by Tan Aik Keong (AK)
Over the past few years I've had the chance to speak at universities across the country about where AI is heading, and I sit on the industry advisory board of six local institutions. Students keep asking me a question that sounds simple but carries real weight: "Where do AI graduates actually go?"
It's a question I hear from business leaders and government officials too. As one of the founders of Agmo Group, where we lead a custom AI development team of more than 250 people, and as a founding member of Konsortium AI Negara (KAIN) and a working-group member of the National AI Office (NAIO), I'm seeing more and more organisations seriously asking themselves: "How can we actually use AI to transform and improve how we operate?"
AI is moving out of research labs and into real-world use, and demand is growing fast across both industry and public services. Here are five practical directions I'd point AI students toward.
The five most in-demand AI roles in Malaysia right now
1. LLM integration. Building intelligent chatbots or internal AI assistants for businesses, paired with their own data via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
2. Model fine-tuning. Training open models for specific domains — legal, healthcare, finance — so they better fit local context and industry needs.
3. Predictive machine learning. Demand forecasting, risk detection, predictive maintenance, or agricultural yield analysis, applied across transport, telecoms and agriculture.
4. Computer vision. Production-line quality inspection, document OCR, drone image analysis, and smart-city infrastructure monitoring.
5. AI workflow automation. Combining AI with workflow platforms to automate approvals, report writing and customer-service responses, lifting overall efficiency.
How to prepare before you graduate
Hands-on experience. Build your own AI chatbot. Try model fine-tuning or classification tasks. Train a model on real image data.
Master the basic toolchain. Learn how to build and deploy an AI model. Get comfortable with vector databases. Understand API development and backend integration.
Understand AI regulation and risk. Get familiar with Malaysia's Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA). Learn how to build guardrails against inappropriate output, and grounding mechanisms that keep information sourced reliably.
Where national AI strategy is headed
The National AI Office (NAIO) has already named three priority sectors: healthcare, transportation and agriculture. These are data-rich sectors closely tied to everyday life, and well suited to real AI deployment.
If you want to track national-level policy and direction, two platforms are worth following: the National AI Office (ai.gov.my) and Konsortium AI Negara (konsortiumainegara.org). Both bring together government, academia and industry to provide policy direction, partnership opportunities and R&D resources for the local AI ecosystem.
Closing: there's no better time to start than now
Whether you're from Sabah, Penang, Johor or Kuala Lumpur, AI has become a core pillar of the country's digital transformation. What you're studying isn't just a technical skill any more — it's part of the national economy and society's development.
Start building, keep learning, and keep watching where the industry is heading. You're not too early. You're right on time.
Part of the AK AI Corner column. Originally published in Oriental Daily (东方日报) on May 7, 2025.