AI, blockchain anchor Philippines’ digitalization journey

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is making its mark in the Philippines, a nation renowned for rapidly adopting emerging technologies. Filipino enterprises have integrated AI into operations to cut costs, increase efficiency and obtain a competitive edge. However, there are concerns, including bias and hallucinations, which Bismark Orbe says businesses must be cautious about as they embrace the technology.

Orbe is the director of finance and procurement at JG Summit Holdings, a Philippines-based conglomerate with interests in manufacturing, tech, air travel and finance. He spoke to CoinGeek reporter Claire Celdran on the sidelines of the 8th Fintech Revolution Summit in Manila, where he participated in a panel discussion on the risks of AI.

“One of the primary concerns with AI adoption is that AI could produce a lot of biased information and lots of hallucinations as well. It’s very important that we’re critical of what AI is producing,” he stated.

Indeed, bias and hallucinations are among the key risks of AI. Study after study has shown that most large-language models (LLMs) have been trained on biased data, leading to biased output. A July 2024 United Nations report summarized this as “bias from the past leading to bias in the future.”

Blockchain, with its decentralized, immutable and transparent data ledger, has been touted as the best solution for AI bias.

Besides AI, the Philippines is rapidly adopting other emerging technologies in the private and public sectors. The inevitable consequence has been a rise in scammers who leverage the latest technologies to target the non-tech-savvy crowd. Orbe cautioned businesses to be vigilant with digital security as, in addition to direct financial losses, it could damage their credibility and reputation with the consumers.

Despite the challenges, Orbe expects Filipinos to promptly adopt the latest technologies to make their lives easier. Already, advancements like digital banking are reducing the burden of bank queues and improving productivity. Such benefits of digitalization will extend to other technologies, boosting the country’s economy.

“In the Philippines today, fintech is actually moving in the right direction. This is benefitting the country as a whole because you can see that more people are having access to their banking needs.”

Blockchain for AI and big data

Ricky Sun, the founder and CEO of Ultipa, a real-time computing and analytics graph database provider, was also a panelist at the Manila event. In an interview with CoinGeek, he discussed the convergence of blockchain, AI and big data.

Sun acknowledged that AI and big data face some challenges today, including “the accuracy problem, the explainability or black box problem and also the depth.”

The black box problem, in particular, threatens AI’s adoption in critical sectors like the military or in instances when AI would be required to make decisions. This challenge emanates from the opaque nature of AI training; most developers, led by OpenAI, refuse to reveal their LLMs’ inner workings and training data, making it impossible to scrutinize a model’s decision-making or biases.

Blockchain is the obvious solution. The technology’s transparency would ensure users can look behind the curtain, leading to better AI output. nChain, for instance, has developed a new technique that employs zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to prove that an AI model has been trained on a certain dataset without any interference or alterations.

With Ultipa, Sun is out to solve these AI challenges through real-time graph technology. He says that this technology is closely related to blockchain, as some implementations of distributed ledger technology (DLT) rely on the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) as their data structure.

“So, using graph technology can natively and naturally analyze this [AI] data. These are the key characteristics that make [our graph technology] part of AI, but it’s just more explainable, faster and more accurate. I think there’s great potential for incorporating that kind of graph technology into the blockchain domain.”

In order for artificial intelligence (AI) to work right within the law and thrive in the face of growing challenges, it needs to integrate an enterprise blockchain system that ensures data input quality and ownership—allowing it to keep data safe while also guaranteeing the immutability of data. Check out CoinGeek’s coverage on this emerging tech to learn more why Enterprise blockchain will be the backbone of AI.

Watch: Demonstrating the potential of blockchain’s fusion with AI