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AI in the Philippines

Pax Silica: Inside the AI Hub That Could Redefine the Philippines’ Tech Future

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The Philippines just landed a 4,000-acre bet on the future of AI infrastructure — and the fine print is as revealing as the headline.

The Weekly Headline: Pax Silica — Inside the AI Hub That Could Redefine the Philippines’ Tech Future

This month, Malacañang confirmed it is backing “Pax Silica,” a US-initiated program to secure supply chains for artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and critical minerals. The centerpiece: a 4,000-acre industrial hub planned for New Clark City in Tarlac, with a framework agreement between the Philippines and the United States expected to be signed in November.

Why this matters beyond the ribbon-cutting

AI doesn’t run on algorithms alone — it runs on chips, minerals, and electricity. Pax Silica is a bet that the Philippines can become a physical anchor point in that supply chain, leveraging its high-purity silica sand and quartz reserves in Zambales and Tarlac. If it goes through, it could position the country as more than a back-office hub for global tech — it becomes part of the hardware layer AI depends on.

The tension underneath the announcement

Palace Press Officer Claire Castro has assured the public that President Marcos is committed to following Philippine law and that “there will be no displacement of communities.” But House Assistant Minority Leader Renee Co disputes that framing, warning that the project could displace farmers, agricultural workers, and Dumagat indigenous communities across Central Luzon, and that the water demands — over 5 million gallons daily for cooling — deserve far more scrutiny than they’re getting. The National Water Resources Board says supply is sufficient; critics aren’t convinced.

This is the pattern every emerging AI economy runs into eventually: the promise of investment and jobs collides with real questions about land, water, and who actually benefits. Pax Silica is a live case study in that trade-off, playing out in real time before our eyes.

What to watch

Two things worth tracking as November approaches: whether the environmental and community safeguards that Malacañang has promised actually show up in the signed framework, and whether the incentives extended to multinational partners get matched by comparable investment in local education and industry — the kind of foundational work that determines whether a country benefits from an AI boom or just hosts one.

AI isn’t coming. It’s here.

Pax Silica is proof that AI’s biggest decisions aren’t only made in labs — they’re made in land-use agreements, water board hearings, and congressional statements. Following the infrastructure story is just as important as following the model releases.

Further Reading

About Doc Ligot:

Dominic “Doc” Ligot is one of the leading voices in AI in the Philippines. Doc has been extensively cited in local and global media outlets including The Economist, South China Morning Post, Washington Post, and Agence France Presse. His award-winning work has been recognized and published by prestigious organizations such as NASA, Data.org, Digital Public Goods Alliance, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and UNICEF. Doc is the featured speaker at AI Talks @ Younifest, with upcoming webinars diving into exactly these kinds of AI policy and governance questions — visit aitalks.younifest.com for details.

If you need guidance or training in maximizing AI for your career or business, reach out to Doc via https://docligot.com.

Follow Doc Ligot on Facebook: https://facebook.com/docligotAI

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Bacolod Just Held the Philippines’ Biggest AI Conversation Outside Manila

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Over a thousand people packed a convention center in Bacolod last month to ask a question Metro Manila rarely does: what does AI mean for the provinces? Doc Ligot helped close the conversation — and it points straight at governance.

The Weekly Headline: Bacolod Just Held the Philippines’ Biggest AI Conversation Outside Manila

A thousand delegates, one message: AI can’t stay in Metro Manila

From July 20 to 24, the SMX Convention Center in Bacolod City hosted “TRAIN 2026: AI & Innovation Networking Week” — a five-day gathering of more than 1,000 delegates, speakers, exhibitors, and volunteers. Organized by former DICT undersecretary Jocelle Batapa-Sigue through the Philippine ICT Innovation Network, the event covered everything from digital infrastructure and startup development to tourism, fintech, and workforce transformation. Its underlying goal was harder to summarize but easy to feel: pull the AI conversation out of Metro Manila and into the Negros Island Region, where the jobs, the risks, and the opportunities are just as real.

“Knowledge is the new currency,” Batapa-Sigue told the crowd, urging organizations to hold onto distinctly human qualities — creativity, leadership, empathy, communication — even as they adopt AI. It’s a line that could double as this newsletter’s thesis.

Doc Ligot closes the week with a hard question: who governs the machines?

