Will rising AI tide lift all Asean nations or sink some?

As the AI wave sweeps across Southeast Asia, nations are racing to harness its promise. But the pace and outcomes of this transformation remain uneven.

- Hariz Baharudin Correspondent Mara Cepeda Philippines Correspondent Philip Wen Regional Correspondent Hazlin Hassan Malaysia Correspondent

Mr Lim Yi Ping walked away from a job as a healthcare marketing strategist in 2024 and into the unknown, betting that artificial intelligence (AI) would pay off.

The 34-year-old, who is single, took various courses on AI, spending up to eight hours a day experimenting with various tools. The Singaporean taught himself to stage live demos on automating workflows and generating content in a corporate voice.

The gamble worked. When it came to job hunting earlier this year, three out of four interviews for roles in marketing ended in an offer.

“If you don’t use AI, you might lose out in job seeking,” said Mr Lim, now a digital marketing strategist at FOZL Group, an accounting and advisory firm headquartered in Singapore.

But across Southeast Asia, the picture is not always as bright.

In Manila, 46-year-old call centre worker Mylene Cabalona has seen colleagues abruptly reassigned, accounts shut down without warning and entire teams displaced.

“Of course I feel threatened because I know eventually our jobs could become redundant or there would be layoffs because of AI,” said Ms Cabalona, who also heads the labour group BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) Industry Employees Network. “AI can easily be improved (upon). It’s scary!”

She said call centre agents are now monitored by AI tools that track tone and sentiment in real time, penalising staff who do not sound upbeat enough, even when speaking to irate customers.

“We're expected to use positive or cheerful words no matter what,” she said. “Even if the customer is shouting or clearly frustrated, we can’t mirror that tone or even just sound neutral. The system marks us down for that.”

Such requirements, she added, create emotional strain by forcing workers to suppress their own reactions just to satisfy what an algorithm defines as “good customer service”.