CelcomDigi equips young digital natives to explore, create and innovate with AI
- ID
- 37304
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 20 Oct 2026, 4:04 PM
- Fetched
- 20 Oct 2026, 4:17 PM
- Provider
- Digital News Asia
- Category
- malaysia-tech
- Original URL
- https://www.digitalnewsasia.com/business/celcomdigi-equips-young-digital-natives-explore-create-and-innovate-ai
- Source URL
- https://www.digitalnewsasia.com/rss.xml
Summary
- Score
- 2.5
- Created
- 20 Oct 2026, 4:18 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- startup_founders
What happened
CelcomDigi partnered with RTM's Junior Innovathon 2026 as official telco partner, hosting 200 primary and secondary school students for an AI workshop plus a tour of its AI Experience Centre (AiX). It also launched a 'Tech for Impact Award', giving one primary and one secondary winning school CelcomDigi Essential 5G Home WiFi (100Mbps) for two years, with CelcomDigi sitting on the judging panel on 1 November 2026. The piece quotes Kugan Thirunavakarasu, acting chief innovation officer of CelcomDigi, on sparking early interest in creating with technology.
Why it matters
For builders this is a CSR/partnership announcement with no product, API, pricing, or platform access attached — nothing in your stack or roadmap changes because of it. The only concrete takeaway is ecosystem signalling: a Malaysian telco is funding school-level AI exposure and putting its name on a 1 November 2026 judging panel, which is relevant if you run youth STEM programmes, education-tech products, or campus recruiting and want to know which corporate programmes exist to plug into. If you were hoping for developer tooling or an AI platform announcement, there isn't one here.
Discussion angle
Vendor-run school AI workshops vs. actual hiring pipelines — does exposure at age 12 convert into AI talent Malaysia's startups can hire, or should telcos be funding paid internships and junior engineering roles instead?