Kota Kinabalu: In light of the new RM1,700 minimum wage which has many still groaning, Sabah Industrial Development and Entrepreneurship Minister Datuk Phoong Jin Zhe says it is time to embrace for the Artificial Intelligence (AI) that is capable of replacing human services.
“In the end, what I worry the most is not that the company can pay higher salary to the people, it is that they can replace the manpower with AI and end in increasing the unemployment rate.
Advertisement (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});“This is the real challenge that we have to face and adapt. With AI you can cut the work in half. This change is inevitable.
“The way of doing business is already changing. A new era is unfolding. Small and Medium Enterprises in Sabah are clearly aware,” he said after officiating the Small and Medium-sized Entrepreneurs Sabah (SME Sabah) Chinese New Year 2025 Open House celebrations at the Daikin Proshop at Luyang Plaza here on Saturday.
Phoong said if China’s DeepSeek AI program can disrupt the global market then there will be many “new things” to come in the following years.
“I’ve read a lot of books about AI technology since 10 years ago and I couldn’t imagine it will come so fast. Now I’m still young yet I can see this kind of thing changing rapidly.
Advertisement (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});“And the next is robotics. Can you imagine robots equipped with AI? It’s coming. It’s not something like fantasy in the sci-fi movie.
Phoong said the technological advancement could mean having to bear less operating costs by letting go of a few redundant positions.
Advertisement (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});“That is the thing that we really have to look into. So that’s why I think that to talk about RM1,700 minimum wage, It will not please everyone. You ask the worker, thousand-seven or not, they will not be happy.
“Then how are we going to move ahead, move forward as an economy? I think the whole economy needs to be enlarged by enlarging the current price, bring in more investments, more upstream and downstream manufacturing activities, more high-tech activities that can by nature create more jobs for the people.
We need to create more high-scale, high-salary jobs.
“For example, we have Kibing now which has created 2,000 jobs...our youth from overseas came home to work at factories here which tackles brain drain.
“This is a real example which creates more jobs and large companies like that have no problem in paying the salary even above RM2,000.
“That’s what we want. We want to have a better, larger economic price so that the small and medium businesses no longer have to suffer because of a sluggish economy,” he said.
