- Why Malaysia is bypassing Silicon Valley to learn from an AI founding father
- Plans including industry-specific AI applications, investment funds, targeted upskilling programs
The realization came during an AI conference in Singapore last year, held by a top consulting company. Nazir Razak, chairman and council member of ASEAN Business Advisory Council Malaysia (ASEAN-BAC), had spent an entire day listening to consultants explain the various aspects of artificial intelligence (AI) to a room full of executives. His verdict was blunt: “I literally walked out and thought, ‘the consultants have no idea’. I realized they knew just about as much as I did – which was very little!”
It was a sobering moment for someone who chairs the Kuala Lumpur-based (KL) council. “Everybody’s at sea,” Nazir observes. “Nobody really knows what to do. And everybody’s kind of reaching out.”
But Nazir also had a deeper concern. As chairman and council member of ASEAN-BAC, he sees AI as “the defining technological change of our era”—but also recognizes that Malaysia’s private sector is essentially flying blind.
His concern extends beyond just catching up. “There’s a new form of colonialism happening,” he warns, referencing academic work being done at Oxford. “Without proper consciousness, we might wake up and suddenly find we’re controlled by these [tech giants]. They bypass all the traditional protective mechanisms.”
Nazir isn’t alone in his concerns here. Goh Peng Ooi, founder of regional banking software leader, Silverlake Axis Sdn Bhd and, along with Nazir, a founding member at ASEAN-BAC is also concerned.
For Goh, the urgency is even more personal. At 71, having spent four decades building software systems, he sees this as possibly his last chance to share what he has learned. “I’m not going to be diplomatic,” he says when asked about consulting firms and tech giants missing the point. “If I’m diplomatic, then you don’t get the correct version,” he said, referring to the impact of AI on business.
Using ASEAN BAC Malaysia as their platform to create real awareness about AI, not hype or fear-based, for businesses in the country, before expanding to other ASEAN nations, they officially launched AI Malaysia (AIM) on May 30 in KL under the theme ‘AI Conversations 2025.’
The platform is designed to foster collaboration between businesses and AI advancements both domestically and specifically in the ASEAN region.
The focus on AI builds on the technology already identified last year by ASEAN-BAC as one of the 12 key areas to focus on in 2025 when Malaysia is the chairman of ASEAN.
Nazir noted a gap in Malaysia’s private sector over understanding of AI. “There is a national AI strategy, things are moving, thankfully,” he said, referring to the Dec 2024 launch of the National AI Office. Before this, in Oct, homegrown tech companies also got together to form a national AI consortium or KAIN (Konsortium AN Negara) as it is known by its Bahasa Malaysia acronym. But he felt there was nothing focused on educating and creating awareness for businesses in the private sector, which would end up being the main users of AI.
AIM-ing to learn from ‘one of the four horsemen of AI’
The learning journey of the AIM members would be different. AIM will not follow the crowd and be ‘so-called expert’ led. Instead it would go directly to the source – meaning to the actual experts of AI.
With so much hype, concern and confusion around AI, Goh, a mathematician whose conversations inevitably veer into the world of physics and math, decided that the best learning outcomes would come from learning from the right people in the first place.
And who better than one of the universally acknowledged founding fathers of modern AI, Prof Richard Sutton— a recent Turing Prize winner this March, who flew in to KL and spoke at the launch of AIM. “His motto is ‘AI for all,'” Goh notes. “He’s really open-minded, extremely nice. He really wants to drive AI globally. Don’t you think it makes sense to invite him to come talk to us?
“Prof Sutton, who teaches at University of Alberta, is one of the “four horsemen of AI”, says Goh, referring to the Turing Prize winners who fundamentally shaped the field. Joining him is Prof Geoffrey Hinton, who teaches at the University of Toronto, Prof Yoshua Bengio at University of Montreal, and Yann LeCun.”
Eye on ASEAN
AIM represents the first component of a broader ASEAN strategy that Nazir hopes will eventually span the region. “We seed the idea, identify the pro tem group led by Goh, and then they run,” he explains. “Once there’s a Malaysia AI platform, we want other ASEAN countries to provide us with their counterparts (respective business groups).”
The model has already worked in adjacent areas. ASEAN-BAC recently established carbon market associations across Thailand, Singapore, and Indonesia. “If we don’t set our own standards for carbon credits, the West will set them for us,” Nazir notes. The same logic applies to AI.
AIM has outlined ambitious plans including industry-specific AI applications, investment funds, and targeted upskilling programs, while positioning itself as Malaysia’s voice in global AI discussions. The platform aims to facilitate collaboration across corporations, academia, government-linked companies, SMEs, and government agencies—a complex coordination challenge in Malaysia’s fragmented business landscape.
The initiative emerges as Malaysia attempts to transition from AI strategy to widespread implementation, backed by the Ministry of Digital, National AI Office, and founding members including CIMB, Boston Consulting Group, Axiata Silverlake, and UTAR.
The stakes
What emerges from this conversation isn’t just another tech initiative, but a recognition that Malaysia’s business community has been caught fundamentally unprepared for a transformation that’s already reshaping global commerce.
The risk isn’t just a competitive disadvantage—it’s irrelevence. “Countries can leap because of technology,” Nazir notes, “but the reverse is also true. Countries can be colonized if they don’t know what’s going on.”
In a landscape where billion-dollar investments are yielding unclear returns and consultants are charging premium rates for borrowed wisdom, AIM’s approach to go directly to AI’s founding fathers represents something genuinely different: a bet that understanding matters more than following trends.
It’s a refreshingly honest admission in an AI mega wave drowning in borrowed expertise and repackaged promises. Whether AIM succeeds, and deliver on its ambitious regional vision remains to be seen. To be sure, building genuine AI capability across ASEAN will require more than a few expert visits and good intentions.
Karamjit Singh contributed to the article