Across Southeast Asia, optimism about artificial intelligence carries an undercurrent of unease. Workers wonder whether the technology transforming their industries will leave room for them at all. That unease is understandable. It is also, according to Vijay Eswaran, the wrong place to stop thinking.
Generative AI could touch the jobs of roughly 164 million ASEAN workers by 2030, automating routine tasks and reshaping more complex roles along the way, according to projections cited by Eswaran in a recent analysis. Eswaran, executive chairman of the QI Group, warns that anxiety over those numbers can give way to fatalism: the belief that algorithms, and whoever controls them, will decide what comes next.
“The future of work is not something that happens to us. It is something we create,” he writes.
For Malaysia and the wider region, Eswaran frames this as a defining moment. Countries that thrive, in his view, will be those whose people learn to create technology-driven opportunities rather than merely adopt someone else’s tools.
A region bracing for disruption
Work carries weight beyond a paycheck. “Work is more than survival. It is dignity, identity, and contribution,” Eswaran writes. “Employment is closely tied to well-being, social stability, and personal agency,” he adds. Across the region, entrepreneurship, from family-run businesses to fast-growing digital startups, has long given people greater control over their own circumstances.
Small and medium enterprises already dominate the regional economy. Between 97.2% and 99.9% of all enterprises across ASEAN qualify as MSMEs, by Eswaran’s count. That concentration, he argues, is precisely why entrepreneurship, rather than reskilling programs alone, holds the key to managing AI-driven disruption.
Reskilling prepares workers for jobs that already exist, or may emerge. Entrepreneurship does something reskilling cannot. “Entrepreneurship creates the possibility of new work altogether,” Eswaran writes.
Vijay Eswaran’s case for distributed opportunity
Four cities, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Singapore and Bangkok, account for most of the region’s startup activity. Foreign direct investment into ASEAN reached $226 billion in 2024 despite ongoing global uncertainty, yet much of that capital remains concentrated in the same urban hubs.
Eswaran sees this concentration as a central challenge. Millions of capable people in villages, smaller towns and second-tier cities have ambition but lack access to financing, mentorship and markets. “Talent is universal. Opportunity is not. That is the gap ASEAN must close,” he writes.
Technology as collaborator, not competitor
Artificial intelligence, in Eswaran’s framing, is a tool entrepreneurs can harness rather than a force working against them. He cautions that its benefits could become concentrated among a few unless access becomes more widespread. “AI will only create real prosperity when its power is placed in the hands of many, not guarded by the few,” he writes.
No single AI playbook fits all of ASEAN’s eleven member states, given how much they vary in digital infrastructure, language diversity and economic development. Eswaran’s view is that nobody outside a community understands its problems as well as the entrepreneurs living inside it, and that homegrown solutions will often outperform those imported from elsewhere.
Malaysia and the wider region share an edge few competitors can match: a young population becoming increasingly digitally fluent each year. Putting that demographic dividend to work, Eswaran argues, ranks among the most consequential economic decisions ASEAN will make this decade. Policymakers, he writes, must “widen the doorway so that more people can enter the economy not as spectators, but as creators.”
“The future of work is not a contest between humans and machines, but a collaboration where technology accelerates what human creativity initiates,” Eswaran writes. Jobs at scale, in his view, will come not from algorithms but from people willing to build something new. Tomorrow’s work, he concludes, will be shaped “by the courage, imagination and resolve of people who choose to build.”
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