PHL organizations must accelerate AI adoption

By Charmaine A. Tadalan, Sub-Editor

SINGAPORE — Philippine businesses have mostly transitioned from experimentation to application of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, but adoption needs to be accelerated as these technologies continue to evolve, with agentic AI now on the rise, IBM said.

“There was a lot of experimentation last year. To me, the very big change moving on to this year is really testing it for… their own organizations,” IBM Philippines Country General Manager and Technology Leader Aileen Judan-Jiao told reporters on the sidelines of IBM Think 2025 held here on Aug. 20. 

Ms. Jiao said leaders have shifted from asking whether AI is relevant to their organizations to finding out how it can be integrated into their operations. 

“Last year, you met a lot of business leaders [who’d say] ‘I want to do AI, but my team is not ready. I don’t know when they will be ready,’” she said.

“This year, you see that whether or not they’re ready, [they’ll say] ‘I’m going to learn anyway.’ They will learn anyway because they know the window of opportunity is now.”

Hans Dekkers, IBM General Manager for Asia-Pacific, likewise noted a significant change in board-level discussions around technology.

“There is a vast difference between then and now at the C-level,” he said at a briefing.

“Now, where are many companies struggling, especially the big ones? It’s the processes, the complexities, the bureaucracy that was built. But technology has a huge ability to cut through it with the right leadership.”

In its 2025 Global chief executive officer Study, IBM found that 55% of Philippine executives are actively adopting AI agents and preparing to implement at scale. While business leaders are pressured to deliver returns on their investments, around 60% said it’s better to be “fast and wrong” than “right and slow.”

The growth of AI adoption in the Philippines is picking up compared to last year, Ms. Jiao said, adding that fear of using AI has subsided, with businesses getting more clarity on how to approach it.

“[Last year,] it’s like almost an analysis paralysis on when to invest in AI, right? But I think there’s getting to be better clarity now as to what to do first — shall I start small? Which department will go first?” she said.

“[Business leaders] don’t necessarily have to be technical to start today,” she added, noting the availability of no-code AI tools.

Still, Ms. Jiao said AI adoption could still be faster, but gaps remain in the readiness of the data architecture.

Asked how she sees AI evolving in the next year, she said “across industries, we will be working alongside AI assistants and more and more AI agents.” 

“It will require a different kind of mindset to collaborate effectively and manage teams efficiently. We can, in turn, see amazing potential for growth.”

AI adoption is most evident in the finance and services sector, led by the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, she said, adding it has also emerged in the food manufacturing industry. 

“It’s really coming up more into where the AI apps are. It’s in food manufacturing because we have a lot in FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods), in consumer industries.”

However, AI adoption is slower in the retail industry as businesses still prefer the brick-and-mortar model.

Mr. Dekkers said the Philippines, along with Indonesia, is among the few countries in the region that has the advantage of scale due to its large population and number of enterprises.

“I think they have an ability to go very, very fast with technologies like AI because they have that scale,” he said. 

Businesses have also become more open to AI in recognition of how tech-savvy their customers are, Ms. Jiao said.

“Businesses… are actively scaling up at all levels, believe it or not. But we still need to be faster because the pace is faster,” she said.

“We need to catch up and we need to do it at scale.”

AGENTIC AI
AI technologies have shifted from generative AI to AI assistants and now to agents, Parul Mishra, vice-president for WW Sales, AI Assistants, and AI Productivity at IBM, said during her keynote speech at the event.

Ms. Mishra said AI agents have more autonomy compared to assistants. They are also more proactive and adaptive, allowing them to learn and improve, but still can’t act on behalf of humans.

During a tour of its i4 Studio, IBM showcased its latest innovations, including an autonomous mobile robot powered by AI avatars called Mandy.

Mandy is a digital ranger deployed at the Mandai Wildlife Reserve in Singapore where it assists and guides guests. It can also curate itineraries and compute costs upon request.

IBM data scientist Ai Kiar Ang said their clients have expressed interest in deploying Mandy at the front office to greet visitors and manage appointments. 

“Mandy is able to host visitors, lead guests to meetings, and at the same time, notify host,” she said in an interview on the sidelines of the tour. “This one (Mandy) is for the offices, and all the parks, hospitals and airports. So, for Mandy, the application is huge.”    

IBM has also developed robot dogs equipped to conduct autonomous facility patrols using AI vision, sensors, and thermal imaging. In a demo, it showed a robot dog inspecting a data center servers, which it then converted into a natural language report that can be consumed by the specialist agents. 

“Robot dog is for cache environment. It’s able to go to power transformer tower, where nobody wants to go, but yet we need a dog to inspect cable, transformer, and things like that,” Ms. Ang said.

In a separate demonstration, the company showcased the IBM watsonx Orchestrate, which it uses to assist organizations to seamlessly integrate agents into their operations. Orchestrate not only builds an agent for businesses but also ensures all agents work together.

“Because a year from now, two years from now, everybody in this room is going to have thousands of agents working on their behalf,” Rob Thomas, senior vice-president for Software and chief commercial officer at IBM, said in his speech.

“So think of Orchestrate as exactly what it is — the orchestrator for how those agents work together.”

Outside offices, parks, and cache facilities, IBM has also entered into partnerships with sports clubs to improve how they scout talent and for fan engagement. As part of its partnership with Sevilla FC, IBM developed a tool to provide a comprehensive, data-driven identification and evaluation of potential recruits.

“They partnered with us to analyze data across the globe that they gather to choose the best player to recruit into their club,” said Kitman Cheung, pre-sales engineering leader at IBM ASEAN.

For the US Open, IBM designed a tool that monitors the tennis match and tracks every ball movement and serve to create player profiles, which it summarizes into AI commentary.

This technology can also be applied to other use cases, Mr. Cheung said, such as summarizing real-time events, news, or statistics.

Companies may not see immediate outcomes as they have only begun deploying AI agents and assistants, Ms. Mishra said.

“It is real when you deploy it at scale and with the right mechanism.”