Salesforce upbeat on Thailand’s efforts to strengthen cloud and AI ecosystem

Eric Loeb, its executive vice president of Global Government Affairs, said on Friday that cooperation would include sharing the company's insights, knowledge and experiences in developing regulations and measurements to ensure Thailand's trustworthiness and competence in cloud and the AI ecosystem.

His remarks came after a meeting on Friday morning at Thailand's Ministry of Digital Economy and Society. He described the discussions as meaningful and fruitful, citing several practical moves and efforts by the country's government to strengthen its national cloud and AI ecosystem.

"It is a wonderful opportunity and experience when you have a ministry that is committed to digital transformation and the Cloud First Policy for Salesforce to engage in a dialogue, hear what the specific questions and priorities are, and share the experiences and ideas that we have of how to be cloud first from the start and how we are seeing it all over the world," he said.

Recently, the Ministry of Digital Economy announced seven key initiatives to reshape the country's digital environment. Among those initiatives, the Cloud First Policy gets top priority, which encourages the use of cloud-based systems as the primary infrastructure, to establish Thailand as a regional cloud hub.

This initiative entails modernising and securing the country's digital infrastructure to international standards, as well as improving government operations using digital technologies.

According to the ministry's statement, the goals include providing cloud services to over 220 departments, saving 30-50% of the national processing infrastructure budget, promoting data exchange, and leveraging big data for development. Furthermore, it aims to attract both domestic and foreign cloud investments, thereby increasing Thailand's competitiveness.

Simultaneously, the ministry has said it is determined to advance AI infrastructure by introducing the National AI Service Platform on the Government Data Centre Cloud. The creation of the Thai Large Language Model (Thai LLM) to support Thai language artificial intelligence represents a significant step forward. AI applications in both the public and private sectors are gaining traction, including intelligent weather forecasting and flood risk mapping, the ministry said.

Developing regulations

Loeb praised Thailand's practical initiatives while expressing full support for the country's efforts to develop AI policy, regulations, solutions, and security measures.

"We believe that it is the responsibility of all stakeholder groups — private sector, government, academia, scientists, civil society — to develop a good policy for AI. And on a global level, we have to ensure that all countries at different states of development are sharing their input on the concerns and the opportunities of AI," he said.

Loeb encouraged Thailand to maintain risk-based frameworks while developing its own regulations. The concept is to distinguish between regulations that pose a higher risk to human safety, future economic potential, or critical infrastructure and those that pose a very low risk, such as personal shopping experiences, he said.

"You want to make sure you have the new on policy framework that might have higher burden obligations, expectations to address the high risk, while ensuring that in the lower risk areas you are allowing room for innovations, competition and experimentation," he said. "We don't have all the answers, but we know that building trust and transparency is the best way forward."

Global dialogue

He said that one of the most interesting things he had seen around the world in the last year was the realisation of working together on integrating AI ethical, legal, and social considerations into AI development along with an innovative approach, such as the EU AI Act, the US Voluntary Commitments and the G7 principles on safe and responsible AI.

"What we're seeing is that rather than trying not to do anything until you can do everything and trying to make everything perfect or doing nothing at all, policymakers are learning from one another, connecting, and taking building blocks as they all work to figure out what a sustainable regulatory framework would be. And I see Thailand participating in that global dialogue, which is a work in progress," Loeb explained.

Insights for Thailand

He reiterated that his visit to Thailand was to provide some insights into the use of AI in a variety of areas, including the value of AI solutions and the ethical use of AI, the distinction between Enterprise AI and Consumer AI, and to further Salesforce's collaboration with policymakers in the country.

"The foundation of digital transformation is that everything is based on data. So, from the start, you must understand that privacy, security, accuracy, auditability, and removal of toxicity are all subject to regulatory oversight," he said.

Citing more than a decade of investment in ethical AI, he said Salesforce intended to expand its collaboration and cooperation with Thailand beyond the current level of dialogue. He also committed to continue developing innovations to provide and protect trusted data in AI for both the public and private sectors.

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