MANILA - While the business process outsourcing industry talks about retooling the workforce to ride the automation trend, there is a lack of expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) and related fields in the Philippines, an international AI developer said Tuesday.

“We have to be intellectually honest. Look at the demographics in the US even India, there are gonna be the top notch guys, data scientists and machine learning. In reality we don’t have enough people to do that,” George Yang, founder and CEO of AI Pros in Silicon Valley told ABS CBN News.

Currently, millennials are geared towards studying disciplines that can be replaced by automation like business accounting, said Raymond Ang, a trustee of the Healthcare Information Association of the Philippines (HIMAP).

Ang recommends students get into machine learning, data science and Math.

“We have to keep up. We have to make those courses interesting to young kids because you have a lot of kids getting into that labor force. We really need to align the courses that the schools are offering to what the industry is looking for, what the world is looking for,” Ang told ABS-CBN News.

Meanwhile, Yang tells students to “start developing skills, problem solving skills, critical thinking so when you go to any job you bring skills with you.”