Reza Ali speaking on stage in a tan blazer and dark tie, gesturing with one hand beside a UOB lectern, with an audience of business people seated at tables below him.

AI Nation 2030 and the SMEs Who Will Build It

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This post was drafted with AI from my event notes and approved by me.

Reza Ali speaking on stage in a tan blazer and dark tie, gesturing with one hand beside a UOB lectern, with an audience of business people seated at tables below him. Reza Ali speaking into a microphone in a tan blazer and dark tie, in front of Microsoft and SRKK banners. Around thirty participants standing in rows for a group photograph in a conference hall, among tables and chairs, in front of wood-panelled walls.
UOB FinLab AI Ready Programme, Kuala Lumpur – 7 May 2026. Photographs courtesy of UOB FinLab and SRKK Group.

I opened the UOB AI Ready Programme with a question to the room: who here has a competitor already using AI? The room was full of SME owners and operators from manufacturing, retail and services, and the honest answer is that most of them didn’t know.

UOB FinLab asked me to set out why AI matters to small businesses before Microsoft showed them how to get started. So my talk was about the why. Malaysia’s plan for AI only works if SMEs take part. They are the engine of the economy, not spectators.

I told the story of how I first met ChatGPT during my master’s, and the assignment I nearly let it write for me. I used the old tale of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice to explain what happens when we start something powerful without knowing how to stop it. That led to governance, which I framed as a business advantage rather than a burden: the AI Governance and Ethics guidelines, MyAI Standards and the direction of the AI Governance Bill.

There was no time for formal questions, and the session handed over smoothly to Microsoft. Afterwards a few people came up to say it had resonated, and one called it “true storytelling”. That meant a lot.

My closing line was one I keep coming back to: perfection is the enemy of progress. Make mistakes fast, make them safe, and fix them.

Thank you to Juan Lim, William Heng and the UOB FinLab team. You can read the National AI Action Plan 2026-2030 at https://ai.gov.my/aiactionplan2030.