AIR APACAI Readiness Index · Powered by Exeter Labs
Malaysia is current on AI.
AI and digital evidence is the signal its own record leans on hardest.
Download the dossierPDF · 20 pages · 4.3 MBExecutive summary
Current, and tech-led
Readiness 46 of 100, range 44-49. Visibility 41.7 of 100 across 224 scored companies.
A low score here reflects the public record, not a company’s capability. Malaysia is among the signal leaders: of the five signals the index reads, its record leans hardest on AI and digital evidence and thinnest on platform and data footprint. The conditions companies here operate under score 46, and what those companies publish scores 41.7. Of the two, the second is the one companies here control, and the quicker to change: 86% of the 224 companies with enough of a public trail to score publish no proof of capability at all.
Malaysia’s record is current, and 31 of its 224 ranked companies already publish proof of capability, averaging 63 of 100.
Source: AIR APAC AI Readiness Index, APAC 5000, Q2 2026. Scores measure public evidence, not verified capability.
63 companies in Malaysia reach the published APAC top 1,000.
161 of 224 are scored already, next in line for the published list.
Why visibility is the asset
Invisible is not the same as absent
Buyers, investors and partners treat it that way. Most decisions about a company are shaped before anyone is contacted, from what they can find. The record is the only version of it most people ever meet. and here about half the market has started one, which makes the other half the addressable group rather than the verdict. In Malaysia, 180 of 405 companies screened leave too little behind to assess, which is the addressable group rather than the verdict.
Capital and customers screen before they call
Investors, corporate buyers and procurement teams build a shortlist from public material long before a meeting exists. A company absent from that material is not rejected on the merits. It never reaches the shortlist.
Partners and talent read the same record
Prospective partners, joint-venture counterparties and senior candidates all check what an organisation says about its own AI work. Silence is read as inactivity, which is often wrong and rarely without cost.
AI assistants now answer the question first
When someone asks an AI system what a company is doing with AI, the answer is assembled from public sources. A company that publishes nothing cedes its own description to whatever else the model finds.
Most companies we look at are doing more with AI than their customers, investors and partners can see. The work is real, the evidence of it is thin, and people decide on the evidence.Indhran SegharFounding Director, AIR APAC
Source: AIR APAC AI Readiness Index, APAC 5000, Q2 2026. Scores measure public evidence, not verified capability.
Source: AIR APAC AI Readiness Index, APAC 5000, Q2 2026. Scores measure public evidence, not verified capability.
Where the signal is strong
Malaysia’s strongest and weakest public signals
The five signals are not on one scale. Nearly every company in the index is discoverable and nearly none publishes proof of what it can do, so the longest bar below is a property of the index before it is a property of Malaysia. Read against its own other four signals, this record leans hardest on AI and digital evidence and thinnest on platform and data footprint. The first is where companies here have already shown they can publish; the second is where the same effort has not yet gone, and it is the clearest place to start.
Source: AIR APAC AI Readiness Index, APAC 5000, Q2 2026. Scores measure public evidence, not verified capability.
Source: AIR APAC AI Readiness Index, APAC 5000, Q2 2026. Scores measure public evidence, not verified capability.
The lean is AI and digital evidence. 31 companies in Malaysia publish capability evidence, averaging 63 and well clear of the market. It works where it exists. The other 86% have yet to publish it, against 83% regionally.
Work published only in Malaysia’s own language is understated here, not absent.
Four tiers of visibility
Four tiers, and where companies in Malaysia sit
A tier is a position in the published regional ranking, not a grade anyone awards. It says how much of a company’s AI work a buyer or an investor can verify, and nothing at all about whether that work is any good.
| Tier | Malaysia | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1Proven | 4 | Region rank 1-100. Publishing enough, recently enough, and across enough of the five signals that the public record alone establishes an AI position. |
| Tier 2Building | 17 | Region rank 101-400. A consistent public trail, usually strong on two or three signals and thin on evidence of hiring. |
| Tier 3Findable | 42 | Region rank 401-1,000. Credibly active and possible to verify, but sparse enough that it takes a deliberate search to find. |
| Tier 4Emerging | 161 | Ranked beyond 1,000. Clears the evidence threshold but does not reach the published list. Real companies, scored and unlisted, and the largest group in almost every market. |
4 of the 224 companies in Malaysia that clear the threshold reach tier 1, and 161 are emerging, 72% of those scored. Emerging is the normal state of the region, and the group standing closest to the tier above.
Moving up a tier is a disclosure decision, not a technology one, because every signal this index reads is something a company already controls.
Source: AIR APAC AI Readiness Index, APAC 5000, Q2 2026. Scores measure public evidence, not verified capability.
Source: AIR APAC AI Readiness Index, APAC 5000, Q2 2026. Scores measure public evidence, not verified capability.
Source: AIR APAC AI Readiness Index, APAC 5000, Q2 2026. Scores measure public evidence, not verified capability.
