Initiative overview
The National AI Strategy Roadmap 2.0 (NAISR 2.0), launched in July 2024, is structured around two core pillars: Innovation and Implementation, operationalised through four strategic dimensions: Research and Development (R&D), Digitisation and Infrastructure, Workforce Development, and AI Governance and Ethics. Drawing inspiration from the Global AI Index, the roadmap outlines seven strategic imperatives and thirty strategic tasks distributed across government agencies, with lead responsibilities clearly assigned whilst encouraging cross-agency collaboration. The strategy is anchored on six core objectives, including increasing the regional and global competitiveness of local industries, identifying key areas for R&D investment, promoting triple-helix collaborations, preparing the workforce for future jobs, attracting major industries, and ensuring responsible AI governance.
The roadmap builds on several national strengths. The Philippines possesses a large, young, and English-speaking talent pool, producing over 800,000 college graduates annually, with more than 200,000 from STEM fields. The country's well-established IT-BPM sector, comprising over 1,300 companies and generating USD 35.5 billion in annual revenue, provides a strong industrial foundation. A growing digital economy, projected to reach USD 35 billion in Gross Merchandise Value by 2025, further underpins the strategy's ambitions.
The strategy also candidly identifies barriers to AI adoption, including limited local use cases, particularly for SMEs, scarce computational and human resources, insufficient enterprise capacity to develop data strategies, and emerging legal and regulatory uncertainties around intellectual property, and deepfakes. To address these, NAISR 2.0 pursues targeted actions such as promoting data literacy across all education levels, incentivising workforce upskilling and reskilling, funding AI startups, and establishing the Centre for AI Research (CAIR) as a national hub for synergistic partnerships across academia, industry, and government.
On governance, the roadmap calls for a robust and adaptive AI governance framework developed in collaboration with agencies including the National Privacy Commission, the Intellectual Property Office, and the Philippine Competition Commission. It envisages the formation of a dedicated committee of AI and data ethics experts to oversee AI usage, ensure compliance, and provide regulatory guidance. The strategy commits to continuous review and adaptation in response to the rapid evolution of AI, with the overarching goal of fostering a competitive, sustainable, and inclusive AI economy for all Filipinos.
