9 in 10 Philippine companies are betting on AI. Their top worry is data.
A survey of IT decision makers found 91 percent of Philippine firms are positive about AI, but 51 percent said data privacy and security is the biggest thing holding them back.
Ninety one percent of Philippine companies surveyed said they have a positive view of using AI at work. The finding comes from the AI Business Application Readiness and Accessibility Survey, commissioned by Alibaba Cloud and carried out by research firm NielsenIQ. It polled 1,000 IT decision makers, the people who choose what software a company buys, across eight Asian markets including the Philippines.
The same companies named what is stopping them. Fifty one percent said data privacy and security is their biggest barrier. Forty one percent pointed to the cost of setting it up. On the hopeful side, 68 percent said their main goal with AI is to build new products and find new business, not to cut staff.
Why it matters
The number one thing making Philippine companies hesitate about AI is the safety of the information they hold. A lot of that information is yours. It is your name, your address, your account history, your medical or loan records, sitting in the systems of the bank, telco, hospital or shop you deal with every week.
The survey also found 74 percent of these firms have already moved all or most of their computer systems to the cloud, meaning the data now lives on someone else's servers instead of a machine inside their own office. That shift is what makes AI easy to switch on, and it is also why the security question is not academic. Grant Gong, who heads solutions architecture at Alibaba Cloud Philippines, said big companies are adopting AI as part of larger technology plans while smaller ones are picking it up mainly to cut costs and work faster.
The catch to watch
Read the date before you read the number. The survey was fielded in mid 2025 and only released this week, so it describes how companies felt about a year ago, and AI moved a lot in that year. It was also paid for by Alibaba Cloud, a company that sells the cloud and AI services the survey found people are eager to buy. That does not make the figures wrong, but optimism is the result it had reason to hope for.
There is one more gap worth noting. Saying you feel positive about AI is not the same as running it, and a company naming data security as its top concern is not the same as a company that has fixed it. Being worried is the first step, not the fix.