Asia-Pacific is embracing artificial intelligence more actively than the rest of the world. A 2025 Boston Consulting Group survey found 70 per cent of frontline workers in the region use AI regularly compared to 51 per cent globally, while 60 per cent felt optimistic about its potential against 52 per cent worldwide.

Enthusiasm does not mean equal opportunity, however. Singapore-based gender advocacy group Nineby9 warns that women face a double disadvantage as AI reshapes work: they are concentrated in clerical, administrative and business-support roles exposed to automation, plus they remain under-represented in the jobs AI is enhancing or creating anew. The challenge, then, is to help women adapt to AI while expanding their influence over the technologies and rules shaping the future economy.

Christie Pang, co-founder of education technology company Lirvana Labs, believes training young women is a crucial first step. She wants female graduates and entry-level workers to have access to AI skills so they can compete for emerging opportunities and generate long-term value.

Her emphasis on human capability also shapes product development at Lirvana. Educators help design Yeti Confetti, the company’s AI-powered platform, rather than being expected to adapt to a finished product. “Giving someone a sharp scalpel does not make them a heart surgeon,” she says. “Training matters.”

Anna Liu worked as a lawyer at Skadden and Tencent before becoming CEO of HashKey RWA, a virtual asset trading platform. For her, technical expertise is not the only route towards influence. She calls her traditional legal training “the single most useful tool” she has brought to her role. Her advice to women entering emerging-technology fields is to combine depth with breadth: “What matters is how deeply you understand your field and how broadly you can see.”

Visibility helps turn expertise into influence. Vila Wong, co-founder of fintech company Finoverse, remembers how early in her career, people sometimes asked to speak to her male co-founder instead of her. That experience forged a commitment to giving women leaders more exposure. Pang shares that view, saying there is a need to “reframe the narrative” rather than “continually approaching [artificial intelligence] from the assumption that women are absent”.

Wong has put that commitment into practice at Finoverse, which has avoided all-male panels since its earliest conferences and encourages female executives to speak publicly. She also helps shape Samantha, the company’s business-matching AI agent, guiding its questions and user experience. Making such contributions as visible as possible can help more women see places for themselves in AI.

Enthusiasm for AI gives APAC an opportunity to set an inclusive course for change. Pang, Liu and Wong show how perspectives from education, law and business can inform how new technologies are designed and governed, and how their development can be led. Giving women more decision-making authority can help the region turn the current opportunity into a more equal future.