Young Singaporeans are the best prepared in the Commonwealth to ride the AI wave, according to a new index. The more useful lesson for Southeast Asia, however, sits with Australia, the country in third place: having the technology is the easy part.
The Ayre Index, launched this week at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua and Barbuda, scores all 56 member states on how well their 15- to 29-year-olds are positioned to benefit from AI. Singapore leads with 77.6 out of 100, followed by Malta on 75, Australia on 71.0, Britain on 70.8 and Canada on 70.2.
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The bar is not low. Only 15 of the Commonwealth’s 56 countries meet the study’s readiness benchmark of 53, while 41 fall below it. New Zealand finishes ninth and India eleventh.
Top of a very uneven class
Singapore’s win deserves some context. The Commonwealth is a club of very unequal economies, and Malawi and Lesotho finished last, with only Mauritius, South Africa and Nigeria among the Commonwealth’s 21 African members reaching the benchmark. Beating that field is not the same as topping a global ranking.
The researchers are also careful about what they measured. They caution that the index tracks conditions associated with readiness rather than the AI competence of individual young people. In other words, it scores the soil, not the crop.
Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei are all Commonwealth members, but the published materials do not disclose where Malaysia or Brunei landed. That is a pity for a country where only 37 per cent of 163,000 workers are getting AI training.
Australia’s access-to-jobs problem
Australia’s scorecard is where the index gets interesting. The country scores 8.7 out of 10 for access to technology and 7.5 for digital and AI capability. On conditions that support decent jobs, business creation and the move into employment, it scores just 5.3.
The foundations are also slipping. A 2025 national assessment found that 37 per cent of Year 10 students met the national standard for digital literacy, down from 46 per cent in 2022.
Canberra’s states are responding. Queensland is rolling out Corella, an AI platform for teachers and students in state schools. Victoria has launched an A$8.2 million (about US$5.4 million) programme to train 1,300 workers in AI. That is a meaningful start, but small against an estimated 5.4 million Australians aged 15 to 29.
The same pattern runs through Southeast Asia: high device and app adoption, weaker routes into good work. Banks may insist that AI will create jobs, but the region should read the fine print first, especially as AI reshapes the entry-level tech roles young people have traditionally used as a first rung.
The US$53 billion maybe
Using International Monetary Fund scenarios, the researchers estimate AI could make Australia’s economy A$80.6 billion (roughly US$53 billion) larger after ten years. The range runs from A$40.9 billion in the conservative case to A$120.3 billion in the optimistic one, a near threefold spread.
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That spread is the honest part of the number. Modelled gains of this kind depend on assumptions about adoption, productivity and policy that no index can lock in. “Could” is doing a lot of work.
Professor C. Justin Robinson of the University of the West Indies’ Five Islands Campus put the stakes more plainly. “We need to make sure that the next generation will be able to do more than just consume AI products made elsewhere,” he said. Southeast Asian founders will recognise the worry: Hong Kong and Taiwan are cheering the AI boom while Southeast Asia isn’t in the room.
Who is grading the test
Readers should also know who built the index. The Ayre Think Tank was founded by Antiguan-Canadian philanthropist Calvin Ayre, better known as the founder of online gambling brand Bodog. In 2017, US prosecutors dropped felony charges against him after he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour charge of being an accessory after the fact to the transmission of wagering information. He is also closely associated with Bitcoin SV, a controversial bitcoin spinoff, and more about the index is hosted on calvinayre.com.
None of that invalidates research built on 1,128 sources covering some 732 million young people. It does mean the index is a privately funded project launched in its founder’s home country, not an independent multilateral assessment, and should be read that way.
Ayre’s own pitch is pragmatic. He told delegates that what matters is giving young people “the skills and the chance to get ahead” to start businesses, find jobs or build something themselves. India, already showing the world what AI will do to jobs and education, is a reminder of what scale looks like. Thailand, where AI literacy is reaching office workers rather than the 63 per cent in informal employment, shows how easily that chance skips most of the workforce.
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The takeaway for the region is not who came first. Singapore and Australia have largely solved access. Neither has yet shown it can turn connected, AI-literate young people into founders and well-paid employees at scale, and as Gen Z needs skills AI can’t replicate more than another AI course, that is where governments should be judged. “Governments now have to decide what they’re going to do about it,” Ayre said. On that, at least, he is right.
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