‘AI brains’ next big thing for companies, say industry leaders

KUALA LUMPUR: The next big development in artificial intelligence may not be smarter chatbots but the emergence of “AI brains” that help companies store knowledge, make decisions and coordinate work across entire organisations.

Speaking at the d Conference 2026, organised by the Malaysian Digital Association (MDA), Nicholas Sagau, president of MDA and chief operating officer of Rev Media Group, said businesses should start building “knowledge bases” that preserve organisational memory and expertise.

Nicholas said companies that can benefit the most from AI are those that can best capture their employees’ processes, expertise and institutional knowledge in systems that AI can utilise.

“Figure out what is unique about your company, what knowledge is unique to your function. Once you get that right, you can make AI much more effective for your organisation,” he said.

FMT managing director Azeem Abu Bakar described these knowledge systems as the early building blocks of an organisational “AI brain”.

Azeem said companies could upload policies, operating procedures, customer insights, research and historical decisions into such a system, allowing AI to understand the organisation better and assist its employees more effectively.

He highlighted ChatGPT’s Projects function – a dedicated workspace that groups related chats, custom instructions, and reference documents into a single organised folder – as an example of an “AI brain” in its most basic form.

“Companies should have their own ‘AI brains’ that can be used to operate the company more productively,” Azeem said.

He said FMT is already exploring ways to organise its institutional knowledge, research and editorial expertise so that it can eventually be utilised by AI systems.

However, an “AI brain” is only as powerful as the information inside it.

Gerard Grech, adviser to the University of Cambridge and former managing director of Founders at the university, said proprietary datasets could become one of the biggest competitive advantages in the AI era.

Grech said every company possesses information that its competitors do not have, ranging from customer insights and operational experience to research and industry expertise.

When this knowledge is organised and connected to AI, it can have a powerful competitive advantage. He said the companies with the best “AI brains” will not necessarily be those with the best technology but those with the best knowledge and data.

He also said building “AI brains” at scale will require more than software and data, calling for more investments in computing capacity and AI infrastructure.

Noting that data centres require significant amounts of electricity in line with increased demand for computing power, Grech said governments around the world are increasingly looking at renewable and clean energy sources to support the growth of AI infrastructure.

The panellists said the challenge for both companies and governments is no longer whether they should adopt AI, but how quickly they can build the knowledge, data, infrastructure and energy capacity needed to power the “AI brains” of the future.