Owning AI services key to nation's growth

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia must move beyond merely hosting digital infrastructure to building and operating an artificial intelligence (AI) services industry, said Digital Minister Gobind Singh Deo.

"A fully operational data centre employs a few dozen people, but an AI services industry, a cloud operation hub, or a regional digital headquarters employs thousands and pulls an entire nation's economy forward. That distinction is where the future of our economy will be decided.

"Our job today is to ensure that we don't just host digital infrastructure, we are looking to build it. We are looking to run it in terms of operations and we are looking to own it," he said at the MDX Forum 2026 by the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) yesterday.

Gobind said the Digital Ministry had a clear role in bringing together the key elements of Malaysia's digital and AI transformation into a coherent national agenda.

"We must create an enabling environment in which Malaysian businesses of all shapes and sizes can adopt new technologies with confidence, strengthen their capabilities, and innovate and compete in regional and global markets."

In his opening remarks, MDEC chairman Ganesh Kumar Bangah said Malaysia was entering a new phase of AI adoption, with the focus shifting towards building an AI economy capable of generating measurable and lasting value.

He said the next shift in AI would be driven by systems capable of acting, executing and coordinating on behalf of users independently of prompts through agentic AI — AI systems that can independently carry out tasks and make decisions with limited human prompting.

"We really haven't seen AI actually improving productivity. And that is what we are looking to do today as well.

"The next shift in AI is going to take it one step higher. We will now have AI that can act, execute and coordinate on our behalf independently of our prompting."

Ganesh said only one per cent of the world's population and businesses currently used AI agents, representing both an opportunity and a risk for organisations that failed to adapt.

He said Malaysia's ambition to become an AI Nation by 2030 was anchored by Malaysia Digital 2030, which provides the implementation pathway while shifting the country from being a consumer of technology towards building, commercialising and scaling local innovation.

AI technologist and Sosa Research founder Jason Sosa said AI agents needed memory and context from previous sessions to work effectively.

"Because an agent has tools, it has access to the Internet, and it has the ability to connect to other agents and spawn new agents. It has to have that memory in order to work effectively with them."

He said businesses needed to weigh the trade-offs between cloud-based AI models and running large language models on-premises.

For small and medium enterprises, Sosa said founders and senior executives should lead in experimenting with AI rather than leaving adoption to engineering teams.

He said AI could allow businesses to build a parallel version of their operations while continuing with their existing business, allowing them to test ideas quickly before committing significant resources.

Ganesh said Malaysia's industry expertise, customer relationships, data and workflows could form the foundation of its AI economy.

MDEC said the MDX Forum brought together around 300 representatives—including global investors, technology companies, state agencies and enterprises—to examine how this next phase could be translated into tangible economic value.