ATxSummit 2026 opened on 19 May with a clear regional agenda: harnessing artificial intelligence for public good, as Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam presided over the Opening Gala Dinner at Gardens by the Bay attended by government leaders, international organisations, and industry figures including OpenAI’s Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser and NVIDIA Chief Scientist William Dally.
Youth-led AI innovation takes centre stage
The centrepiece of the evening was the inaugural AI Ready ASEAN Youth Challenge, which drew more than 600 submissions from across all ten ASEAN member states. Eleven finalist teams presented AI-driven solutions spanning healthcare, education, agriculture, and social inclusion — all aligned to a broader initiative targeting foundational AI literacy for 5.5 million people across the region.
The top prize went to Brunei’s ΣHAI team, whose platform uses speech, language, and video analysis to support earlier detection of dementia and provide personalised caregiver guidance. Cambodia’s Voha.ai, which applies real-time speech recognition to help hearing-impaired children with pronunciation, took second place, while Myanmar’s Future Flux — an offline AI education platform powered by edge computing for rural students — claimed third. Cash prizes of USD 5,000, USD 3,000, and USD 1,000 were awarded respectively.
“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.” — Koo Sengmeng, Director of Talent & Ecosystem, AI Singapore
SingHealth signs AI healthcare MOUs
Ahead of the Gala Dinner, two Memoranda of Understanding were signed at the SingHealth AI in Health Symposium at Capella Singapore.
The first saw SingHealth partner with Bhutan’s Gyalpozhing College of Information Technology to develop and deploy an AI-assisted chest radiograph model — built on MerMED-FM, a multimodal medical imaging foundation model co-developed with A*STAR and published in The Lancet Digital Health. Trained on Bhutanese data, the model is expected to roll out across hospitals in Bhutan’s Gelephu Mindfulness City by 2027, extending specialist-level diagnostics to underserved rural communities.
The second MOU linked Singapore General Hospital with A*STAR’s Diagnostics Development Hub (DxD Hub) to fast-track commercially scalable diagnostic tools — covering antimicrobial resistance detection, early memory loss screening, and the potential spin-off of investable companies from these partnerships.
ATxSummit 2026 continues through the week, jointly organised by IMDA and Informa, with the full programme available at asiatechxsg.com.
