PINOY workers are already among the most advanced users of artificial intelligence, but organizations need to change how they manage people, processes and technology if they are to capture the full value of AI, Microsoft Philippines said during a media briefing on the tech company’s latest Work Trend Index Annual Report.
Josh Aquino, head of communications for Microsoft Philippines, presented the report on Aug. 7 at the Microsoft Philippines office in Makati City, highlighting the country’s performance against global benchmarks and arguing that the country’s challenge has shifted from AI adoption to organizational readiness.
“So, the headline out of this room is that the Philippines is ready for AI. Not catching up — ready and ahead of the world on the measures that matter the most,” Aquino told the media.
The sixth annual Work Trend Index, titled “Agents: Human Agency and the Opportunity for Every Organization,” draws on a survey of 20,000 full-time employed AI users across more than 20 markets, conducted from February to April 2026, as well as anonymized Microsoft 365 work signals.
Aquino said the report marks a shift in Microsoft’s central question about AI at work.
“Bottom line, the question is flipped from ‘Are people ready?’ to ‘Are organizations ready?’ And that flip is the story,” he said.
The report identified a group called “Frontier Professionals,” representing the most advanced AI users. Globally, they account for 16 percent of AI users. They use AI agents for multistep work, redesign workflows around AI, establish quality standards and retain human judgment rather than handing over decision-making entirely to AI.
In the Philippines, 25 percent of AI users fall into the Frontier Professional category, nine percentage points above the global average.
“Here’s the headline: 25 percent of Filipino AI users are Frontier Professionals, against 16 percent globally. One in four,” Aquino said. “That is 56 percent more likely than the world average to be operating at the most advanced level of AI use.”
He stressed that the figure measures maturity rather than basic adoption.
“Note the distinction: this is not adoption, it’s maturity — it’s a signal of maturity,” Aquino said.
The Philippines also exceeded the global average across the seven measures presented by Aquino, including the ability to produce work that users could not produce a year earlier, critical thinking, quality control, treating AI output as a starting point, leadership alignment and being rewarded for redesigning work.
The strongest difference was in critical thinking. Sixty-five percent of Filipino AI users identified critical thinking as the most important human skill, compared with 46 percent globally. Aquino also noted that 93 percent of Filipino AI users treat AI output as a starting point rather than a final answer.
“What excites us most, though, is beyond usage and adoption, Filipinos are also the most aware and cognizant of the importance of judgment and agency,” Aquino said.
Among Filipino Frontier Professionals, 53 percent deliberately do some work without AI to keep their skills sharp, compared with 43 percent of Frontier Professionals globally.
“Our most advanced users are the most deliberate about staying human,” Aquino said. “This is not hesitancy; it’s discipline.”
The organizational gap
Despite the strong employee-level results, Aquino said the report also exposes a gap between workers’ willingness to use AI and the support provided by their organizations.
Sixty-six percent of Filipino AI users worry about falling behind, while 53 percent said it feels safer to stick with existing priorities than redesign their work. At the organizational level, only 35 percent said they see clear leadership alignment on AI, while 25 percent said they are rewarded for reinventing how they work with AI.
“Urgency is not missing; permission is,” Aquino said.
The report found that organizational factors, including culture, management support and talent practices, were associated with 67 percent of AI’s measured impact, compared with 32 percent for individual mindset and behavior. The report notes that these figures represent statistical associations rather than causal effects.
Aquino pointed to managers as a key factor in translating individual AI capability into organizational change. Filipino Frontier Professionals were more likely to report that their managers openly use AI, establish quality standards, create room for experimentation and encourage more ambitious workflow redesign.
The presentation was followed by a fireside discussion with Gilbert Gaw, first vice president and head of the IT and Transformation Office at PLDT and Smart, who provided a local example of how an organization is approaching AI adoption.
Gaw said PLDT and Smart initially limited Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment to 200 licenses to ensure that spending was tied to measurable business outcomes rather than AI hype.
“Last year, we only had 200 Copilot licenses, right? Because we had to make sure that we use the money wisely, that there has to be a return, and we cannot jump into the hype,” Gaw said.
The company subsequently expanded deployment to 1,000 users. Gaw said weekly usage was about 90 percent and estimated the return on investment at about 150 percent, with an estimated 13 hours of employee time saved per month.
PLDT and Smart also applied AI to customer service processes. Gaw said an AI-enabled system reduced some processes involving customer complaints from hours to minutes. For its wireless stores, three processes that previously took 12 hours, six hours and four hours were reduced to five minutes, five minutes and two minutes, respectively.
The company’s StoreGenie application had been deployed across 115 wireless stores and 450 agents, eliminating about 62,000 hours of customer waiting time since February.
“We’ve never laid off anybody because of AI,” Gaw said. “We’ve adopted AI to make sure that our operations are more efficient, we are able to think about what kind of products we can offer (better products), and we are able to give our customers better service.”
The discussion reinforced Aquino’s argument that organizational change, rather than access to AI tools alone, will determine whether companies benefit from the technology.
Gaw identified governance, adoption and process redesign as the three main requirements for AI implementation. He also stressed the need for human review of AI-generated output.
“Every time we — you know, we make sure that the human is in the chain, and whatever the AI turns out, it goes through a rigorous review process,” Gaw said.
The event also included a demonstration by Rommel Sia, senior Copilot solution engineer at Microsoft Philippines, showing how Microsoft 365 Copilot can be used for meeting preparation, language interpretation and multistep tasks through its Cowork capability.
Sia demonstrated how Copilot could brief a user on upcoming meetings through voice interaction, while Teams’ Interpreter Agent could translate between English and Japanese during meetings. Cowork was demonstrated as a digital coworker capable of carrying out several related tasks from a single prompt, including preparing a briefing document, creating a presentation, scheduling a meeting and sending a Teams message.
The demonstration also emphasized the need to verify AI output. In one example involving Singapore’s Mandai Night Safari, Cowork generated comparative research, an interactive dashboard and a PowerPoint presentation, while providing sources that users could inspect to check how the AI grounded its output.
For Aquino, the examples underscored the central finding of the Work Trend Index: the Philippines already has workers capable of operating at the frontier of AI use, but companies need to redesign systems around them.
“Our people are ready. That’s not an aspiration; it is a finding measured against 20-plus other markets on the same instrument,” Aquino said.
“One in four Filipino professionals is already at the frontier, and we lead the world on judgment, ambition, and quality standards.”
“The talent question is settled. The system question — whether our organizations are built to unlock what people can already do — is the one we get to answer starting now.”