The conference’s final day tackled the uncomfortable parts of the AI story: misinformation, safety, workforce disruption, public trust, and data governance. CirroLytix founder Dominic “Doc” Ligot took the stage to argue for governance mechanisms that protect the public without freezing organizations out of building and deploying AI systems in the first place — a balance that’s easy to state and hard to legislate. He then joined Batapa-Sigue for a closing roundtable on what comes next: follow-through training programs, startup support, and policy proposals that Negros Occidental — and the rest of the country — can actually act on.

CirroLytix CEO Claire Tayco also presented a framework for assessing the AI readiness of institutions and regions earlier in the week, while DICT Negros Occidental provincial director Jane Agonace laid out a readiness model built around skills, data, innovation, and governance. Taken together, the week reads less like a tech expo and more like a province building its own AI playbook in real time.

Why a regional forum matters more than it sounds

It’s tempting to file AI governance under “policy paper” and move on. But the Bacolod forum was explicit that governance without regional buy-in is just a Manila memo. Local telecom infrastructure, SME digital adoption, education-industry alignment, and disaster-preparedness tools were all treated as governance issues, not side topics — because in a country this geographically spread out, “responsible AI” only means something if it reaches the countryside too.

AI isn’t coming. It’s here.

It’s already sitting in a convention hall in Bacolod, in a province-level AI-readiness framework, and in the closing remarks of people trying to make sure the technology doesn’t just concentrate power and opportunity in the capital.

Further Reading:

About Doc Ligot:

Dominic “Doc” Ligot is one of the leading voices in AI in the Philippines. Doc has been extensively cited in local and global media outlets including The Economist, South China Morning Post, Washington Post, and Agence France Presse. His award-winning work has been recognized and published by prestigious organizations such as NASA, Data.org, Digital Public Goods Alliance, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and UNICEF.

Doc is the featured speaker at AI Talks @ Younifest, with upcoming webinars diving deeper into responsible AI adoption in the Philippines — visit https://aitalks.younifest.com for details.

If you need guidance or training in maximizing AI for your career or business, reach out to Doc via https://docligot.com.

Follow Doc Ligot on Facebook: https://facebook.com/docligotAI

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The Philippines Isn’t Chasing Bigger AI Models — It’s Building Ones That Understand Jeepneys and Typhoons

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The Philippines isn’t trying to out-build OpenAI. It’s building traffic models that recognize jeepneys, weather models tuned to 20 typhoons a year, and it just wrapped a five-day festival to prove it.

The Weekly Headline: The Philippines Isn’t Chasing Bigger AI Models — It’s Building Ones That Understand Jeepneys and Typhoons

A festival with a point to prove

AI Fest 2026 closed this week in Iloilo City after five days of hackathons, policy labs, and exhibits — the second edition of a regional showcase organized by the Department of Science and Technology’s Region 6 office. DOST Secretary Renato Solidum Jr. used the opening to make a pointed argument: the Philippines’ edge in AI isn’t going to come from building the next frontier language model. It’s going to come from data and local knowledge that foreign models simply don’t have.

His examples were concrete. Traffic models trained overseas don’t recognize jeepneys or tricycles. Weather models built for temperate countries aren’t designed for a nation hit by more than 20 tropical cyclones a year. “Our advantage lies elsewhere,” Solidum said, “in our people, our data and our deep understanding of local problems that foreign models were never trained to solve.”

The tools already in the field

This isn’t aspirational. DOST is already running vBANT.AI for traffic monitoring on Philippine roads, Project GABAY for neighborhood-level weather updates every 15 minutes, iTanong for natural-language queries against government databases, and a cluster of disaster-resilience tools — GeoRiskPH, HazardHunterPH, PlanSmart — built specifically around Philippine hazard data. Western Visayas, notably, became the first region to adopt both a Regional AI Action Plan and an AI Governance and Ethics Policy, pairing the tech rollout with actual guardrails.

The workforce bet

The other half of the strategy, announced the day before the festival opened, is people. DOST is targeting one million Filipinos for AI upskilling — spanning BPO workers, government employees, and roughly 1,000 advanced researchers pursuing graduate work in AI. It’s a deliberate hedge: not everyone needs a PhD to work with AI, but the country needs some. The National AI Strategy, running through 2028, treats compute, people, partnerships, and public benefit as four legs of the same stool.

Why governance keeps showing up in the same sentence

What’s notable is how often “ethics” and “governance” appear right alongside the technical wins — not as an afterthought, but as a stated precondition for scaling AI responsibly. That’s the exact ground Doc Ligot has been working for years. As chair of the AI Ethics and Safety Committee of the Philippine AI Business Association, and as a speaker who’s been walking regional audiences through governance frameworks — most recently at TRAIN 2026 in Bacolod — he’s been arguing that the “human-centered” language coming out of DOST needs concrete mechanisms behind it, not just good intentions. Doc Ligot is the featured speaker at AI Talks @ Younifest, with upcoming webinars digging into exactly this intersection of AI adoption and responsible governance — details at aitalks.younifest.com.

