Phuong Uyen Tran
The first two pieces in this series argued that leadership behavior, not capital, is what decides whether a company adapts, and that the decisions leaders redesign have to travel with real guardrails to earn real trust. Technology is where that argument gets tested hardest. MIT’s most-cited study on the subject, published in August 2025, found that 95 percent of corporate generative AI pilots stall before they ever scale. The reported cause was not the technology. It was what the researchers called a learning gap, the distance between a new tool and the workflows, judgment, and trust it is dropped into.
Harvard Business Impact frames this as a fourth leadership discipline, alongside unlearning and decision redesign: treat every technology choice as a culture choice first. A tool that strengthens the judgment of the person using it gets adopted. A tool that simply automates the decision away from them, without the structure to explain why or the trust to back it, gets quietly worked around, however sophisticated it is.
Vietnam is now living this test at speed. The share of Vietnamese enterprises implementing AI rose from 13 percent to 18 percent in a single year, roughly 170,000 companies, and manufacturing already accounts for 21 percent of enterprise demand for AI tools, ahead of most other sectors, according to Vietnam’s AI Annual Report 2025. Funding behind that shift is real: domestic AI firms drew roughly US$80 million in 2024, up eightfold from 2023, and the government has committed 3 to 4 percent of the national budget over five years to science, technology, and digital transformation. None of that guarantees adoption succeeds. It only guarantees the tools will arrive. Whether Industry 4.0 and AI end up strengthening a factory floor’s judgment, or simply routing around it, is still a leadership decision, not a procurement one.
Tan Hiep Phat has treated its own automation the same way. As our production lines have taken on more automated quality control and monitoring, the accompanying investment has gone into higher-skill maintenance and quality-assurance roles. The guardrail from the previous piece in this series applies here too: a factory floor trusts a new system faster when the people on it understand what decisions the system is making and which ones remain theirs. Technology that clarifies that boundary earns adoption. If people cannot understand a system, question it or know how and when to practice necessary human override, technology does not create agility. It creates a faster, less visible form of centralization. On the other hand, technology that focuses on marginal gains through the elimination of routine tasks but fails to revolutionize knowledge work gets quietly ignored, however advanced it is.
Unlearning old assumptions, redesigning where decisions sit, and choosing technology on cultural terms are not three separate disciplines. They are leadership commitments practiced on three different fronts. As the global playbook is changing, Vietnam’s manufacturers are at a pivotal moment to build on these fronts. The companies that manage it will not be the ones with the highest investment into the new technology but rather the ones who thrive to master these three disciplines.
“The newest technology in a factory means nothing until the people on the floor trust what it is asking of them.” – Phương Uyên Trần