Source: AIR APAC AI Readiness Pulse, Q2 2026. CERS is a market-level signal, not a company readiness score. View sources.
Market context
Macro, state, and enterprise benchmarks for Malaysia.
| Benchmark | Value | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Country Readiness Prior (CRP v0.1) | 67.7 | Macro and state readiness prior |
| CRP v0.2 (three-block) | 52.0 | Full triangulated prior |
| Oxford Government AI Readiness 2024 | 71.4 | Macro input to CRP |
| IMF AI Preparedness Index 2023 | 63.2 | Macro input to CRP |
| Enterprise adoption (Salesforce 2023) | 30.3% | Business AI adoption block |
Source: AIR APAC AI Readiness Index, APAC 5000, Q2 2026. Scores measure public evidence, not verified capability.
Malaysia carries the enterprise-adoption block. CERS triangulates the macro prior, public company signal, and enterprise adoption with a coverage-based shrinkage; the precise integer is indicative, so a band is also published.
Public company signal
What the indexed companies in Malaysia show.
| Signal | Value |
|---|---|
| Mean raw RPS visibility | 41.7 |
| Sector-stratified signal | 41.0 |
| Supplier-readiness signal | 43.7 |
| Domestic-adopter signal | 47.8 |
Top organisations
The highest public-signal organisations in Malaysia.
| Rank | Organisation | Sector | RPS | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25 | Sime Darby Property | Professional Services | 71.0 | B |
| 50 | Finexus Group | Tech/Fintech | 68.0 | B |
| 56 | Telekom Malaysia | Tech/Fintech | 68.0 | B |
| 97 | Mastercard | Tech/Fintech | 65.0 | B |
| 123 | HSBC Malaysia | Financial Services | 64.0 | B |
| 163 | CelcomDigi Berhad | Tech/Fintech | 62.0 | B |
| 189 | MaiStorage Technology | Tech/Fintech | 62.0 | B |
| 214 | UEM Group Berhad | Professional Services | 62.0 | B |
| 226 | Censof Holdings Berhad | Tech/Fintech | 61.0 | B |
| 227 | CIMB Bank | Financial Services | 61.0 | A |
| 267 | Redtone Digital Berhad | Tech/Fintech | 60.0 | B |
| 299 | Foodpanda Malaysia | Retail/E-commerce | 59.0 | A |
| 304 | KESM Industries Berhad | Manufacturing | 59.0 | B |
| 314 | MNRB Group | Financial Services | 59.0 | B |
| 321 | Pemandu Associates | Professional Services | 59.0 | B |
| 329 | Shearn Delamore & Co. | Professional Services | 59.0 | B |
| 331 | Shopee Malaysia | Retail/E-commerce | 59.0 | B |
| 336 | Tranglo Sdn Bhd | Tech/Fintech | 59.0 | B |
| 358 | Lotus's Malaysia | Retail/E-commerce | 58.0 | B |
| 368 | Rhbgroup.com | Financial Services | 58.0 | B |
Ranked by raw public signal (RPS), a visibility measure. Open any organisation for its evidence profile.
Limits and what this is not
What this report does not claim
Printed with the findings rather than in an appendix at the back.
Known blind spots in this market
Malaysia carries 2 this cycle: evidence is gathered from English-language search, likely undercounting local-language activity; below the full three-source-block coverage standard. Each is a direction we know the number leans in. The country evidence behind the readiness score is graded B on source coverage of macro=1, enterprise=1.
A high score means published, not proven
A high visibility score means a company publishes a lot that can be found about its AI work. It does not mean the work is good, in production, or making money. A company here running serious AI quietly will score low here, and it should: this index reads the public record and nothing else.
What would change these numbers
Three things, all scheduled and all documented on page 21. Fuller source coverage per market, which is what currently sets the width of every readiness range. Validating the coverage weighting behind those ranges, which is a stopgap in this edition. And merging companies that operate several web domains, so one group cannot appear twice. Nothing here was audited inside a company, and no verified-readiness score is published this cycle. Next edition: Q3 2026.
What to do with a visibility score
A visibility score is something a company here can move, because every signal behind it is something it already controls. Three steps separate it from a record that shows what it is actually doing.
Start with the company’s own row
Every scored company in Malaysia appears in the dataset with its five signal scores and an evidence grade. A grade C or D row is usually a company that has not said much, not a company that has not done much.
Then measure what this cannot see
This index reads the outside only. Leadership alignment, governance, data quality and workforce capability are invisible to it by design, and that is where the real answer sits.
Correct the record on purpose
Proof of capability is the region’s weakest signal, because companies announce intent faster than they show work. Job posts, named leads and dated case studies move the score honestly.
None of this requires a new AI programme. It requires publishing the one that already exists.
The full Malaysia dossier, as published.
63 of the 224 ranked companies in Malaysia reach the published APAC top 1,000.
Macau has no benchmark block and is reported as contextual. The dossier counts companies on a wider definition than this page does and the two reconcile: how the company counts fit together.