Why Philippines Should Stop Thinking Small In AI

Of all the talks I’ve given over the years, this is the one that keeps coming back to haunt me. It shows up when the noise dies down. During holidays. In the in-between days when I’m not chasing the next deadline. Usually right before a pivot, when I can feel that old skin starting to itch.

This piece comes from a longer talk I gave in Cebu. I return to it not because it’s clever, but because it’s uncomfortable. It pokes at something we rarely admit out loud. This isn’t really about maps or AI. It’s about how small we’ve been trained to think.

We were lied to by a picture.

That world map we grew up with, the one glued to classroom walls, is distorted. It shrinks countries near the equator and inflates those closer to the poles. The Philippines has been visually downsized our entire lives. Europe looks massive. We look like an afterthought.

Move the countries around on a true-size map and the illusion breaks fast. Singapore? The size of Metro Manila. Hong Kong? Manila plus Bulacan. Qatar? About the size of Negros. Israel? A thin slice of Luzon. These places dominate global headlines, investment flows, and our imagination. And yet, they fit neatly inside pieces of us.

Still, we call them “big” and ourselves “small.”

That lie leaks into everything.

I felt it again when our women’s football team shocked the world at the FIFA World Cup. A well-meaning comment floated by: “the little country that could.” No malice intended. But the phrase stuck. Why do we keep shrinking ourselves even when we win?

Here’s the inconvenient truth: the Philippines is not small. We are longer than New Zealand. Bigger than the UK. Roughly the same size as Japan, with a comparable population. We are an archipelago of more than a hundred million people, sitting in the middle of the world’s fastest-growing region.

And yet, we talk like renters in our own future.

This mindset is no longer harmless, because we are standing at the edge of something big. AI is not coming. It’s already here. And unlike past waves of technology, this one doesn’t require elite credentials or deep technical training just to participate.

To use AI, you don’t need to code. You need to speak. You need to write. You need to think clearly and ask good questions. English, once framed as a colonial leftover, suddenly becomes leverage. Millions of Filipinos already have what most of the world is now scrambling to learn.

In 2021, more Filipinos were interested in AI than there were people in Singapore. Let that sink in. Not companies. Not startups. People.

The real gap isn’t skills. It’s self-belief.

 

We’ve spent decades exporting talent while importing confidence. We cheer for success stories abroad but hesitate to imagine them rooted here. We treat ambition like a scarce resource, something that must be rationed.

AI doesn’t care about our excuses. It doesn’t care about our history or our hang-ups. It responds to prompts. To clarity. To intent. If we approach it with the same small-country energy we’ve been taught, it will happily mirror that back to us.

But if we stop apologizing for our size, our voice, our presence, something shifts.

The women’s football team didn’t win because they thought small. They won because they showed up like they belonged on the field. That’s the lesson we keep missing.

The Philippines is not a footnote. It never was.

The danger isn’t that we’re too small to compete. The danger is that we keep acting like we are. And in an age where technology amplifies whatever mindset you bring to it, that may be the most expensive habit we have left.

 

 

About Me:

Dominic “Doc” Ligot is one of the leading voices in AI in the Philippines. Doc has been extensively cited in local and global media outlets including The Economist, South China Morning Post, Washington Post, and Agence France Presse. His award-winning work has been recognized and published by prestigious organizations such as NASA, Data.org, Digital Public Goods Alliance, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and UNICEF.

If you need guidance or training in maximizing AI for your career or business, reach out to Doc via https://docligot.com.

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