On 5 February 2026, Malaysia’s Ministry of Digital — through the National Artificial Intelligence Office (NAIO) — and Google Cloud launched the AI@Work 2.0 initiative, providing 445,000 Malaysian public officers with access to Google Workspace Gemini generative AI tools and hands-on training workshops. The training covers practical prompting skills, high-impact AI use cases for government work, and governance considerations. A pilot phase showed 97% of participants saved an average of 3.25 hours per week; 91% reported improved quality of work.
AI@Work 2.0 is a government-secured initiative: the Ministry of Digital negotiated the training provision centrally and deployed it across the civil service, rather than leaving it to individual agencies. The training goes beyond tool orientation to include AI governance and responsible use, making it one of the most substantial civil servant AI training deployments in Southeast Asia.
Who it affects: 445,000 Malaysian civil servants — representing a significant proportion of the entire public sector workforce. The training is provided at no cost to individual civil servants and is coordinated through their agencies via NAIO.
What is notably missing: The training is not yet backed by a legal minimum standard for civil servant AI competency. Participation may not be uniformly mandatory across all agencies. The initiative is a capacity-building programme rather than a binding certification requirement with defined pass standards and verification before deployment on AI systems.