What Exabytes'GROW AI Summit 2026 says about who owes whom

There is a version of corporate ambition that ends at the balance sheet, and there is a version that understands scale as a form of duty. Exabytes, twenty-five years into building Southeast Asia's digital backbone, has chosen the latter with the launch of GROW AI, a strategy less concerned with selling artificial intelligence (AI) than with making sure the businesses least equipped to adopt it are not left to fend for themselves.

The numbers explain why this matters. A 2025 study by Ecosystm, conducted with Red Hat and backed by the National AI Office, found that only one in five Malaysian SMEs surveyed had moved past the pilot stage with AI. Six in ten cited a lack of in-house expertise as the barrier. This is the quiet crisis beneath every AI headline: interest has outpaced capability, and the businesses with the least room for error are the ones most exposed to that gap.

GROW AI is Exabytes' answer, built on what the company calls the RASA principles: Reliable, Accessible, Scalable, AI-driven. It is the next chapter of a mission that began with helping businesses simply exist online and now extends to helping them think, decide and operate with AI woven into the fabric of the enterprise. Announced at the GROW AI Summit 2026 in Kuala Lumpur, before an audience of roughly 500 business owners, executives and public-sector figures, the strategy carries a target that reads more like a civic pledge than a sales projection: one million businesses empowered to adopt AI by 2030.

Exabytes GROW AI Summit 2026.

Chan Kee Siak, the company's Founder and Chief Executive, framed the moment as a natural continuation rather than a pivot, noting that the company's role has always been to reduce complexity for businesses uncertain of where AI fits into their operations. It is a modest way of describing what amounts to a redistribution of capability, from the companies that already have it to the thousands who do not.

The summit's centrepiece was a three-year partnership between Exabytes and Aurora Mobile, the NASDAQ-listed enterprise AI platform behind GPTBots.ai, signed by Chan and Aurora Mobile's Founder and CEO, Chris Lo. The alliance pairs Exabytes' regional infrastructure and customer reach with Aurora Mobile's expertise in AI agents and workflow automation, aimed at producing tools that scale from a single SME's customer-service assistant to full enterprise AI deployments for larger organisations and government bodies. Lo's own framing was instructive: enterprise AI transformation, he suggested, is not a matter of switching on a chatbot, but of connecting intelligence to an organisation's knowledge, workflows and people, with the governance to sustain it.

(From L to R) Mr. Ryan Lim, Enterprise Sales & Account Manager, Exabytes Group, Mr. Eric Foo, Deputy CEO, Exabytes Group, Mr. Sam Hu, AI Solution Manager, Sangfor Technologies, and Mr. Dave Yu, COO, Aegis Clouds during the second panel session entitled “AI is Driven by Data and Successful Use Cases are Driven by Business – How Do We Ensure Success?” 

Eric Foo, Exabytes' Deputy Chief Executive, put the obligation in more practical terms. Businesses do not need to overhaul themselves overnight, he said. They can begin with one operational problem, prove its value, and let adoption grow from there, the real challenge being to move AI from a scattered, hard-to-measure individual effort into something the whole company can stand behind.

This is where Noblesse Oblige earns its place in the story. Buried beneath the summit's headline partnerships is the fact that Exabytes' commitments extend to B40 youth, women entrepreneurs and underserved SMEs, through training, sponsorship and talent development. It is easy for a company to build an AI product for those who can already afford one. It is a different, harder commitment to build the on-ramps for those who cannot yet see the road.

Malaysia's AI Nation 2030 ambition will not be won by the enterprises with the resources to adopt AI unassisted. It will be decided by the hundreds of thousands of smaller businesses that make up the country's real economy, and by whether the companies with the infrastructure to help them choose to do so. GROW AI is, at its core, a bet that the obligation runs both ways: that those who built the digital foundations of Malaysian commerce owe something to the businesses now trying to build atop them.

On the evidence of this summit, Exabytes appears to understand that scale, handled well, is not just an advantage. It is a responsibility.