Indonesia’s AI ambitions are large, and President Prabowo Subianto’s government has made no secret of wanting the country to compete in the region’s AI buildout. Later last year, his government unveiled a National AI Roadmap(Opens in new window), naming artificial intelligence a central driver of productivity, innovation and growth on the road to Golden Indonesia 2045. The debate since has been about infrastructure, regulation and investment.
That is not really the country’s hardest challenge. Building AI capacity is, relatively speaking, the more straightforward task.
The harder question is one the roadmap barely addresses: getting far more of its working-age population into productive, quality jobs. This will determine whether Indonesia can build an economy that actually makes use of AI without closing off the lever it will need most to reach high-income status.
Development economists have long described how countries get richer through structural transformation. Workers move out of agriculture, first into industry, then into services such as banking, administration, education and business support.
In Indonesia, this pattern is well documented. Agriculture’s share of employment fell from 48% in 1991 to 27% in 2025, while the services sector’s share rose from 38% to 50% over the same period. Between 2005 and 2025, services alone accounted for roughly 37 million of the 52 million net new jobs Indonesia created, about 70%.
Indonesia’s wrong AI race risks leaving women behind | Lowy Institute
(source: Dyah (Prita) Pritadrajati – Lowy The Interpreter)
The Global Eye is in partnership with SIOI