AI isn’t coming. It’s here.

A traffic model that knows what a jeepney is sounds small. It isn’t. It’s the difference between AI that gets imposed on a country and AI that actually works for one. That’s the bet the Philippines is making — and the ethics infrastructure to match it is being built in the same breath.

Further Reading

About Doc Ligot:

Dominic “Doc” Ligot is one of the leading voices in AI in the Philippines. Doc has been extensively cited in local and global media outlets including The Economist, South China Morning Post, Washington Post, and Agence France Presse. His award-winning work has been recognized and published by prestigious organizations such as NASA, Data.org, Digital Public Goods Alliance, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and UNICEF.

If you need guidance or training in maximizing AI for your career or business, reach out to Doc via https://docligot.com.

Follow Doc Ligot on Facebook: https://facebook.com/docligotAI

AI Governance Beyond Manila: What Bacolod’s TRAIN 2026 Forum Taught Us

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Over 1,000 delegates gathered in Bacolod City last month to ask a question Metro Manila rarely has to: what does responsible AI adoption look like outside the capital?

The Weekly Headline: AI Governance Beyond Manila: What Bacolod’s TRAIN 2026 Forum Taught Us

From July 20 to 24, the SMX Convention Center in Bacolod City hosted “TRAIN 2026: AI & Innovation Networking Week,” a five-day gathering of government agencies, tech companies, schools, startups, and business groups. More than 1,000 delegates, speakers, exhibitors, and volunteers showed up — not in Metro Manila, but in the Negros Island Region, a place AI conversations rarely reach in force.

Why a regional AI forum matters

Convened by former DICT undersecretary Jocelle Batapa-Sigue through the Philippine ICT Innovation Network, TRAIN 2026 was built around a simple premise: AI adoption can’t stay concentrated in the capital if it’s going to work for the whole country. Sessions covered digital infrastructure, enterprise adoption, workforce transformation, education, tourism, fintech, and creative industries — each one asking how a regional economy prepares for a technology shift that’s already underway everywhere else.

“Knowledge is the new currency,” Batapa-Sigue told delegates, pointing to a tension every organization adopting AI eventually runs into: the tools scale fast, but creativity, leadership, empathy, and communication don’t come bundled with the software. Someone still has to build that capacity deliberately.

Governance took center stage on the final day

The conference closed its final day on misinformation, AI safety, workforce disruption, public trust, and data governance — the harder questions that get skipped when AI coverage stays purely celebratory. CirroLytix founder Dominic “Doc” Ligot led that conversation, arguing for governance mechanisms that protect the public while still giving organizations room to build and deploy AI systems. It’s a balance easier to state than to design, and it’s exactly the kind of work Doc has built his career around: AI ethics that hold up in practice, not just in policy decks.

DICT Negros Occidental provincial director Jane Agonace followed with an AI-readiness framework centered on skills, data, innovation, and governance, before Batapa-Sigue and Ligot closed the event with a roundtable on what comes next — training programs, startup support, enterprise projects, and policy follow-through for the wider Negros Island Region.

AI isn’t coming. It’s here.

Bacolod’s forum is a reminder that AI governance isn’t an abstract, Manila-only debate — it’s already shaping decisions in regional government offices, classrooms, and small businesses across the country. The organizations doing this well are the ones treating governance and adoption as the same conversation, not two separate tracks.

Doc Ligot is the featured speaker at AI Talks @ Younifest, with upcoming webinars digging further into exactly these questions — how the Philippines builds AI systems that are both useful and accountable. Visit https://aitalks.younifest.com for details on the next session.

Further Reading

About Doc Ligot:

Dominic “Doc” Ligot is one of the leading voices in AI in the Philippines. Doc has been extensively cited in local and global media outlets including The Economist, South China Morning Post, Washington Post, and Agence France Presse. His award-winning work has been recognized and published by prestigious organizations such as NASA, Data.org, Digital Public Goods Alliance, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and UNICEF.

If you need guidance or training in maximizing AI for your career or business, reach out to Doc via https://docligot.com.

Follow Doc Ligot on Facebook: https://facebook.com/docligotAI

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AI in the Philippines: Beyond the BPO Floor

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The Philippine BPO industry has heard the AI warnings for years — but this week, one of the country’s leading AI ethics voices put a sharper point on exactly which jobs are at risk, and which ones aren’t going anywhere.

