Bigger AI Fest, harder questions for Iloilo

The Department of Science and Technology’s Western Visayas office announced last week that the 2026 AI Fest will run Aug. 3-5 with nine sub-events, more than double the inaugural edition. That is real progress. DOST-6 Regional Director Rowen Gelonga is also right to argue that the country’s first regional AI Governance and Ethics Policy, drafted by the Regional Development Council-6 and launched at last year’s fest, set the order of operations: governance first, then human capital, then deployment. Manila has not done it that way.

Nationally, the sequence has run in reverse. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. approved the National AI Strategy in May 2025. The National AI Center for Research and Innovation opened on Feb. 26, 2026. At least six bills creating a Philippine Council on Artificial Intelligence are still moving through the 20th Congress, among them Senate Bill 852 and House Bills 2827 and 3195. The pilots are everywhere; the rules are not. Western Visayas got the sequencing right, and the rest of the country should borrow from it. Whether our regional bloc in Congress carries the RDC-6 model into the technical working group is another question entirely.

Inclusion language at the launch was good. DEPDev-6’s Ira Pahila said the AI Policy Lab will reach out to PWDs, senior citizens, and Indigenous Peoples. That instinct is correct, but the arithmetic is harder than the rhetoric. DICT survey data still pegs rural Filipino households’ home internet spending at around PHP 1,008 a month — close to what some Tumandok families in Tapaz earn in a week. Western Visayas remains a designated middle-mile build-out zone under the World Bank-backed Philippine Digital Infrastructure Project. You cannot consult communities into a digital future they cannot log into. The 2027 edition should be measured by something more specific than attendance: how many katutubo language datasets get built, how many barangay hubs come online, how many PWD-led prototypes make the hackathon shortlist.

Speaking of the hackathon, it is the most underrated outcome of the first AI Fest. Reyjand Gellamucho of the Kwadra TBI confirmed that the top three teams from 2025 are now incubated at WVSU Binhi TBI. A startup pipeline is forming in a city whose IT-BPO sector crossed PHP 18.2 billion in direct revenues in 2024. Whether those startups stay rooted in Iloilo depends on procurement preferences from regional LGUs and patient capital from DTI and DOST — not seed grants alone.

And then there is the silence. Iloilo’s BPO sector employs roughly 30,000 to 35,000 workers across 45 centers. Voice operations have dropped from 70% of headcount in 2020 to about 55% by early 2025, with three major centers trimming voice seats by 15% in the first quarter alone. None of the nine sub-events appears to address this head-on. The AI Policy Lab should add a labor track. DOLE-6, TESDA-6, IBPAP, and worker representatives belong at that table — before the next round of layoffs, not after.