ARTIFICIAL intelligence did not arrive in our company through a government policy, a conference, or a formal announcement. It arrived quietly through tools our developers use to write and review code, systems that help teams analyze documents, and the growing expectation that work that once took days should now be completed in hours.
As the founder of a Philippine technology company building platforms for digital payments, rural banks, cooperatives, blockchain, and government services, I see both the promise and the pressure of AI firsthand.
AI can help a smaller technology company develop faster and compete with organizations that have much larger teams. It can assist programmers, improve customer support, detect unusual transaction patterns, and reduce repetitive work. But every improvement raises practical questions.
If an employee enters proprietary source code, customer information, financial data, or an internal document into an AI platform, where does that information go? Who retains it? Can it be used to improve a foreign-owned model? What happens when the technology becomes so embedded in our operations that replacing it is no longer simple?
These questions are no longer limited to technology companies.
A bank may use AI to detect fraud. A hospital may use it to help interpret medical images. Farmers can receive advice based on weather, soil conditions, satellite imagery, and crop patterns. During typhoons, AI-assisted systems can analyze hazard data, estimate damage, and help direct government resources to the communities that need them most.
In government, AI could examine thousands of procurement records and identify unusual pricing, repeated suppliers, suspicious bidding patterns, or projects that are inconsistent with actual public needs. Used properly, it could make corruption harder to hide.
But the same capabilities can also be used differently.
A system designed to detect fraud can be used to profile citizens. Facial recognition intended to improve security can become a tool for permanent surveillance. A digital identity created for convenient public services can become a mechanism for tracking people’s movements, transactions, associations, or political activity.
The technology may be the same. The difference lies in who controls it, what rules govern it, and whether citizens have the right to question its decisions.
This is why the upcoming World Artificial Intelligence Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance in Shanghai is important. As governments, technology leaders, and researchers gather to discuss the future of AI, developing countries such as the Philippines should participate not merely as consumers of technology but as nations with their own interests, constitutional values, and strategic choices.
Technological sovereignty does not mean rejecting technology from China, the United States, Europe, or elsewhere. Neither does it mean building everything ourselves. Global cooperation is necessary because no country develops AI in isolation.
But cooperation should not become permanent dependence.
Imagine a Philippine government agency using a foreign AI system to determine who qualifies for public assistance. The data may be stored locally, but the model may be owned abroad, its reasoning may be impossible to inspect, and its rules may change without public scrutiny. If a citizen is denied assistance, who explains the decision? Who is accountable—the government agency, the local technology provider, or the foreign company that developed the model?
That is not merely a data privacy issue. It is a question of sovereignty and due process.
AI sovereignty is more than requiring servers to be located inside the country. We must also ask: Who owns the infrastructure? Who controls the model? Can Filipino regulators audit it? Can our institutions continue operating if a provider withdraws its service or geopolitical relations change? Can we transfer to another platform without losing years of data, investment, and institutional knowledge?
Our telecommunications networks, cloud infrastructure, data centers, energy systems, and cybersecurity capabilities are becoming the foundation of an AI-enabled economy. Telecommunications companies are no longer simply carrying voice and internet traffic. Increasingly, they will carry the data on which AI systems learn, operate, and make decisions.
A country may possess legal sovereignty while remaining technologically dependent in practice.
The Philippines should therefore avoid becoming permanently tied to one foreign vendor, one cloud provider, one foundation model, or one geopolitical technology ecosystem. We should support interoperability, open standards, local capability, sovereign infrastructure, and systems that government agencies and regulated industries can independently audit.
At the same time, sovereignty should never become an excuse for excessive state control.
AI is already being adopted faster than many laws and institutions can respond. Existing laws on privacy, cybercrime, labor, consumer protection, and intellectual property provide some safeguards, but many were not designed for generative AI, synthetic identities, deepfakes, or automated decision-making.
The answer is not to regulate every AI application as though it presents the same risk.
An AI tool that helps a small business prepare a product description should not face the same obligations as an algorithm that influences creditworthiness, employment, health care, access to government assistance, elections, or law enforcement.
Regulation should be based on risk and actual impact.
Low-risk innovation should have room to grow. High-risk AI should be subject to stronger requirements for testing, transparency, cybersecurity, auditability, human oversight, and accountability. Citizens should know when an automated system materially affects their rights, opportunities, benefits, or access to essential services.
We must also avoid writing rules that only large global corporations can afford to follow. If compliance becomes too expensive for Filipino startups and smaller technology companies, regulation may unintentionally eliminate local competitors and strengthen the foreign technology monopolies it seeks to govern.
Government use of AI deserves an even higher standard because government possesses powers that private companies do not.
Digital authoritarianism does not always arrive through an obvious declaration. It may arrive as a convenient application, a mandatory digital identity, an invisible citizen score, a facial-recognition camera, or an algorithm that quietly influences who may travel, transact, speak, work, or receive public services.
Efficiency is valuable, but it does not justify removing consent, privacy, due process, or the right to challenge government power.
A democratic government should use AI to make public institutions more transparent to citizens—not to make citizens more transparent to the state.
As the world gathers in Shanghai, the Philippines should neither fear AI nor follow global powers without question. We can learn from China’s scale and execution, the innovation ecosystems of the United States, Europe’s rights-based regulatory experience, and lessons emerging from other countries. But we must develop a distinctly Filipino approach—one grounded in our Constitution, economic realities, democratic values, and the need to build local technological capability.
AI should help Filipino businesses compete, help government serve better, and give citizens greater access to opportunities. It should not make our country technologically dependent, our institutions less accountable, or our people easier to control.
We should welcome artificial intelligence—but never at the price of surrendering human rights, democratic accountability, or national sovereignty.
Ann Cuisia is the founder and chief executive of TraXion Tech, a Philippine technology company specializing in blockchain, digital payments, fintech, and digital transformation. She is an advocate for financial inclusion, AI governance, and emerging technologies.