The Weekly Headline: AI in the Philippines: Beyond the BPO Floor

Dominic “Doc” Ligot, Director for AI Ethics and Data Governance of the Philippine AI Business Association, made headlines this week with a candid assessment of what AI actually means for the country’s biggest employment engine. Speaking on the risks facing the BPO sector, Ligot called the threat “significant but manageable” — a rare middle ground in a conversation usually split between doomsday and denial.

It’s not disappearance, it’s disruption

“The immediate danger is not the disappearance of the sector, but the automation of routine tasks, fewer entry-level positions, and growth in revenues without comparable growth in employment,” Ligot said. That distinction matters. It’s not that the industry vanishes overnight — it’s that the ladder Filipino workers have climbed for two decades, starting with routine customer service and data entry roles, is losing its bottom rungs.

The new valuable worker

Ligot’s forward-looking take is where the real insight lives. “The valuable worker will be someone who can define objectives, direct AI systems, verify their output, manage exceptions, and remain accountable for results,” he said. In other words, the job isn’t disappearing so much as moving up a level — from doing the task to supervising the system that does it. That’s a harder skill to teach, and a more urgent one.

A bigger national push

Ligot’s comments landed the same week the Philippines opened a new AI and Scale-Up Center in Manila for small businesses, the EU announced a ₱704-million package for AI infrastructure and talent development, and DOST reaffirmed its goal of upskilling a million Filipinos in AI. Ligot himself has been on the road making this case directly to industry, speaking at the 2026 Transformation Summit in Cebu on what AI transformation means for BPO-heavy regions like Cebu.

Doc Ligot is the featured speaker at AI Talks @ Younifest, where upcoming webinars dig deeper into exactly this shift — how workers, teams, and businesses adapt as AI moves from novelty to infrastructure. If this piece raised more questions than it answered, that’s the point of the series.

AI isn’t coming. It’s here.

The BPO story isn’t a Philippine problem — it’s a preview of what every knowledge-work economy is about to navigate. The countries and companies that treat this as a skills transition, not a layoff notice, will be the ones still standing when the dust settles.

Further Reading:

About Doc Ligot:

Dominic “Doc” Ligot is one of the leading voices in AI in the Philippines. Doc has been extensively cited in local and global media outlets including The Economist, South China Morning Post, Washington Post, and Agence France Presse. His award-winning work has been recognized and published by prestigious organizations such as NASA, Data.org, Digital Public Goods Alliance, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and UNICEF.

If you need guidance or training in maximizing AI for your career or business, reach out to Doc via https://docligot.com.

Follow Doc Ligot on Facebook: https://facebook.com/docligotAI

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AI Won’t Kill the Philippine BPO Industry — But It Will Change Who Gets Hired

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The Philippine BPO industry has weathered plenty of “the sky is falling” headlines before. This week, one of the country’s leading AI ethics voices put a sharper, more useful frame on the threat — and on what to do about it.

The Weekly Headline: AI Won’t Kill the Philippine BPO Industry — But It Will Change Who Gets Hired

A “significant but manageable” threat

In an August 19 report from BusinessWorld, Dominic “Doc” Ligot, Director for AI Ethics and Data Governance at the Philippine AI Business Association, offered one of the clearest assessments yet of how AI is reshaping the country’s BPO sector. His verdict: the threat is real, but it isn’t existential. “The immediate danger is not the disappearance of the sector, but the automation of routine tasks, fewer entry-level positions, and growth in revenues without comparable growth in employment,” he told the paper. “The outcome will depend on how quickly we respond.”

Which jobs are actually exposed

Doc Ligot was specific about where the risk concentrates: basic customer inquiries, password resets, data entry, transcription, appointment scheduling, and templated chat or email support. These tasks share a common trait — they’re repetitive, rules-based, and highly standardized, which makes them the easiest for AI systems to absorb. Simple claims processing, billing, and first-line technical support fall into the same category.

What survives, he argued, is work that depends on judgment, accountability, empathy, and complex problem-solving — the parts of a job that resist being reduced to a script. Industry group IBPAP echoed the point, noting that AI is “not simply eliminating work” but “fundamentally changing the kind of work that clients value,” and it has already trimmed its 2028 workforce forecast from 2.5 million to a range of 1.85 to 2.14 million employees.

