ROTARY CLUB OF MANILA JOURNALISM AWARDS
2006 National Newspaper of the Year 2011 National Newspaper of the Year 2013 Business Newspaper of the Year 2017 Business Newspaper of the Year 2019 Business Newspaper of the Year 2021 Pro Patria Award 2026 National Newspaper of the Year PHILIPPINE STATISTICS AUTHORITY 2018 Data Champion
BusinessMirror A broader look at today’s business
www.businessmirror.com.ph
n
Sunday, September 6, 2026 Vol. 21 No. 327
EJAP JOURNALISM AWARDS
BUSINESS NEWS SOURCE OF THE YEAR
(2017, 2018, 2019, 2020)
DEPARTMENT OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
2018 BANTOG MEDIA AWARDS
P25.00 nationwide | 2 sections 12 pages | 7 DAYS A WEEK
THE SHADOW & THE SWARM
Why Filipino workers adopt AI faster than their employers Structural Barriers
INCE the energy crisis started in March, fuel, shipping, and electricity costs have spiraled, and Philippine companies are scrambling for any margin they can find. Increasingly, many are finding it in artificial intelligence—specifically, in tools their own employees started using long before management signed off.
The Obstacles Between Pilots and Scale The survey data reveals a consistent set of barriers preventing AI from scaling beyond pilot
Bring Your Own AI
THE numbers describe a workforce that stopped waiting for permission. At least 86 percent of individual AI users at Philippine companies now bring their own tools to work, and 42
alignment, confirming that successful AI adoption depends as much on organizational readiness as on technology capabilities. Understanding these barriers matters for two reasons. First, they explain why momentum has stalled for many organizations despite genuine enthusiasm and executive commitment. Second, they reveal where intervention can accelerate progress. Organizations that address
Exhibit 8
What challenges has your company faced in adopting AI?
Source: Swarm, Philippine AI Report 2025 Executive Report
strictly accountable for any per‑ sonal data processed by AI systems under their control—whether the deployment was officially autho‑ rized or not. Simultaneously, under the current energy emergency, run‑ ning unmonitored AI pricing mod‑ els that lack a transparent, audit‑
Philippine AI Report Executiveretailers Brief 17 able decision trail2025 leaves defenseless against Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) profi‑ teering audits, which penalize price hikes exceeding 10 percent without explicit justification. “Traditional [IT] security is no longer enough,” Swarm CEO Dexter Ligot‑Gordon warns in an
In Their Honor: 25 Years of 9/11 By Troi Santos
N
EW YORK CITY—Twentyfive years after September 11, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum is preparing to mark the anniversary with a new exhibition and a nationwide educational push aimed at Americans who have no memory of the attacks. One name on the South Pool I have followed for 18 of the 25 years. On Monday afternoon the Muse‑ um described the exhibition it is about to open on the 25th anniversary of the attacks. It is called In Their Honor: 25 Years of 9/11-Inspired Service.
Beth Hillman, the Museum’s pres‑ ident and chief executive, stood before a bank of cameras at a press briefing convened with the New York Foreign Press Center—the State Department’s Manhattan outpost for foreign me‑ dia—and offered a figure that has come to define the anniversary. It felt, she joked at the top of her remarks, as though there were more cameras than people in the room. About 100 mil‑ lion Americans, she said, were either unborn on September 11, 2001, or too young to have registered what was hap‑ pening. Each year, she said, the annual promise to never forget becomes both Continued on A2
MINIRHENYX | DREAMSTIME.COM
percent pay for premium accounts— such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Claude—out of pocket rather than charging a corporate card. It is a resounding vote of confi‑ dence in the technology, but a mas‑ sive compliance warning sign for the organizations around them. When staff copy and paste sen‑ sitive customer lists, proprietary pricing spreadsheets, or critical supply chain plans into consumergrade tools that retain inputs for AI model training, they quietly expose their employers to massive liabilities those companies may not even know they are carrying. Feeding a customer database into a public chatbot is a direct Data Privacy Act breach, regardless of who typed the prompt. Under National Privacy Com‑ mission Advisory No. 2024-04, organizations acting as Personal Information Controllers are held
The proof‑of‑concept graveyard
stages. These challenges span human capital, technical infrastructure, and organizational
these issues proactively will move from pilots to scaled deployments faster.
