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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

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

Fast Adopters, Slow Builders: Doc Ligot’s Wake-Up Call from Bacolod

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Over a thousand delegates packed the SMX Convention Center in Bacolod last month for TRAIN 2026 — and the line that traveled furthest afterward wasn’t about the newest app. It was a warning about the gap between how fast Filipinos use AI and how slowly the country builds it.

The Weekly Headline: Fast Adopters, Slow Builders: Doc Ligot’s Wake-Up Call from Bacolod

A five-day conference, one uncomfortable truth

From July 20 to 24, TRAIN 2026: AI & Innovation Networking Week drew government agencies, schools, startups, and business groups to Bacolod City — deliberately outside Metro Manila, and organized by the Philippine ICT Innovation Network under former DICT undersecretary Jocelle Batapa-Sigue. The goal was to push AI conversations, and eventually jobs and investment, into the regions.

Among the speakers was Dominic “Doc” Ligot, founder of CirroLytix and Director for AI Ethics and Data Governance at the Philippine AI Business Association. His message cut through the conference buzz with a single, memorable line: “We are fast adopters but slow builders.”

What “shadow AI” actually means

Doc Ligot’s concern isn’t that Filipinos are using AI — they clearly are, in classrooms, call centers, and city halls. It’s that adoption is outpacing governance. When employees quietly plug sensitive data into consumer chatbots, or agencies deploy AI tools without oversight, that’s “shadow AI” — usage nobody has vetted, sitting outside any accountability structure. Left unchecked, he argues, it exposes ordinary citizens to real risk: leaked data, biased decisions, no one to answer for either.

His point isn’t anti-AI. It’s pro-guardrail. Countries that build their own AI capability — models, talent, infrastructure — get to set the rules for how that technology touches their people. Countries that only consume AI built elsewhere inherit someone else’s defaults, including someone else’s blind spots.

Beyond Metro Manila

A companion story out of the same Bacolod gathering made a related point: the AI economy so far has clustered around major cities, and organizers want the next phase — training programs, startup support, digital jobs — to reach the wider Negros Island Region and beyond. Governance and geography, it turns out, are the same conversation. An AI strategy that only serves Metro Manila’s tech corridor isn’t really a national strategy.

AI isn’t coming. It’s here.

The Philippines doesn’t have an appetite problem with AI — it has a construction problem. Closing that gap means training builders, not just users, and writing the rules before the shadow systems write them for us.

Doc Ligot is the featured speaker at AI Talks @ Younifest, with upcoming webinars digging deeper into exactly this tension between adoption and accountability. Visit aitalks.younifest.com for details.

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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Bacolod Just Showed What AI Governance Looks Like Outside Manila

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More than 1,000 delegates packed Bacolod’s SMX Convention Center for a five-day AI summit — and Doc Ligot closed it with a hard question: who governs AI once it leaves the capital?

The Weekly Headline: Bacolod Just Showed What AI Governance Looks Like Outside Manila

A five-day AI summit, far from Manila

From July 20 to 24, the SMX Convention Center in Bacolod City hosted “TRAIN 2026: AI & Innovation Networking Week,” drawing 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 enterprise adoption to tourism tech, fintech, and — on the final day — AI governance and public trust.

That last part matters. Most AI conversations in the Philippines happen in Metro Manila boardrooms. TRAIN 2026 deliberately moved the discussion to the Negros Island Region, asking a harder question: what does responsible AI adoption look like for a province, not just a country?

Doc Ligot closes with the governance question

On the conference’s final day, CirroLytix founder Dominic “Doc” Ligot took the stage to discuss the governance mechanisms needed to protect the public while still letting organizations build and deploy AI systems. He later joined Batapa-Sigue for a closing roundtable on what should happen after the conference ends — training programs, startup support, policy initiatives, and digital jobs that actually reach the Negros Island Region.

