Amirudin looking at the displays at the Selangor 2025 Budget dialogue at Setia City Convention Centre, Shah Alam. — FAIHAN GHANI/The Star
State government to build facility with cloud partners
AN Artificial Intelligence (AI) centre will be set up in Selangor to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) embrace the technology.
The move will be under the state’s 2025 budget, said Selangor Islamic and cultural innovation committee chairman Dr Mohammad Fahmi Ngah.
Speaking at the Selangor 2025 Budget dialogue session, he said the AI infrastructure centre would be built in collaboration with cloud partners.
The dialogue session was launched by Selangor Mentri Besar Datuk Seri Amirudin Shari, where five group discussions took place simultaneously.
The topics were AI, sustainable revenue, state sustainability, public welfare and housing.
“We talk about small and medium-sized entrepreneurs adopting AI but there seems to be scarce use of AI, due to the cost. We will be setting up the AI centre to help you,” Mohammad Fahmi said during his speech during the AI dialogue session.
He said the state realised that there were also gaps in terms of AI adoption within the state government management itself.
“SMEs may have funding limitations to embark on AI technologies, so we will do a match-fund model where we will pay some money and you match that to solve your problem using our facilities.
“This will help bring down the cost,” he said.
He welcomed at least 30 “use cases”, a term used in system analysis to identify and organise the system requirements.
“We need industry use cases. The SMEs can use local or foreign talents, that is entirely up to them.”
Elaborating on this to StarMetro, Mohammad Fahmi said, “Ideally, they source talent locally from our universities.
“Our students here will then be able to use the AI centre with the foreign AI technology to solve industry problems.”
He said AI technology could also be used to manage floods better, via sharing of information from multiple agencies and making information available at one centre.
“For instance, if there is a lack of an item such as mattresses in Kuala Selangor, we should have an AI system whereby we can quickly locate the nearest place that has mattresses and dispatch them to the flooded location immediately,” he cited.
He said other simple cases would be digitising meeting minutes to save time.
“At the moment it takes about a month for a meeting’s minutes to be prepared.
We do not have AI system that can help with this, that is fast and accurate,” he said.
“Another example is facial recognition for attendance at work,” he added.
Mohammad Fahmi said AI was not just about picking and choosing the best models from web services.
“We need mathematicians, we need to build digital models and run those models.
“We also need the right data to train on the models. This is the core of AI that we require.”
In his speech, Mohammad Fahmi also touched on Selangor expecting to achieve full 5G network coverage in all its populated areas by 2025.
“Civil servants will not have any more excuses to not use AI.”
