Shaping a Philippine AI policy

As Filipinos use these systems, Aquino argued, “The AI is also training you.” He cited the West Philippine Sea, saying that a Chinese AI model could present the dispute differently from a Filipino-developed one.The DOST said it was already pursuing the idea. A program to develop a Philippine large language model has been approved under the National AI Center for Research and Innovation. It will cover major Philippine languages and those spoken by smaller communities, with public access targeted for 2027.The concern is legitimate. Language, data sovereignty and the way Philippine history is represented in tools used by children deserve attention. A Filipino-language assistant could also improve access to government services.But sound management requires more than a good idea. It asks whether the idea is appropriate for the country’s needs, resources and capabilities. By that measure, the campaign for a homegrown AI model deserves closer scrutiny.AI runs on electricity — one of the Philippines’ biggest weaknesses. The average residential power rate reached P12.43 per kilowatt-hour in June, slightly higher than Singapore’s. The Philippines outpriced one of the world’s richest economies not because of prosperity but scarcity. In the Visayas, 21 power plants were on forced outage, placing the region under yellow alert.Connectivity is another obstacle. According to the Department of Information and Communications Technology, about 43.9 percent of households lack internet access. Fixed broadband reaches only 33 percent of households, below the Asean average of 41 percent. A Filipino chatbot is of little use to a family that cannot go online.Even more troubling is comprehension. Under the stricter definition used in the 2024 Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey, only 70.8 percent of Filipinos aged 10 to 64 were functionally literate or able to read, write, compute and comprehend. The Second Congressional Commission on Education also found that 88 percent of students entering Grade 7 were not reading at grade level.The strongest defense against being “trained” by foreign AI is not necessarily a domestic model. It is a citizen who can read critically, evaluate sources and recognize bias. A local model speaking 20 languages cannot protect a child who struggles to understand a paragraph in any of them.The Philippines also keeps reaching for someone else’s playbook — yesterday as a manufacturing hub, today as a frontier AI developer — while undervaluing what the world already pays Filipinos to do.The IT-business process management industry earned more than $40 billion in 2025 and employed 1.9 million workers. This year, revenues are projected to reach $42.3 billion, with employment rising to 1.96 million.That success is built largely on Filipinos’ command of English and their creativity, warmth and adaptability.Wrong targetNone of this means AI is irrelevant. It means the country may be aiming at the wrong target.AI is already disrupting the services sector. The IT and Business Process Association of the Philippines has lowered its 2028 projections because of rapid AI adoption and intensifying competition. Its best-case forecast now stands at $50.5 billion in revenue and 2.14 million workers, down from $59 billion and 2.5 million, respectively.That gap represents billions of dollars in export earnings and hundreds of thousands of jobs. It will be determined largely by how effectively Filipinos use AI — not by whether the country builds its own frontier model.As AI takes over routine work, demand will grow for judgment, context, communication, empathy, design and taste. These are areas in which Filipinos excel. Opportunities include AI-enabled customer service, implementation and change management, quality evaluation, trust and safety, localization, animation, content creation, game development and design.Global capability centers offer another opening. India has more than 1,800 compared with about 160 in the Philippines. Industry leaders believe the Philippines can become a strong second destination.The national ambition should be to make the Philippines the world’s most trusted partner in putting AI to work — deploying it, operating it, explaining it and surrounding it with human service.The government must improve power reliability, expand broadband beyond Metro Manila, treat literacy and English proficiency as economic infrastructure, and help today’s service workers become AI-enabled employees through industry-designed training.A sovereign model can be part of that agenda, but at a realistic scale. Instead of building a frontier system from scratch, the government can adapt open models to Philippine languages and public services. It can invest in assets only Filipinos can provide: digitized local-language material, laws, jurisprudence and public records.That would protect the cultural interests Aquino rightly raised at a fraction of the cost, without diverting resources from the foundations on which the entire digital economy depends.The question for Philippine AI policy is not simply whether a machine can speak Filipino. It is whether, five years from now, the world will still call on Filipinos to make its machines work.Kay Calpo Lugtu is the chief operating Officer of Hungry Workhorse, a digital and culture transformation firm. She may be reached at kay.lugtu@hungryworkhorse.com.