Marcos says AI is 'here to stay' and puts a number on it: 1.8 million trained
In his fifth State of the Nation Address, the President gave artificial intelligence its own section. Here is exactly what he claimed, and the one number that sits awkwardly beside it.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. used part of his fifth State of the Nation Address on Monday to talk about artificial intelligence, and he did not hedge about it. "AI is here to stay," he said, "and so we adopt it to harness its potential to enhance critical sectors, from our educational system to our industries."
The concrete figure he attached to that was a training count. "We have launched massive training programs for AI readiness," he said, "which have reached at least 1.8 million individuals, students, parents, and teachers alike." That is the government's own number for how many Filipinos it has put through some form of AI readiness program.
The rest of the tech ledger
The AI line sat inside a broader digital section. Marcos said the Department of Information and Communications Technology continues to train citizens in what he called high-impact tech skills. He pointed to the eGovPH app, which he said has now been downloaded by more than 56 million Filipinos, and to medical assistance moving into it: applying for help with hospital bills is now down to two requirements, with no guarantee letters to chase and no line to stand in.
He also credited faster and cheaper internet with making online classes and work-from-home a real option, and cited an 81 percent placement rate for technical-vocational graduates, with programs like Tech-Pro folded into senior high school. The Pax Silica industrial hub, the project a scientists' group publicly disputed earlier this month, was described as having AI at its core.
The number that sits beside it
1.8 million is a real figure and a large one. It is worth holding next to another: a Sprout Solutions survey of 3,516 Filipino employees found 78 percent already use AI at work, while only 35 percent had ever been trained for it. The training push is running behind adoption that already happened on its own, in offices, without anyone waiting for a program.
The AI passage was also, notably, about opportunity rather than risk. It came the same month the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas told banks to prepare for AI-powered cyberattacks and to drop SMS and password logins for sensitive access. Both things are true at once: the state is training people to use AI, and separately warning institutions about what AI can now do to them.
What to watch
The useful test over the next year is not the headline count but what sits underneath it. How many of the 1.8 million were students in a one-off session, and how many were working adults who now use AI differently on Monday morning? That is the difference between a number and a skill, and it is the thing the next SONA will be measured against.