highlights AI’s role in energy optimization, renewable integration, and carbon tracking. As AI evolves from passive analytics to active orchestration, it creates synergy between operational efficiency and decarbonization allowing industrial companies to become both leaner and greener.
For investors, this represents a new opportunity for funding AI-enabled transformation platforms that bridge data, sustainability, and operations across portfolio companies.
AI as Strategic Infrastructure
In today’s private capital ecosystem, AI is rapidly becoming strategic infrastructure, comparable to the role electricity played during the first industrial revolution. For Gunung Capital, AI sits at the nexus of operational transformation and impact investing.
AI high performers, McKinsey notes, allocate over 20% of their digital budgets to AI technologies and are three times more likely to have senior leaders personally driving adoption. This leadership commitment is the differentiator that moves AI beyond pilot projects into scalable value creation.
By embedding AI into transformation roadmaps, from predictive to sustainable logistics, investors can unlock measurable outcomes: lower operating costs, improved ESG performance, and greater supply-chain resilience.
Human Plus Machine: The Power of Hybrid Intelligence
A key lesson from McKinsey’s analysis is the importance of human-in-the-loop systems. The most successful AI organizations integrate human judgment into their workflows, ensuring that AI augments rather than replaces human expertise.
In capital-intensive sectors where precision and safety are paramount, this hybrid intelligence with the collaboration between human insight and machine intelligence are builds both trust and scalability. In the end of the day, the most resilient enterprises of the next decade will be those that combine human adaptability with AI-driven foresight.
The 2026 Horizon: What Lies Ahead
As AI matures toward 2026, there are several trends that will reshape the investment landscape:
- The Rise of “Physical AI”
By 2026, robotics, drones, and intelligent maintenance systems will be mainstream in manufacturing, logistics, and construction, reducing downtime and improving safety. For investors, this means productivity gains that directly enhance both profitability and sustainability. - Sovereign AI and Responsible Autonomy
As data privacy, cybersecurity, and energy sovereignty regulations tighten, AI infrastructure will increasingly resemble critical utilities. Investors will need to align AI systems with national interests and ESG goals. - AI as a Source of Novel Insight
AI will evolve from an analytical tool to a strategic collaborator capable of generating new designs, materials, and process innovation, transforming R&D and industrial design. - The Trillion-Dollar AI Economy
Resourcera (2025) reports that the global artificial intelligence market, valued at approximately USD 638.23 billion in 2024, is expected to surge to nearly USD 3.68 trillion by 2034, reflecting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 19.2 percent. For investors, the focus will shift from speculative AI startups to real-economy deployments that generate measurable impact.
Toward an AI-Enabled Investment Thesis
The convergence of physical AI, responsible autonomy, novel insight generation, and rapid market growth signals a new era of AI-enabled infrastructure investing. By 2026, successful investors will not merely deploy capital into technology, they will build the frameworks that let AI deliver sustainable, scalable value: data infrastructure, governance models, and ESG integration.
For Gunung Capital, this means deepening its role as a transformation partner, helping portfolio companies evolve from digital pilots into AI-powered ecosystems. The next generation of industrial competitiveness will belong to those who understand AI not as a single tool, but as an interconnected system, linking intelligence, capital, and sustainability.
