The AI advantage is coming for Philippine SMEs

A few weeks ago, I met with my friend Jardine Gerodias, who runs Expedise, a workforce solutions company with roughly 3,000 people on its manpower roster.

Manpower is not exactly the industry most people associate with cutting-edge technology. It is an old-school business built around people, paperwork, compliance, scheduling and an enormous amount of operational complexity.

So I was surprised when Jardine showed me something he had built himself: an HRIS, or Human Resources Information System, created from scratch with Claude.

Not commissioned from a major software vendor. Not built by a large engineering team. Jardine essentially used an AI coding assistant to help him build software around the specific ways his company operates.

And he is only getting started.

Another friend of mine, who runs a beauty e-commerce business, has been doing something similar on the marketing side. He has automated much of his marketing funnel, using AI and software to handle processes that previously required people to manually move information, create content, post and monitor campaigns.

The “many me” multiplier of AI

These are not billion-dollar Silicon Valley companies. They are Filipino businesses, and that is what makes this moment so interesting. For decades, one of the biggest disadvantages of a small business was that software was built for somebody else.

If you were a large corporation, you could afford an enterprise resource planning system, a customized CRM, a dedicated IT department and software developers who could build internal tools around your particular needs.

If you were an SME, you generally had to adapt your business to whatever software you could afford. Today, a founder who understands his own business deeply can easily describe what he needs to an AI coding system and get a working prototype. It might be an employee dashboard, an inventory tracker, a quotation generator, a customer service system, a reporting tool or an internal approval workflow.

According to the Department of Trade and Industry’s 2024 MSME statistics, 99.63 percent of the country’s registered business establishments are micro, small or medium enterprises.

In other words, when we talk about Philippine businesses becoming more productive, we are overwhelmingly talking about SMEs.

Imagine a small distributor that automatically generates purchase orders when inventory falls below a certain level. A restaurant that has an AI system analyze daily sales and recommend how much of each ingredient to order. A construction company that turns site photographs and notes into progress reports. And so on and so forth.

For Philippine SMEs, this may be one of the biggest opportunities of the AI era. We have spent decades talking about how Filipino businesses need to become more productive, more digital and more globally competitive. AI could finally expedite that transformation .

And for Filipino entrepreneurs, the time to start experimenting is not next year. It is now.