ATxSummit 2026 showcases regional ambition to harness AI for good

- Youth-led AI innovation across ASEAN: The inaugural AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge received over 600 submissions across ASEAN, with 11 finalist teams from each of the ASEAN member states showcasing AI solutions

- AI for healthcare access: SingHealth and Bhutan’s Gyalpozhing College of Information Technology signed an MoU to develop responsible AI healthcare solutions

- Commercialising AI-enabled diagnostics: SGH and A*STAR’s DxD Hub's MoU focused on fast-tracking AI-enabled diagnostic tools 

ATxSummit 2026 has officially kicked off with Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam as the guest-of-honour at an opening gala dinner at Gardens by the Bay in Singapore. 

This year’s ATxSummit will bring together government leaders from Asia, the Middle East and the US; 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 AI security and trustworthy machine learning. 

ASEAN’s youth showcase AI-enabled solutions  

The highlight of this year’s gala dinner was a showcase of 11 youth projects from the inaugural AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge. With AI adoption across the region reaching 85% in 2024*, 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 span themes of healthcare, education, social inclusion and agriculture, with a common objective of improving lives and strengthening communities across the region.  

 

Source: IMDA. President Tharman (second from left) presented Team ΣHAI from Brunei with the top prize for the AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge 2026. 

 

President Tharman presented the top three prizes of US$5,000, US$3,000, and US$1,000 in cash to teams from Brunei, Cambodia and Myanmar respectively. The winning teams presented 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, on the other hand, 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. 

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."  

Team 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.”  

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 M 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 

Two memoranda of understanding (MoUs) were signed at the SingHealth AI in Health Symposium, an ATxSummit 2026 pre-event.  

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.

Beyond the model itself, both institutions will also co-develop publications, guidelines and educational programmes on AI ethics and responsible healthcare AI use. At the same time, they will work on developing AI applications that remain safe, effective and ethically sound, and adapted to Bhutan’s regulatory frameworks and healthcare environment. This is part of SingHealth's commitment to advancing regional healthcare innovation and responsible AI governance.

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 (AMR) 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. One such tool is the In-vitro Antibiotic Combination Test (iACT), an algorithm-based antibiotics combination testing tool designed to expand treatment options for patients with complex diagnoses (e.g. oncology, transplant) facing AMR infections. 

SGH will serve as the clinical champion and first adopter, providing clinical expertise, samples, and validation support while DxD Hub will bring critical product development to accelerate iACT's commercialisation pathway including expertise in workflow optimisation and standardisation and automation and software co-development for high-throughput deployment. 

SGH and DxD Hub has also identified a pipeline for innovation facilitated by this MoU. Other collaboration projects in the pipeline include the productisation of PENSIEVE-AI, a digital drawing application developed by SGH and GovTech that identifies early memory problems in seniors, and clinical integration and implementation of HealthVector from Mesh Bio, the world's first foundational digital twin model of human biology for detecting and managing diabetic kidney disease. 

Hashtags: #ATXSummit, #ATXSummit2026 

*11th ASEAN Economic Community Dialogue survey at asean.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/ASEAN-for-Business-Bulletin-Special-Edition.pdf