ATxSummit 2026 Opens with Shared Regional Ambition to Harness AI for Public Good

1. ATxSummit 2026 officially kicked off this evening with Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam as the Guest-of-Honour at the Opening Gala Dinner at Gardens by the Bay. This year’s ATxSummit will bring together government leaders from Asia, the Middle East and the United States of America; International organisations such as the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), as well as industry and academic luminaries including Denise Dresser, OpenAI’s Chief Revenue Officer, David Zapolsky, Chief Global Affairs & Legal Officer, Amazon, Jane Sun, CEO of Trip.com Group, William Dally, Chief Scientist at NVIDIA, Professor Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal, a pioneer in deep learning, and Professor Dawn Song of University of California, Berkeley, known for her work in artificial intelligence (AI) security and trustworthy machine learning.

ASEAN’s Youth Showcase AI-Enabled Solutions for Society

2. The highlight of this year’s Gala Dinner was a new showcase of 11 youth projects from the inaugural AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge. With AI adoption across the region reaching 85% in 2024¹, these projects demonstrated how the next generation in ASEAN is already shaping practical AI solutions for the public good. Shortlisted from over 600 team submissions across all ASEAN Member States, the 11 projects spanned themes of healthcare, education, social inclusion and agriculture, with a common objective of improving lives and strengthening communities across the region.

3. President Tharman presented the top three prizes to the teams from Brunei, Cambodia and Myanmar. The three winning teams presented innovative applications aligned to the Challenge’s focus on knowledge, skills and learning, scientific progress and stronger communities. Brunei’s ΣHAI, the overall winner, developed an AI-powered dementia care platform that uses speech, language and video analysis to support earlier detection of cognitive decline, provide personalised caregiver guidance, and improve dementia care coordination across ASEAN communities. Cambodia’s Voha.ai applied AI to help hearing-impaired children improve their pronunciation through real-time speech recognition and visual mouth-tracking technology. Future Flux from Myanmar focused on providing an offline AI education platform powered by edge computing to provide rural students with access to digital learning, adaptive lessons and AI tutoring in areas with limited internet connectivity. These winners were awarded cash prizes of USD 5,000, USD 3,000, and USD 1,000 respectively.

4. Koo Sengmeng, Director of Talent & Ecosystem at AI Singapore, said, "This is the kind of impact we hope to see from our AI Ready ASEAN effort – our future generations not just knowing how AI works, but knowing where it matters, where it should be used, and how it can improve lives."

5. ΣHAI, said: “Through Sahabat-Care, we wanted to address the growing challenge of dementia detection and caregiver support in Southeast Asia. This platform has helped us explore how AI can support caregivers with more timely insights, personalised guidance and better decision-making for elderly care.”

6. The AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge is a regional ideathon organised by AI Singapore (AISG) in partnership with the ASEAN Foundation, with support from Google.org and in collaboration with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA). It is part of the AI Ready ASEAN initiative to equip 5.5 million people with foundational AI literacy and capabilities. Built around the theme “AI for an Inclusive and Sustainable ASEAN”, the Challenge called on youth aged 18 to 35 to develop AI-based solutions across three priority areas: knowledge, skills and learning, scientific progress and stronger communities. Each proposal was required to demonstrate real-world applications, including outreach to at least 1,000 community members.

AI-Powered Healthcare Research and Solutions

7. Earlier in the day, two Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) were signed at the SingHealth AI in Health Symposium held at Capella, Singapore, a pre-event of ATxSummit 2026. These MoU will further drive AI-powered healthcare research and accelerate practical solutions for patients and health systems. They reflect the increasing need for scalable solutions given how ageing populations, rising chronic disease burdens, and uneven access to care are placing growing pressure on healthcare systems across Southeast Asia. They also demonstrate how AI is increasingly answering this call – sharpening clinical decision-making, supporting healthcare workers and extending quality care to more patients:

• SingHealth and the Gyalpozhing College of Information Technology (GCIT), Royal University of Bhutan, signed an MoU to develop and implement innovative initiatives that promote the responsible use of AI in healthcare, with a focus on creating localised solutions for emerging healthcare systems. At the heart of the collaboration is an AI-assisted Chest Radiograph model powered by MerMED-FM, a multimodal, multi-specialty medical imaging foundation model born out of a collaboration between SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medicine Centre and A*STAR's Institute of High Performance Computing. Published in The Lancet Digital Health, the model has demonstrated good performance in detecting pneumonia, tuberculosis, hepatic masses, and colorectal cancer. Trained on Bhutanese data and expected to roll out in 2027 across Bhutan's Gelephu Mindfulness City Healthcare Hospitals, the model brings specialist-level diagnostic capability to rural communities where geographical barriers and shortages of radiological expertise remain pressing challenges and signals a broader ambition for SingHealth to transform diagnostic care across the region.
• Singapore General Hospital (SGH), the flagship hospital of SingHealth, Singapore‘s largest public healthcare cluster, also signed an MoU with the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)’s Diagnostics Development Hub (DxD Hub) to accelerate the translation of AI-enabled and multimodal precision diagnostics into market-ready solutions. This partnership will fast-track the development of commercially scalable diagnostic tools, from fighting antimicrobial resistance infections to detecting early memory loss in seniors, with the ambition of spinning off investable companies that bring sustainable health and economic impact to Singapore and beyond. 

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