What a breathtakingly intense and historic week here in Singapore! As the government officially kicked off
#ATxSummit 2026, bringing together global tech leaders alongside Minister Josephine Teo (Ministry of Digital Development and Information), the defining narrative of human technology future is being written right now.
🇪🇺 🤝 🇸🇬 The Prelude: EU-ASEAN AI Standards Workshop (May 19)
Ahead of the main summit, I was honoured to be invited to speak at EU-ASEAN AI Standards Workshop, which has brought together senior regulators, policymakers, standards experts and industry from across ASEAN and the EU for a morning of genuinely substantive conversation.
It was an incredible honour to share the stage with global pioneers in digital governance to dissect what the EU AI Act truly means for ASEAN’s regulatory reality:
🎤 Panel Moderator: Kelly Forbes (President, AI Asia Pacific Institute)
🗣️ Fellow Panellists:
Sharmini Melissa Johnson(Senior Manager, AI Governance, IMDA)
@HenryWang2021 (Co-founder,
@singaporeigf &
@LingoAI_io )
Sigit Jarot (ICT Standardisation Expert, GIST Project)
The panel covering what the EU AI Act means for regulators, industry and standards bodies across the region. By the end of the workshop we had a shared picture of where the real friction points lie between EU standards frameworks and ASEAN regulatory realities. That map will feed directly into the workshops ahead, and into the work of building an ASEAN Standards Champions Network across the region.
The workshop opened with introductory remarks from Nigel Hee, followed by a welcome from Benoit Sauveroche, First Counsellor at the Delegation of the European Union to Singapore, and an opening address from Emilio Davila Gonzalez, Head of ICT Standardisation at the European Commission's DG CONNECT.
Kim Skov Hilding, Secretary of CEN-CENELEC JTC 21, delivered a keynote on the technical standards architecture underpinning the EU AI Act. Scott Cadzow, Chair of ETSI TC SAI, took us into technical specifications in practice: data quality, robustness, and transparency as technical requirements, and what this means for jurisdictions outside the EU seeking alignment.
I had good discussions with Sang Hao Chung, Deputy Director (AI Governnce and Safty) IMDA and AI Verify Foundation, Prof. Stuart Russell, A*STAR - Agency for Science, Technology and Research hashtag#MERaLion team, and AI Singapore team on AI governance and data Sovereignty.
From the visionary opening address by Singapore’s Minister-in-charge of Smart Nation and Cybersecurity, to cutting-edge dialogues exploring the evolution of AI Agents and Embodied AI, this premier tech event is firmly setting a brand-new tone for the global technology landscape.