Connectivity Alone Not Enough As ASEAN Faces Emerging Ai Divide - Industry Players

By Soon Li Wei

KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 9 (Bernama) -- ASEAN’s digital transformation needs to move beyond expanding network coverage towards ensuring that citizens can participate safely, affordably and meaningfully in an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven economy, amid concerns that the traditional digital divide could evolve into an “AI divide”.

International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Chief of Strategic Planning and Membership and Special Advisor to the Secretary-General, Sulyna Abdullah, said connectivity alone did not guarantee participation, particularly when users remained sceptical about the safety, integrity and resilience of digital platforms.

“A network can be fast, a service can work exactly as designed. Today, an AI agent can complete the task in seconds and yet people may still hesitate.

“Connectivity brought us into the digital economy and trust will determine how confidently we live in it, in a region where data, payments, digital services and increasingly AI systems cross national boundaries,” she said during the ‘Digital Trust Summit Keynote Session: Digital Trust as A National Capability’ in conjunction with M360 ASEAN 2026 here today. 

Sulyna said building digital trust required a focus on three fundamental pillars: safeguarding users, enabling participation and strengthening infrastructure resilience, especially as fraud and impersonation eroded public confidence while AI complicated issues of identity and accountability.

She noted that the transition from informational AI systems to autonomous agents capable of transacting on behalf of individuals raised serious questions regarding authorisation, identity verification and legal liability when transactions failed.

“We are moving from AI that answers questions to AI agents that can plan, act, transact on our behalf,” she said.

Sulyna added that user trust also depended heavily on whether the critical infrastructure underpinning the digital economy remained uninterrupted during crises, which called for robust resilience across terrestrial networks, subsea cables and satellite systems, backed by closer cross-border coordination.

“The challenge for ASEAN ultimately comes down to three questions from the perspective of ordinary users: 'Do I feel safe using these technologies? Can I benefit from them? And will the systems I depend on still be there when I need them most?

“If we can answer yes, we will have built more than a connected ASEAN people can trust,” she said.

Meanwhile, ZTE Corporation senior vice-president for the Asia Pacific and CIS region, James Zhang, warned that the rapid acceleration of AI risked entrenching a new layer of inequality if computing infrastructure became prohibitively expensive for emerging markets.

He said the global demand for AI tokens was outstripping earlier forecasts, widening the gap between developed and developing nations in computing capacity, investment and adoption.

“Although the telecommunications industry has spent years narrowing the connectivity gap, the emergence of AI means policymakers and industry must now consider whether people and economies have equal opportunities to benefit from intelligence rather than focusing solely on connecting them. 

“The objective now should not only be (to) connect everyone; it should be (to) make sure everyone has the same opportunity to benefit from intelligence,” he said.

He highlighted four strategic pillars essential for sustainable AI development: sovereign AI, security, affordability and sustainability, noting that governments needed to preserve national languages, local culture and personal privacy while safeguarding critical data assets.

“Affordability ultimately comes down to whether AI can serve more people rather than becoming accessible only to those able to afford increasingly expensive computing resources.

“The sustainability challenge is equally significant, with the growth of AI placing increasing pressure on energy, land and other resources, requiring governments and industry to reassess plans that were developed before the recent emergence of large-scale AI models,” he said. 

He suggested that the telecommunications sector’s established model of infrastructure sharing could serve as a practical blueprint for AI, allowing nations and enterprises to pool resources, minimise duplicate investments and make computing capacity widely accessible.

M360 ASEAN 2026, organised by the GSM Association on Sept 9 and 10, brings together ministers, regulators and industry leaders to discuss digital trust, artificial intelligence, resilient infrastructure and regional digital integration.

The event, held for the first time in the ASEAN region and in Malaysia, is endorsed by the Ministry of Communications, with the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) as host partner.

-- BERNAMA