The missing AI-CIU explains why the roadmap had no driver. But there is a second, deeper reason it stalled — one about machinery of government rather than any single unit. Between 2021 and 2025, the part of government responsible for AI changed twice, and the roadmap did not travel with it.
The National AI Roadmap was conceived, written and published by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI). Its governance body would answer to the MOSTI Minister; its R&D funding ran through MOSTI's schemes. The roadmap was, in every institutional sense, a MOSTI document. Then the ground moved beneath it.
The handoff, step by step
Four moves over four years — and with each, AI drifted further from the ministry that owned the plan.
MOSTI publishes the AI-Rmap
The roadmap is launched under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, developed with UTM and PIKOM. AI policy sits squarely with MOSTI, and the proposed AI-CIU would report to its Minister.
A new Ministry of Digital is created
In the December 2023 cabinet reshuffle, the Ministry of Communications and Digital is split, and a dedicated Ministry of Digital is established on 12 December 2023 under Malaysia's first Digital Minister, Gobind Singh Deo. National digital transformation — and with it the centre of gravity for AI — now belongs to this new ministry, not MOSTI.
MyDIGITAL and MDEC are placed under the new ministry
Crucially, the agencies that would actually drive AI delivery — MyDIGITAL Corporation, MDEC, the National Digital Department, the data-protection department, CyberSecurity Malaysia and DNB — are housed under the Ministry of Digital. The institutional capacity to run an AI agenda is now consolidated outside MOSTI.
The Ministry of Digital launches NAIO
Exactly one year later, on 12 December 2024, the new ministry launches the National AI Office — incubated under MyDIGITAL — as the central AI authority, tasked with writing a fresh 2026–2030 plan. The AI-Rmap is not handed to NAIO to finish; it is left where it was.
What actually moved out of MOSTI's reach
The handoff was not just a name on an org chart. The operational agencies an AI plan needs were relocated to the new ministry — including the very corporation that would later incubate NAIO.
Placed under the Ministry of Digital (Dec 2023)
Once MyDIGITAL and MDEC sat under a new ministry, the answer to "who runs national AI?" was no longer MOSTI — and the roadmap MOSTI had written lost the agencies that were supposed to execute it. The plan stayed put while the power to deliver it walked out the door.
Why a handoff orphans a plan
Machinery-of-government changes are routine, and creating a dedicated digital ministry was a defensible decision on its own terms. The problem is what happens to an in-flight strategy when its owning ministry loses the mandate: nobody inherits the obligation to deliver it.
A new ministry arrives with its own leadership, its own priorities, and — reasonably — its own plan. It has little incentive to pick up a predecessor ministry's half-run roadmap and report against targets it did not set. So the AI-Rmap fell into an accountability gap between two ministries: MOSTI no longer led on AI, and the Ministry of Digital was busy building something new. The roadmap's 2025 end date passed with neither ministry having published progress against it.
This is the institutional twin of the missing implementation unit. One absence meant no body owned the plan day to day; the other meant no ministry owned it after 2023. Together they explain why the targets scorecard is a sea of "no public data," and why the story of Malaysian AI from 2024 onward is really the story of a different institution — NAIO — starting over.
Dates and structure are drawn from the public record: the AI-Rmap's publication by MOSTI (2021; archived here), the establishment of the Ministry of Digital on 12 December 2023 from the former Ministry of Communications and Digital, the agencies placed under it (MyDIGITAL, MDEC, JDN, JPDP, CyberSecurity Malaysia, DNB, MYNIC), and the launch of NAIO under that ministry on 12 December 2024.
The interpretation — that the handoff left the roadmap without an owning ministry — is independent analysis by airmap.my. Full sources: airmap.my/sources. Not affiliated with MOSTI, the Ministry of Digital or NAIO.