ATxSummit 2026 Opens with Shared Regional Ambition to Harness AI for Public Good

SINGAPORE, May 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- ATxSummit 2026, hosted by the Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore, officially kicked off this evening with Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam as the Guest-of-Honour at the Opening Gala Dinner at Gardens by the Bay. This year's ATxSummit will bring together government leaders from Asia, the Middle East and the United States of America; International organisations such as the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), as well as industry and academic luminaries including Denise Dresser, OpenAI's Chief Revenue Officer, David Zapolsky, Chief Global Affairs & Legal Officer, Amazon, Jane Sun, CEO of Trip.com Group, William Dally, Chief Scientist at NVIDIA, Professor Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal, a pioneer in deep learning, and Professor Dawn Song of University of California, Berkeley, known for her work in artificial intelligence (AI) security and trustworthy machine learning. 

ASEAN's Youth Showcase AI-Enabled Solutions for Society

The highlight of this year's Gala Dinner was a showcase of 11 youth projects from the inaugural AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge. With AI adoption across the region reaching 85% in 2024^[1],  these projects demonstrated how ASEAN youth are shaping practical AI solutions for public good. Shortlisted from over 600 submissions across all ASEAN Member States, the 11 projects spanned healthcare, education, social inclusion and agriculture, with a common objective of improving lives and strengthening communities.

President Tharman presented the top three prizes to teams from Brunei, Cambodia and Myanmar, whose innovative applications aligned to the Challenge's focus on knowledge, skills and learning, scientific progress, and stronger communities. Overall winner Brunei's ΣHAI developed an AI-powered dementia care platform using speech, language and video analysis to support earlier detection, personalised caregiver guidance, and care coordination. Cambodia's Voha.ai helps hearing-impaired children improve pronunciation through real-time speech recognition and visual mouth-tracking. Myanmar's Future Flux provides an offline AI education platform powered by edge computing to provide rural students with digital learning, adaptive lessons and AI tutoring. These winners received cash prizes of USD 5,000, USD 3,000, and USD 1,000 respectively.

Koo Sengmeng, Director of Talent & Ecosystem at AI Singapore, said, "This is the kind of impact we hope to see from our AI Ready ASEAN effort – our future generations not just knowing how AI works, but knowing where it matters, where it should be used, and how it can improve lives."

ΣHAI, said: "Through Sahabat-Care, we wanted to address the growing challenge of dementia detection and caregiver support in Southeast Asia. This platform has helped us explore how AI can support caregivers with more timely insights, personalised guidance and better decision-making for elderly care."

The AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge is a regional ideathon organised by AI Singapore (AISG) with the ASEAN Foundation, supported by Google.org and in collaboration with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA). It is part of the AI Ready ASEAN initiative to equip 5.5 million people with foundational AI literacy and capabilities. Themed "AI for an Inclusive and Sustainable ASEAN", the Challenge called on youth aged 18 to 35 to develop AI-based solutions across three priority areas: knowledge, skills and learning, scientific progress and stronger communities. Each proposal had to demonstrate real-world applications, including outreach to at least 1,000 community members.

AI-Powered Healthcare Research and Solutions 

Earlier in the day, two Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) were signed at the SingHealth AI in Health Symposium held at Capella, Singapore, a pre-event of ATxSummit 2026. These MoU will advance AI-powered healthcare research and accelerate solutions for patients and health systems. They reflect the need for scalable solutions given how ageing populations, rising chronic disease burdens, and uneven access to care place pressure on healthcare systems across Southeast Asia. They also demonstrate how AI is answering this call – sharpening clinical decision-making, supporting healthcare workers and extending quality care to more patients:

• SingHealth and the Gyalpozhing College of Information Technology (GCIT), Royal University of Bhutan, signed an MoU to promote the responsible use of AI in healthcare, with a focus on localised solutions for emerging healthcare systems. At the heart of the collaboration is an AI-assisted Chest Radiograph model powered by MerMED-FM, a multimodal, multi-specialty medical imaging foundation model developed by SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medicine Centre and A*STAR's Institute of High Performance Computing. Published in The Lancet Digital Health, the model has demonstrated good performance in detecting pneumonia, tuberculosis, hepatic masses, and colorectal cancer. Trained on Bhutanese data and expected to roll out in 2027 across Bhutan's Gelephu Mindfulness City Healthcare Hospitals, the model brings specialist-level diagnostic capability to rural communities where geographical barriers and shortages of radiological expertise remain pressing challenges and signals SingHealth's ambition to transform diagnostic care regionally.
• Singapore General Hospital (SGH), SingHealth's flagship hospital, Singapore's largest public healthcare cluster, signed an MoU with the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)'s Diagnostics Development Hub (DxD Hub) to accelerate AI-enabled and multimodal precision diagnostics into market-ready solutions. This partnership will fast-track commercially scalable diagnostic tools, from fighting antimicrobial resistance infections to detecting early memory loss in seniors, with the ambition of spinning off investable companies delivering health and economic impact to Singapore and beyond.

For more information on ATxSG, please visit asiatechxsg.com.

Media: atxsg.imda@archetype.co

^[1] 11^th ASEAN Economic Community Dialogue survey. asean.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/ASEAN-for-Business-Bulletin-Special-Edition.pdf

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