ATxSummit 2026 opens in Singapore with showcase of 11 youth AI projects addressing healthcare, education, and agriculture across ASEAN

ATxSummit 2026, hosted by Singapore's Infocomm Media Development Authority, officially opened with Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam as Guest-of-Honour. The summit brings together government leaders from Asia, the Middle East and the United States; international organisations including the World Bank, OECD, and ITU; and industry and academic leaders including Denise Dresser (OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer), David Zapolsky (Amazon Chief Global Affairs & Legal Officer), and Professor Yoshua Bengio (University of Montreal, pioneer in deep learning).

Eleven finalist youth projects from the inaugural AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge were showcased, shortlisted from over 600 submissions across all ASEAN Member States. The projects spanned healthcare, education, social inclusion and agriculture. Top winners included Brunei's ΣHAI (an AI-powered dementia care platform using speech, language and video analysis), Cambodia's Voha.ai (helping hearing-impaired children improve pronunciation through speech recognition and visual mouth-tracking), and Myanmar's Future Flux (an offline AI education platform using edge computing for rural students).

President Tharman presented cash prizes of USD 5,000 to Brunei's ΣHAI, USD 3,000 to Cambodia's Voha.ai, and USD 1,000 to Myanmar's Future Flux. According to the body, AI adoption across ASEAN reached 85% in 2024.