AI Nation,
Cash Only.
On 28 July, the Prime Minister launched AI Malaysia and unveiled the National AI Action Plan 2026–2030. The same week, the petrol station near me still couldn’t take an e-wallet, and a full-house restaurant was cash only — by choice. I’ve watched this movie before. We are excellent at launching. We are terrible at plumbing.
The launch on paper
Give credit where the paper deserves it: a national AI office, an action plan through 2030, RM5.9 billion in Budget 2026 for AI and digital infrastructure including a Sovereign AI Cloud, RM18.1 million for NAIO itself. Government, industry and academia in one hall, and the PM saying AI must be accessible and inclusive. Nothing in that sentence is wrong.
The plumbing that never got fixed
Now the part nobody puts on a stage. Start with the most basic layer there is: fibre internet that behaves like a roller coaster — speed when your luck is in, and when the rain comes, it simply breaks. This is the network the AI nation is supposed to run on.
Five years after 5G arrived, the operators are still fighting over network structure while coverage limps behind the announcements. Petrol stations — businesses that move millions of transactions a day — still wave away wallet payments. And the one that should embarrass everyone: plenty of reputable, packed, profitable restaurants flatly refuse digital payment altogether. Not spoilt machines — policy. Cash only, by choice, in 2026. Everyone knows the quiet reasons: the fee that eats margin, the settlement lag, and the trail that cash doesn’t leave.
Here’s what makes this list offensive rather than merely sad: every item on it is solvable by a directive. One policy: every fuel pump takes DuitNow by year end. One rule: settlement to merchants within 24 hours. No research grant, no consortium, no five-year plan. These problems have stayed unsolved for years not because they’re hard, but because nobody’s KPI depends on them.
Why the shiny thing always wins
A launch photographs well. Plumbing doesn’t. A new initiative comes with a stage, a minister, a hashtag and a budget line; a working payment terminal in a kampung petrol station comes with nothing — no ribbon, nobody to congratulate. So the system produces what it rewards: another launch, another acronym — while the boring infrastructure that would actually move the rakyat’s daily life stays broken, because fixing it advances no one’s career.
That’s how you get a white elephant: not through bad intentions, but through a scoreboard that counts announcements instead of transactions.
To be fair about the plan
The AI agenda itself is not the elephant. Sovereign AI matters; I argue for it constantly. And regulation arriving late is partly universal, not uniquely Malaysian. The test isn’t the launch — it’s whether, two years from now, the money produced working rails or only reports. The action plan deserves the benefit of the doubt exactly once.
What an SME should do
Same answer as always: don’t wait to be saved. The national plan’s success or failure will not fix your cashier. Take every payment method today even if the fees annoy you — cash-only is how you volunteer for extinction. Put your catalog where AI, not footfall, does the discovering. And use the AI tools that need no national infrastructure at all — they run on the broken internet we already have.
Published by IMA AI — August 2026. Written from the operator’s side of the counter — where the payment either lands or it doesn’t.