Top 10 ASEAN stories of 2025

This past year was the tipping point for many organisations across Southeast Asia as they went beyond experimental artificial intelligence (AI) pilots to rolling out large-scale AI initiatives that delivered clear business outcomes.

For one thing, the region’s lenders – such as Malaysia’s Ryt Bank and Vietnam’s Techcombank – leapfrogged traditional digital banking, deploying agentic AI and unified data platforms to handle complex transactions and personalise customer engagement.

Others took the opportunity to bolster their infrastructure foundations, with major players – including Standard Chartered and Metrobank in the Philippines – doubling down on modernising their data infrastructure and private cloud capabilities to support new and emerging workloads.

Beyond the corporate world, the Malaysian public sector started equipping half a million civil servants with generative AI tools, while Singaporean researchers were leveraging Google Deepmind’s AlphaFold tool to decode Parkinson’s disease, underscoring how AI and deep tech can solve societal challenges and contribute to the public good.

In this roundup of the top IT stories in ASEAN this year, Computer Weekly recaps some of the key themes that have been keeping technology leaders and suppliers across the region busy throughout the year.