AI at Work 2.0 — Malaysia's government-wide generative-AI productivity rollout for civil servants

Announced on 6 February 2025 as a follow-on to Malaysia's National AI Office launch in December 2024, AI at Work 2.0 gives public officers access to Google Workspace's Gemini suite — drafting and summarising in Gmail and Docs, generating training videos with Google Vids, and building custom "Gems" AI agents for repetitive tasks such as analysing citizen feedback — backed by hands-on prompt-writing workshops. Malaysia's Ministry of Digital, working with Google Cloud, has scoped the initiative to eventually reach up to 445,000 public officers government-wide.

Independently of the vendor rollout, the World Bank partnered with Malaysia's Public Service Department on a 2025 GovTech Skills Survey of more than 16,500 civil servants across all 28 federal ministries. It found that civil servants using AI tools save an average of 2.5 hours per day — though adoption and gains vary sharply by ministry, with the Digital Ministry and the Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry leading, and the Women, Family and Community Development Ministry and Ministry of Finance lagging.

The same survey that documents these productivity gains also warns that Malaysia's public sector runs on a "secrecy-by-default" culture: only 26.1% of service-delivery data is published externally, versus a 35% OECD average, and the report recommends a Freedom of Information Act. That transparency gap — flagged by the government's own commissioned research — tempers how independently the reported productivity figures can currently be verified at national scale.

Read the full analysis: https://futureiot.tech/ai-at-work-2-0-to-empower-malaysias-public-officers/