CelcomDigi's Sophia AI simplifies automation for SMEs, but skills gap remains

Sophia AI is supported by CelcomDigi’s broader enterprise technology capabilities across connectivity, 5G, cloud, data, cybersecurity, IoT, automation and AI.

CelcomDigi is commercializing Sophia AI, the digital workforce it spent four years building internally. Aimed at enabling small and medium enterprises (SMEs), Sophia AI rests on a specific promise: that it can run agentic AI without building large technology teams or overhauling how they work.

"With our agentic AI solution, we can successfully eliminate repetitive administrative tasks while empowering employees to devote time on higher-value work where human judgement, creativity, problem-solving, and meaningful customer engagement makes the greatest difference," said Kugan Thirunavakarasu, CelcomDigi's chief enterprise business officer.

Accoding to CelcomDigi, it has deployed more than 400 automations across its own operations before taking the product to market. In retail and distribution, the system handles the invoice-to-payment process from end to end, reading and validating invoices, flagging exceptions and routing them for approval without staff moving between systems. The company named manufacturing, healthcare and public sector workflows as adjacent use cases.

The launch is anchored to the Ministry of Finance's Economic Outlook 2026, which finds AI adoption among SMEs uneven. The barriers the company pulled from that report were uncertainty over returns on investment and limited access to AI platforms built for SME needs. However, what CelcomDigi did not highlight was the skills shortage issues SMEs continue to face in the country.

Instead, CelcomDigi stated that it will work with businesses throughout the journey of identifying high-value opportunities, integrating AI with existing systems, deploying AI agents and measuring business outcomes. Specifically, Sophia AI can be customized and tailored to an SME’s needs, size, and complexity of different businesses. This allows SMEs to start with the processes that matter most to them, at a scale that fits their operations and budget.

While this gives SMEs a practical pathway to adopt agentic AI without having to build extensive AI capabilities from scratch, it does not address the skills gap that most SMEs in the country are facing.

The telco has already rolled out workshops for SMEs throughout the country, with over 3,000 local entrepreneurs trained in practical digital skills and access to tools crucial for growth in the digital economy. Newer formats have also been introduced this year to further support SMEs in their various business lifecycles.

However, there is still a strong need on AI skilling in the country which the telco company should be looking to address.