The Malaysian Artificial Intelligence (AI) Roadmap Survey was carried out in 2021 to assess the state of AI use and development across Malaysia's economic sectors and to inform the roadmap. It examined readiness across governance, infrastructure and data, talent and technology, R&D, and innovation.
What it found
- Governance — more than half of organisations had a security policy in place, but only about half of those considered their programme well established. AI-governance initiatives were mostly at an initial stage, with the public sector notably behind.
- Infrastructure & data — generally good computing infrastructure, but most organisations were only at the initial stage of the data capabilities needed to support AI.
- Talent — high projected growth in demand for AI roles to 2025, with the AI Architect role showing the steepest projected increase; talent shortages and insufficient hiring budgets topped the list of challenges.
- R&D & innovation — the most common R&D areas were big-data analytics, smart applications and IoT; most organisations had no incentives to promote AI R&D.
How the 2021 baseline held up
A baseline survey is judged not by what it measured but by what it predicted. On that test the AI-Rmap Survey did well in one dimension and revealingly less well in another.
The talent prediction was right — emphatically
The survey's loudest 2021 finding was that talent shortage was the number-one barrier and that demand for AI roles would grow steeply to 2025. That is precisely what happened. By late 2024, TalentCorp's national impact study found roughly 620,000 jobs at high risk from automation while identifying 60 emerging roles, about 70% of them in AI and digital tech.[1] PwC's 2025 barometer put AI-related job postings up 103% since 2021.[2] Industry surveys reported a large majority of tech leaders struggling to hire qualified talent, and the government's response — the MyMahir National AI Council for Industry (May 2025) and KESUMA's reskilling fund — is a direct answer to the gap the 2021 survey flagged first.[1][3]
The governance gap also persisted
The survey found AI governance mostly at an initial stage, with the public sector behind. That, too, proved durable: the roadmap's own coordinating body (the AI-CIU) never formed, and a settled national governance framework — the AIGE guidelines and the National AI Office — only arrived in late 2024, three years after the survey identified the gap.[4]
What shifted underneath the survey's assumptions
The survey's R&D picture — big-data analytics, smart apps, IoT — reflected a pre-generative-AI world. The single biggest change since 2021, the arrival of widely-available generative AI, is essentially absent from the 2021 frame. The “good computing infrastructure” finding also predates the data-centre boom that reshaped Malaysia's compute landscape from 2022 onward (see data centres). The survey was an accurate snapshot — of a moment that the technology then overtook.
2021 survey said
- Talent shortage is the #1 barrier; demand to surge by 2025
- AI governance at initial stage; public sector behind
- Good compute, but weak data capabilities
- R&D centred on big data, smart apps, IoT
What 2026 shows
- Talent gap confirmed: ~620k jobs at risk, +103% AI postings, MyMahir launched
- Governance gap persisted; framework only settled late 2024
- Data still a constraint; compute reshaped by the data-centre boom
- Generative AI — the biggest shift — absent from the 2021 frame
Why this matters — and what to watch
The survey's value in 2026 is twofold. As a historical baseline, it lets us measure movement: where Malaysia started on governance, data and talent before any roadmap action. And as a forecasting record, it is a reminder that the survey's most actionable signal — the talent gap — was both correct and under-resourced for years, which is its own lesson about the distance between diagnosis and delivery that recurs across this site.
Any successor baseline for the 2026–2030 plan will need to centre what the 2021 survey could not see: generative AI in workers' hands, local compute at scale, and an AI-talent market that is now competitive across the whole region. Watch whether MyMahir and the new plan finally close the talent gap the survey first named in 2021.
References & further reading
- “TalentCorp Launches Landmark Study on Workforce Impact of AI…” (620,000 jobs at risk; 60 emerging roles; MyMahir), TalentCorp, Nov 2024 / May 2025. talentcorp.com.my
- “Malaysia's AI Revolution” (PwC 2025 barometer: +103% AI postings since 2021; MyMahir-NAICI), Sunway University, 2025. sunwayuniversity.edu.my
- “How Malaysia has been preparing its workforce for the future”, World Economic Forum, Jun 2025. weforum.org
- The National AI Office (NAIO), launched 12 Dec 2024 — MyDIGITAL. mydigital.gov.my
- Malaysian AI Roadmap Survey 2021, as summarised in the National AI Roadmap 2021–2025 Playbook (MOSTI). Official copy: mastic.mosti.gov.my