By Alvin Toh
ACROSS Southeast Asia, the Learning and Development (L&D) landscape is undergoing its most significant transformation since the rise of online learning a decade ago. The acceleration of generative AI, paired with the need for rapid workforce reskilling, has reshaped expectations of how adults learn, how organizations build capability, and what “digital readiness” really means in 2025.
The region’s workforce realities have increased the stakes. A recent World Economic Forum analysis of Southeast Asia found that 60 percent of employers in Asean are concerned about widening digital skills gaps, while 83 percent expect rising demand for adaptability, analytical thinking and AI-related competencies by 2030. In parallel, the Asia-Pacific corporate training market is projected to grow at a 7.4-percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2031, as companies race to close workplace skills gaps.
In the face of these trends, companies and educational institutions are now confronting the reality that traditional training alone cannot keep pace with the speed of technological change. This is the context in which AI-powered Capability-as-a-Service (CaaS) solutions have emerged, not as tools to replace instructors or training programs, but as a comprehensive framework that helps organizations erect their own “AI factory.”
The arrival of generative AI in the last two years has disrupted teaching and learning significantly and has shifted the focus in this sector from solely the promotion of technical knowledge toward developing the AI literacy skills needed to manage, govern and collaborate with digital intelligence. Organizations now require workers who can critically assess AI-generated information, apply ethical reasoning, and collaborate with automated systems — human-centric competencies that machines cannot replicate.
This reality is reflected in newly AI-enhanced L&D products that deliver personalized learning through AI tutors and enhance role-specific competencies through role-play simulations. Consequently, the instructor’s role is evolving from knowledge bearer to learning designer and mentor, focused on helping learners navigate truth, manage artificial outputs and apply discretion.
Talent needed to push AI progress
Despite surging interest in AI, many Southeast Asian economies remain constrained by a shortage of AI-literate talent. In the Philippines, for example, national initiatives such as the Center for AI Research and the country’s AI Strategy Roadmap 2.0 highlight ambitions to become a regional AI hub. The country’s AI market is also projected to grow at a 27.75 percent CAGR between 2025 and 2030, resulting in a market volume of $3,487.00 million by the end of the decade.
Yet adoption on the ground remains uneven. The challenge is not accessibility — many large enterprises already subscribe to AI-powered applications. The problem is the lack of a systematic approach within organizations to manage AI ethically and effectively. Without the right skills and governance frameworks, corporate investments in AI technologies often underperform, leading to the “freemium trap” or “hodgepodge trap,” where employees resort to using free, unsanctioned tools — a phenomenon known as “shadow AI” — risking data leaks, intellectual property loss, privacy violations and fragmented productivity results across teams.
In the next five years, Southeast Asia will need far more professionals who can effectively manage new AI-charged modes of work, such as AI governance officers, AI-blended learning designers and domain experts fluent in generative AI. These emerging roles focus less on coding and more on oversight and strategic decision-making, which are skills that must be strategically built within organizations.
Responding to the AI talent shortage
Companies across the Philippines and Southeast Asia can respond to the AI skills gap steadily through two strategies.
The first is to raise baseline AI literacy across the workforce.
The fundamental starting point is equipping every nontechnical professional with AI literacy. This means transforming nontechnical domain experts into AI bilingualists, who possess expertise in their field and the know-how to translate that into targeted AI use. At a basic level, this includes applying prompt engineering techniques, understanding the basic principles of AI governance (what data can and cannot be shared), and developing the ability to critique AI outputs instead of accepting them at face value. These capabilities can be developed through short, targeted professional training programs.
The second is to build organizational capabilities, not just individual skills.
Raising individual literacy is necessary, but relying on one-off workshops or individual training alone is insufficient. What organizations need is a holistic capability-building strategy that keeps pace with evolving AI technologies.
This is where the CaaS model comes in. Designed to support sustained capability-building over time, the CaaS framework integrates five core dimensions: knowledge, comprising historical data unique to the organization to ensure AI assistants provide contextualized insights rather than generic answers; skills to use, create and govern AI tools; technology that is secure and aligned with business goals; processes that embed AI ethically into workflows (e.g., HR, legal, customer service); and flexibility in organizational culture to embrace new tools and roles, which is critical for sustaining capability development. To this end, we at Straits Interactive have also developed our own adaptive generative AI platform, Capabara, as the vehicle for delivering CaaS within organizations, including our own.
Human-centric AI education
As generative AI becomes woven into the fabric of work and learning, Southeast Asia faces both a challenge and an opportunity. The integration of AI, while offering massive productivity gains, demands that we maintain human agency, ethics and wisdom.
The path forward requires leadership commitment to building AI capability across the five CaaS levels mentioned. This includes supporting the role of the chief AI officer (CAIO) — the “master builder” who orchestrates the human and digital workforce —— and ensuring that compliance and ethics are built into the foundation of the AI factory. Critically, standards such as the EU AI Act, the ISO 42001 AI management system and national guidelines provide the necessary guardrails.
As emphasized in Unesco’s Recommendation on the Ethics of AI, human rights, transparency and human oversight should remain nonnegotiable anchors in any AI deployment. Ultimately, the future of work will not be defined by the sophistication of our machines, but by the strength of our human judgment and the systems we build to support it.
Alvin Toh is co-founder and chief marketing officer of Straits Interactive, a company that delivers end-to-end governance, risk and compliance solutions that enable globally trusted business and responsible marketing, particularly in the areas of data protection and privacy.
This article was originally published on The Manila Times.
