BENGALURU, India – President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has reached halfway through his five-day State Visit to India as he will be transferring from New Delhi to the “Silicon Valley” of the country, Bengaluru.

According to Ambassador of the Philippines to India Josel Ignacio, this trip to Bengaluru would strengthen ties between the two countries in the IT-BPM (Information Technology-Business Process Management) sector.

“What we want is for our countrymen to be upskilled because it can't just be voice,” he told DAILY TRIBUNE.

“Technology is advancing very quickly, we need to keep up with it and we need to be onboard on the AI trend,” he added.

With a parallel growth for both countries in this sector – IT for India, and BPM for the Philippines, the two countries observe what they call "coopetition", cooperation and competition.

“We see a big thing that we can do in India that we call relationship, not competition, even though both of them are leading in IT BPN, they call it coopetition, there is competition but more on cooperation,” he said.

Through this, India is pushing the Philippines for adopting artificial intelligence in their BPM sectors.

“What we want is for our collaboration to reach the point of upskilling almost 1.8M Filipinos working in the IT-BPM sector so that they become skilled and proficient in AI, which is where the world is headed,” he said.

Even though the Philippines is far from India, Filipinos would no longer need to go to India to study the country's knowledge in the world of AI because the experts in this field are already in the Philippines.

“Fortunately, many of our IT-BPM companies in the Philippines are Indian and in our conversations with them, of course it happens that some are brought in and trained here, but we prefer in-house training in the Philippines because those are also Indian partnerships, joint ventures, so it will be done there,” he said.

He added that companies in the Philippines can receive incentives if they train Filipinos in-house.

“In fact, the current investment regime has incentives for training that is done right at the headquarters in the Philippines, so that is what is encouraged to be done there so that more people can be trained and given skills in AI and other IT fields that are emerging today,” Ignacio noted.

Upon President Marcos' arrival, he will immediately head to meet with various companies here in Bengaluru including iSon group, Tata group Hinduja group, and Nephroplus.

He will also meet with the governor of Bhava Karnataka at the Raj Bhavan Karnataka.

Marcos and the Philippine delegation here will stay until his departure for Manila on Friday.