Chief Digital & Data Officer Malaysia Summit
Malaysia is progressing well on its trajectory to lead ASEAN as its regional digital hub, with well-crafted national AI strategies, evolving AI regulations, an increasingly tech-savvy workforce, and infrastructure investments.
Yet, as AI becomes the backbone of Malaysian enterprises, the gaps in governance and talent persist. And with an accelerated, interconnected, but volatile macro-environment, it is imperative for Chief Digital Officers, Chief Data Officers and AI leaders to transform their organizations for a resilient and well-governed autonomous era. Rethinking strategies, business models, organizational structure, talent management, technology infrastructure, and risk management will help equip enterprises for continued success.
The 2nd annual Chief Digital & Data Officer Malaysia Summit brings together digital, data, IT, e-commerce, CX, and AI leaders to explore technology value creation, critical technological advancements, and upcoming digital trends. Through peer-to-peer exchanges, thought leadership discussions, and real-world experience sharing, the Summit looks to unearth the latest best practices in driving AI maturity, infrastructure readiness, digital sovereignty, ROI, speed, and governance.
Why Chief Digital & Data Officer Malaysia Summit is Different
- Create business impacts and outcomes through digital and data initiatives
- Achieve agility and digital capability through architecture, application, and process modernization
- Craft seamless experiences for customers and employees in a phygital world
- Enhance data and AI capabilities through structure, talent and tech
- Refine talent and organizational strategies for digital and data resources
- Explore exponential technologies for monetization opportunities
AGENDA
Enterprises are undergoing a fundamental shift towards intelligent operations. AI is expected to comprise the backbone of enterprise architecture, with autonomous agents revolutionizing the way of work. Yet most enterprises are still getting ready for such a reality where their existing business and operational models are disrupted. Add in the prevalence of employee-led AI usage and the associated risks, enterprises need a recalibration. In this session, a leading consultant will provide his advice to help CDOs and CIOs get their organizations realigned and future ready.
Digital sovereignty is no longer just a compliance requirement. It is a strategic enabler that allows organizations to build trusted AI, unlock the value of enterprise data, and confidently deploy agentic AI solutions while maintaining control over data, security, and regulatory obligations across hybrid environments.
- Defining digital sovereignty, the foundation for agentic enterprise
- Why digital sovereignty is becoming a business imperative
- Empowering Malaysia through joint collaboration on Sovereign AI and Quantum Computing
Pioneers in Malaysia are implementing Agentic AI. The natural next step is to orchestrate them together for autonomous systems. Yet, some opt that none of the pillars – human, tech, processes, and governance – is ready for such levels of AI autonomy, resulting in a significant increase in risk. This panel will discuss:
- The state of Agentic AI readiness in Malaysia: Deployment, governance, and maturity.
- AI entrenchment in the workforce: Making sense of organizational structures and job roles in multi-agent AI-augmented companies.
- Human oversight: Keeping pace, refining processes, and closing skill gaps.
- AI-led transactions: Can we trust AI to act independently without direct human involvement?
The macroenvironment is getting increasingly nonlinear and volatile, with an AI-enabled accelerated pace. To ensure business resiliency, the notion of sovereignty in technology has expanded from data and storage to infrastructure, applications, services and ecosystems. Add in geo-specific compliance requirements and vendor-related reliance, digital and technology leaders are facing complex decisions. This panels will explore:
- The level of digital sovereignty enterprises needs to demystify against geopolitical risk and vendor dependence.
- Architecting resiliency beyond data storage: Infrastructure, cloud, applications, and SaaS.
- Balancing between the pace of innovation and control, interdependence and strategic self-reliance.
- Navigating governance and compliance with PDPA, AI Governance Bill, and related laws and guidelines.
- Addressing supply chain risk in AI projects.
Every Malaysian CDO is under the same pressure: to show the board that AI spend is turning into real outcomes, not just another slide of pilots. The gap between the two really boils down to one thing: whether your data is trusted, real-time, and well governed enough to carry AI past the pilot stage. In July 2026, NACSA and MCMC signed an MoU with IBM to explore a National Quantum and AI Centre of Excellence, part of a National Post-Quantum Cryptography Migration Plan and Quantum Sandbox built to get ahead of “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks. A tightened PDPA now holds your cloud vendor liable too. Malaysia’s digital sovereignty journey isn’t a side conversation anymore; it’s the bar your data strategy now has to clear.
This IBM Executive Roundtable puts you at a small table with Malaysia’s data and business peers to work through how you can get your data strategy from AI-curious to AI-ready. In 90 minutes, you’ll:
- Open with the AI data problem you’re actually wrestling with
- See how a real-time, governed data foundation moves AI from pilot to production
- Map your own data strategy on paper and benchmark it against peers at the table
- Unpack what actually drives growth versus what just fills a dashboard, with IBM and industry voices weighing in
You leave with a strategy map tested against your peers, not notes from someone else’s slides.
SPEAKERS
