In the Press

Thailand's Need for AI Sovereignty

Thailand's National AI Strategy targets ten million AI-literate users and ninety thousand professionals by 2027 — but the country's informal workforce numbers more than twenty million. The majority of Thai citizens appear nowhere in the AI strategies of Washington, Beijing, Bangkok's technopreneurs, or the ten agencies currently shaping Thailand's AI future.

This is the demographic the AI Middle Way Coalition was designed to serve. Cooperative formalisation — the economic model at the heart of the Middle Way approach — offers a pathway to bring the informal majority into the digital economy on their own terms: not as passive recipients of algorithmic decisions made elsewhere, but as co-owners of the data, platforms, and value they generate.

The Bangkok–Isan digital divide will widen unless regional equity is written explicitly into the governance architecture. The Isan region — home to a third of Thailand's population and the country's deepest reservoirs of cultural knowledge and agricultural wisdom — has the most to gain from an AI strategy that treats regional equity as a design principle, and the most to lose if foreign platforms capture its data, attention, and economic surplus first.