That bottom‑up rush is now documented in one of the country’s first nationwide benchmark of cor‑ porate AI adoption—The Philippine AI Report. Based on a survey of 175 orga‑ nizations by Manila‑based global AI consultancy firm Swarm with contributions from the Analytics and AI Association of the Philip‑ pines (AAP), the report found that 92 percent of Philippine companies have used AI in some capacity. But adoption has been almost en‑ tirely improvised: employees teaching themselves, paying out of pocket, and outrunning the governance structures meant to manage them.
exclusive interview with BusinessMirror. “IT departments must treat AI governance as table stakes, im‑ plementing secure enterprise tools that block data leakage to external model developers.”
PART THREE
THE title wall of In Their Honor: 25 Years of 9/11-Inspired Service, opening at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum on September 12. TROI SANTOS
VADIMRYSEV | DREAMSTIME.COM
S
By Malou Talosig-Bartolome
IF the risk is obvious, so is the rea‑ son boards have not moved faster to contain it: money. Ligot‑Gordon said Western companies typically invest in AI in‑ frastructure first and work out the use cases later. Philippine boards want it the other way around. “Western markets invest first and figure out how to use AI later,” he said. “In the Philippines, corpo‑ rate boards expect an ROI on the very first use case.” That expectation has pro‑ duced what the report calls a “proof‑of‑concept graveyard”: 65 percent of local AI initiatives never make it past the pilot stage. Production‑grade AI requires real investment in data and secu‑ rity infrastructure up front, and loading all of that cost onto a single pilot makes the first use case look far more expensive than it should. “If you’re trying to load all of the ROI onto the first-use case, it’s going to look very expensive,” Ligot-Gordon concedes. “What’s also making [AI adoption] slow is that you have to put a lot of infra‑ structure for your first implemen‑ tation.”
Breaking the logjam
TO break this corporate stalemate, Ligot-Gordon suggests a simple, collaborative approach—cluster‑ ing strategy. Instead of forcing a single department to carry the heavy cost of building the compa‑ ny’s first AI foundation, businesses can bundle three to five related projects together. For instance, marketing, fi‑ nance, and supply chain teams can collaborate a project that requires an AI solution. Sharing the same tools and splitting the massive setup bill would make the AI in‑ vestment instantly affordable for everyone. “If you get three or four de‑ partments to share the cost, you split the bill across multiple bud‑ gets and get immediate traction,” he suggested.
Where AI-investment ROI is immediate: Demand forecasting
SINCE the energy crisis began, domestic transport and logistics costs have repriced overnight, with trucking rates surging by 50 per‑ cent, inter-island shipping rates caps climbing 25 percent, and whole electricity spot prices nearly doubling to exceed P9 per kilowatthour. In this high-pressure environ‑ ment, the immediate corporate line of defense is inevitably costcutting. Continued on A2
A CROSS-SECTION of the Survivor Tree, the callery pear that lived through the collapse at Ground Zero, displayed near a commemorative quilt in the exhibition. TROI SANTOS
A FIREFIGHTER’S turnout coat, signed by responders, on display in the exhibition. TROI SANTOS
PESO EXCHANGE RATES n US 62.4940 n JAPAN 0.4010 n UK 84.5731 n HK 7.9712 n CHINA 9.3027 n SINGAPORE 49.3439 n AUSTRALIA 44.9832 n EU 72.6680 n KOREA 0.0461 n SAUDI ARABIA 16.6433 Source: BSP (September 4, 2026)