January 15, 2026 · The greatest lesson we are learning from the democratization of artificial intelligence is not only the need to cultivate our uniquely human abilities, but more importantly, the costs we pay for being left behind in digital transformation. In a country with subpar digital infrastructure development that manifests through uneven internet connectivity (urban vs rural), digitally illiterate populations, and continued use of legacy (outdated) systems, small business owners are set up for failure in the digital economy. How do we move on to AI when our foundations are severely lacking?
The digital divide is particularly more evident in less urbanized areas. This gap is most visible when national digital ambitions meet on-the-ground realities. I observed this firsthand on November 26, 2025, when I joined a gathering organized by the Philippine Department of Information and Communications Technology to promote newer (e.g. Industry 4.0) technologies to small business owners in Quezon province. I shared my insights on IT-BPM firms’ experiences from a report I co-wrote about leveraging AI to increase competitiveness and improve human capital capabilities.
The gathering was instructive in showing how smaller enterprises in developing areas perceive and approach new technologies such as AI. It also highlighted a cultural paradox between the wide availability of AI tools, and an individual’s acceptance of and readiness to use them—one that mirrors broader challenges in adapting to a highly globalized and competitive digital economy.
I’d like to summarize some of my insights from the event to expound more on the above issue:
- AI reveals the digital divide is not only generational but geographical. When I mentioned that 83% of the Filipino workforce uses Generative AI (GenAI), the majority, if not all, of the audience were shocked. They did not realize that many were already using GenAI, indicating they belong to the minority.
- AI highlights the low-hanging fruits. The first step that smaller enterprises in provinces should take in an AI world is to build their foundations. They need to digitalize and upgrade from manual and inefficient processes. This covers required steps for digital transformation, including organizing and digitizing their documents for machine-readability, automating processes, and setting-up cloud-based data storage systems. AI is definitely useful but it is step 3 in a process where enterprises have barely even reached step 1.
- Cultivating uniquely human abilities (it’s a human-led-machine partnership after all) is the value-adding strategy of SMEs. The real investment and value-building elements of an enterprise are what the individuals it’s composed of can offer: skills, creativity, and the power to understand and cultivate human desires, needs, wants, and experiences. In a world where smaller firms have to compete against larger, resource-intensive companies, their edge is in having quality talents, not hardware.
Solutions do not emerge from the technology itself, but from how people understand, accept, adopt, and integrate it into their lives. The real challenge is designing human-technology systems that are sustainable, context-appropriate, and embedded in everyday practices—so they endure beyond pilots and projects.