From execution to orchestration

The most useful part of Doc Ligot’s analysis is the reframe he offers for workers themselves. “With agentic AI, career value will increasingly shift from execution to orchestration,” he said. “The valuable worker will be someone who can define objectives, direct AI systems, verify their output, manage exceptions, and remain accountable for results.” He also pushed back on the idea that upskilling alone solves the problem, since employers tend to train people for their current roles rather than prepare them for new ones. His prescription: portable credentials, updated TESDA and university curricula, apprenticeships, and real job-transition support from government — not just token reskilling seminars.

AI isn’t coming. It’s here.

The line that stuck with us from Doc Ligot’s comments: “The Philippines cannot prevent AI from automating BPO work. Its choice is whether to remain a source of low-cost task execution or become a center for AI-enabled expertise, business ownership, and innovation.” That’s not a talking point — it’s a decision the industry, government, and every entry-level agent are already living through.

Doc Ligot is the featured speaker at AI Talks @ Younifest, with upcoming webinars digging into exactly these questions of AI ethics, governance, and workforce readiness in the Philippines. Visit https://aitalks.younifest.com for details on the next session.

Further Reading

About Doc Ligot:

Dominic “Doc” Ligot is one of the leading voices in AI in the Philippines. Doc has been extensively cited in local and global media outlets including The Economist, South China Morning Post, Washington Post, and Agence France Presse. His award-winning work has been recognized and published by prestigious organizations such as NASA, Data.org, Digital Public Goods Alliance, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and UNICEF.

If you need guidance or training in maximizing AI for your career or business, reach out to Doc via https://docligot.com.

Follow Doc Ligot on Facebook: https://facebook.com/docligotAI

pax-silica-featured

Pax Silica: Inside the AI Hub That Could Redefine the Philippines’ Tech Future

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The Philippines just landed a 4,000-acre bet on the future of AI infrastructure — and the fine print is as revealing as the headline.

The Weekly Headline: Pax Silica — Inside the AI Hub That Could Redefine the Philippines’ Tech Future

This month, Malacañang confirmed it is backing “Pax Silica,” a US-initiated program to secure supply chains for artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and critical minerals. The centerpiece: a 4,000-acre industrial hub planned for New Clark City in Tarlac, with a framework agreement between the Philippines and the United States expected to be signed in November.

Why this matters beyond the ribbon-cutting

AI doesn’t run on algorithms alone — it runs on chips, minerals, and electricity. Pax Silica is a bet that the Philippines can become a physical anchor point in that supply chain, leveraging its high-purity silica sand and quartz reserves in Zambales and Tarlac. If it goes through, it could position the country as more than a back-office hub for global tech — it becomes part of the hardware layer AI depends on.

The tension underneath the announcement

Palace Press Officer Claire Castro has assured the public that President Marcos is committed to following Philippine law and that “there will be no displacement of communities.” But House Assistant Minority Leader Renee Co disputes that framing, warning that the project could displace farmers, agricultural workers, and Dumagat indigenous communities across Central Luzon, and that the water demands — over 5 million gallons daily for cooling — deserve far more scrutiny than they’re getting. The National Water Resources Board says supply is sufficient; critics aren’t convinced.

This is the pattern every emerging AI economy runs into eventually: the promise of investment and jobs collides with real questions about land, water, and who actually benefits. Pax Silica is a live case study in that trade-off, playing out in real time before our eyes.

What to watch

Two things worth tracking as November approaches: whether the environmental and community safeguards that Malacañang has promised actually show up in the signed framework, and whether the incentives extended to multinational partners get matched by comparable investment in local education and industry — the kind of foundational work that determines whether a country benefits from an AI boom or just hosts one.

AI isn’t coming. It’s here.

Pax Silica is proof that AI’s biggest decisions aren’t only made in labs — they’re made in land-use agreements, water board hearings, and congressional statements. Following the infrastructure story is just as important as following the model releases.

Further Reading

About Doc Ligot:

Dominic “Doc” Ligot is one of the leading voices in AI in the Philippines. Doc has been extensively cited in local and global media outlets including The Economist, South China Morning Post, Washington Post, and Agence France Presse. His award-winning work has been recognized and published by prestigious organizations such as NASA, Data.org, Digital Public Goods Alliance, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and UNICEF. Doc is the featured speaker at AI Talks @ Younifest, with upcoming webinars diving into exactly these kinds of AI policy and governance questions — visit aitalks.younifest.com for details.

If you need guidance or training in maximizing AI for your career or business, reach out to Doc via https://docligot.com.

Follow Doc Ligot on Facebook: https://facebook.com/docligotAI