A new government study just confirmed what many Filipino AI advocates have been saying for months: Philippine businesses have plenty of access to AI tools, but almost none of the readiness to actually use them well.

The Weekly Headline: The AI Readiness Gap: Why Access Isn’t Adoption in the Philippines

This week, the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) released findings that put a hard number on something that’s been an open secret in local tech circles: overall AI adoption among Philippine firms sits at just 3 percent. Even the sectors you’d expect to lead — ICT and BPO — are only at 6 to 7 percent. Agriculture, which employs a huge share of the workforce, trails at 1.5 percent.

Access is not the same as readiness

The PIDS study is careful to separate two things people often conflate: having access to AI tools, and being ready to use them. Filipino businesses, especially in urban centers like Metro Manila and CALABARZON, generally have internet, devices, and even free or cheap access to tools like ChatGPT. What’s missing is everything around that access — awareness of what these tools can actually do, staff who know how to use them well, funding to experiment safely, and clear guardrails around data privacy and IP.

The researchers found that only about one in five Philippine firms are even aware of AI and other Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies in the first place. You can’t adopt what you don’t know exists.

A pattern Doc Ligot has been flagging for a while

This gap tracks closely with something Dominic “Doc” Ligot has been saying in public forums for months: the Philippines has high adoption but low maturity when it comes to AI tools. In practice, that means individual Filipinos are quietly using AI everywhere — for schoolwork, side hustles, content, customer service scripts — while the organizations around them haven’t built the policies, training, or governance to support that use responsibly.

That mismatch is exactly why Doc Ligot has spent the past year pushing for structural fixes rather than more tool rollouts. As Director for AI Ethics and Data Governance at the Philippine AI Business Association, he reviewed 23 pending AI-related bills in Congress and helped draft an alternative proposal, the Philippine AI Flourishing Act (4E PAIFA), with colleagues Claire Tayco and Carljoe Javier. The proposal calls for a National AI Council focused on coordination rather than heavy-handed enforcement, and a new organizational role — the AI Ethics Officer — for any company deploying AI systems.

Why this matters beyond the headlines

Put the PIDS numbers next to the PAIFA proposal and a clear picture emerges: the technology is available, but the scaffolding around it — literacy, funding, and governance — is what’s actually holding the country back. Building that scaffolding is slower and less exciting than announcing a new AI tool, but it’s the part that determines whether AI ends up helping ordinary Filipino workers or just widening the gap between big-city firms and everyone else.

Doc Ligot is the featured speaker at AI Talks @ Younifest, with upcoming webinars covering exactly this kind of ground — practical AI adoption, ethics, and governance for Filipino organizations. Details and schedules are at aitalks.younifest.com.

AI isn’t coming. It’s here.

The tools have already arrived in every Philippine office, classroom, and sari-sari store with a smartphone. What hasn’t arrived yet is the readiness to use them well — and that’s the harder, more important work ahead.

Further Reading:

• PIDS: PH businesses lag in AI adoption despite digital access
• The AI readiness gap: Why Philippine businesses need more than access to technology
• Toward a Filipino framework for AI — Manila Times

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