President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. chaired the fifth joint meeting of the Private Sector Advisory Council’s Education and Jobs Sector Group and Digital Infrastructure Sector Group at Malacañang on August 5, 2026, where PSAC formally proposed establishing a National AI Implementation Task Force. The council’s pitch is to align government agencies, businesses, schools, and tech groups around a single coordinated push to prepare students, workers, entrepreneurs, and micro, small, and medium enterprises for AI adoption — rather than leaving upskilling, regulation, and infrastructure planning to move independently across different agencies, as they largely have so far.
The concrete number attached to the proposal is P650 million, which PSAC recommended drawing from the Higher Education Development Fund specifically to fund AI upskilling programs in colleges and universities starting the following academic year. Business leaders including Sabin Aboitiz spoke at the meeting about how AI is actively reshaping jobs and industries across the country, framing the task force less as a speculative future-proofing exercise and more as a response to disruption that’s already underway. The discussion also touched on semiconductor and electronics industry development, tying the AI workforce push to the country’s broader ambitions in hardware manufacturing, not just software and services skills.
Why a Task Force, Specifically
The Philippines has no shortage of AI-adjacent initiatives already in motion — the Department of Science and Technology has its own separate 1-million-Filipino AI upskilling target, the Clark AI hub buildout is proceeding with backing from Washington, and a bilateral Pax Silica AI hub framework with the United States is reportedly on track to be signed by November. What’s been missing is a single coordinating structure to make sure those efforts reinforce rather than duplicate each other, and PSAC’s proposal is explicitly aimed at that gap. A national task force with real convening authority across government, private sector, and academia is the kind of institutional plumbing that doesn’t generate headlines the way a big funding round or a new data center does, but is often what determines whether a country’s AI strategy actually executes coherently or fragments into a dozen well-intentioned but disconnected programs.
The Money Is Real, but the Task Force Isn’t Approved Yet
It’s worth being precise about where this stands: PSAC has proposed the task force and the funding allocation to the President — this is a recommendation from a private-sector advisory body, not yet an enacted policy or a released budget. The P650 million figure is specific and earmarked toward a specific fund, which is more concrete than most policy proposals at this stage, but the actual creation of the task force, its mandate, its leadership, and the mechanics of how the funding would be disbursed to individual colleges and universities all remain to be worked out. Philippine founders and educators should treat this as a strong signal of direction rather than a program they can apply to today.
What This Means for Philippine Founders
If this task force materializes as proposed, it creates two concrete things worth watching closely over the next several months. First, a real, government-coordinated AI upskilling pipeline feeding through Philippine colleges and universities is exactly the kind of talent supply Philippine AI startups have been short on — founders building AI products should watch for how the P650 million actually gets allocated and consider whether their own company could plug into university partnerships, internship pipelines, or curriculum input once the programs stand up. Second, a national task force explicitly tasked with aligning government, business, and tech groups is a natural venue for startup ecosystem representation — the kind of body where policy decisions affecting AI regulation, data governance, and public procurement of AI tools get shaped before they become law. Founders and industry groups like the Startup PH ecosystem should be paying attention to who ends up staffing and advising this task force once it’s formally constituted, since early involvement in a body like this is usually far more valuable than reacting to policy after it’s already been written.
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