It’s a theme Doc has pushed for years through AI and Data Ethics PH, the grassroots community he founded to examine AI’s societal consequences, and through his role chairing the AI Ethics and Safety Committee of the Philippine AI Business Association. The Bacolod forum also featured CirroLytix CEO Claire Tayco, who presented a framework for assessing the AI readiness of institutions and regions — a practical tool for exactly the kind of regional rollout the conference was pushing for.

Why “countryside AI” is the harder problem

Building an AI pilot in Manila is comparatively easy: reliable connectivity, deep talent pools, and enterprise budgets. Bacolod’s organizers flagged the real friction points — telecom infrastructure reaching outlying towns, MSMEs and agricultural enterprises adopting tools without dedicated IT staff, and workforce transformation in a region where the outsourcing industry itself is being reshaped by AI. Sessions on disaster preparedness and smart-city systems for local government rounded out a conference that treated AI less as a shiny new tool and more as infrastructure that needs governance before it needs scale.

AI isn’t coming. It’s here.

Conferences like TRAIN 2026 are a reminder that the AI conversation in the Philippines isn’t just about which model is smartest — it’s about whether the governance, connectivity, and training reach the people outside the capital who’ll actually use these tools. Doc Ligot is one of the people making sure that question gets asked out loud.

Want to hear more of his thinking directly? Doc is the featured speaker at AI Talks @ Younifest, with upcoming webinars digging into exactly these questions of AI ethics and governance. Details at https://aitalks.younifest.com.

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

daily-post-image

Bacolod Just Showed What AI Governance Looks Like Outside Manila

, , , ,

More than 1,000 delegates packed Bacolod’s SMX Convention Center for a five-day AI summit — and Doc Ligot closed it with a hard question: who governs AI once it leaves the capital?

The Weekly Headline: Bacolod Just Showed What AI Governance Looks Like Outside Manila

A five-day AI summit, far from Manila

From July 20 to 24, the SMX Convention Center in Bacolod City hosted “TRAIN 2026: AI & Innovation Networking Week,” drawing 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 enterprise adoption to tourism tech, fintech, and — on the final day — AI governance and public trust.

That last part matters. Most AI conversations in the Philippines happen in Metro Manila boardrooms. TRAIN 2026 deliberately moved the discussion to the Negros Island Region, asking a harder question: what does responsible AI adoption look like for a province, not just a country?

Doc Ligot closes with the governance question

On the conference’s final day, CirroLytix founder Dominic “Doc” Ligot took the stage to discuss the governance mechanisms needed to protect the public while still letting organizations build and deploy AI systems. He later joined Batapa-Sigue for a closing roundtable on what should happen after the conference ends — training programs, startup support, policy initiatives, and digital jobs that actually reach the Negros Island Region.

It’s a theme Doc has pushed for years through AI and Data Ethics PH, the grassroots community he founded to examine AI’s societal consequences, and through his role chairing the AI Ethics and Safety Committee of the Philippine AI Business Association. The Bacolod forum also featured CirroLytix CEO Claire Tayco, who presented a framework for assessing the AI readiness of institutions and regions — a practical tool for exactly the kind of regional rollout the conference was pushing for.

Why “countryside AI” is the harder problem

Building an AI pilot in Manila is comparatively easy: reliable connectivity, deep talent pools, and enterprise budgets. Bacolod’s organizers flagged the real friction points — telecom infrastructure reaching outlying towns, MSMEs and agricultural enterprises adopting tools without dedicated IT staff, and workforce transformation in a region where the outsourcing industry itself is being reshaped by AI. Sessions on disaster preparedness and smart-city systems for local government rounded out a conference that treated AI less as a shiny new tool and more as infrastructure that needs governance before it needs scale.

AI isn’t coming. It’s here.

Conferences like TRAIN 2026 are a reminder that the AI conversation in the Philippines isn’t just about which model is smartest — it’s about whether the governance, connectivity, and training reach the people outside the capital who’ll actually use these tools. Doc Ligot is one of the people making sure that question gets asked out loud.

Want to hear more of his thinking directly? Doc is the featured speaker at AI Talks @ Younifest, with upcoming webinars digging into exactly these questions of AI ethics and governance. Details at https://aitalks.younifest.com.

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