In September 2026, SEAMEO participated in two major UNESCO global events examining how education systems must respond to an increasingly AI enabled world. UNESCO Digital Learning Week 2026, held from 8 to 11 September at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, France, explored digital learning, teacher development and higher education. This was followed by the 4^th UNESCO Global Forum on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, held from 14 to 17 September in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which widened the discussion towards governance, equity, human agency, cultural and linguistic diversity, and the public purposes of education.

Across both events, the discussions pointed beyond technology itself towards the systems surrounding teachers and learners. The central question was whether policies, institutions, professional learning, curriculum, assessment, infrastructure and governance are evolving coherently enough to support people through technological change. UNESCO’s global discussions framed AI as already affecting teaching and learning, assessment, research, governance and knowledge production, raising questions about how these changes can remain human led, ethical and aligned with education’s wider public mission.

This question of system readiness was central to SEAMEO’s Futures Thinking Workshop, Rethinking Teacher Professional Development in the Age of AI, held during Digital Learning Week in Paris. Drawing on SEAMEO’s Teacher Professional Development landscape analysis across nine Southeast Asian countries, the workshop shifted the question from whether teachers are ready for AI to whether the systems supporting teachers are ready. SEAMEO’s regional work has shown that professional development sits within a wider ecosystem of policy, institutions, technology, partnerships, learning design, professional capacity and communication. These layers are deeply connected. Providing teachers with new technologies achieves little if they lack time, infrastructure, trusted guidance, opportunities to collaborate or policies that support professional judgement.

The discussions also challenged the assumption that when something is not working in the classroom, the answer is automatically more teacher training. A difficulty may reflect an individual learning need, but it may equally result from curriculum, assessment, class size, infrastructure, workload, leadership or wider institutional conditions. Systems therefore need to diagnose before they prescribe. AI and better use of data may help identify patterns and personalise support, but they should not become another way of shifting system problems onto teachers. Teacher agency must also be supported by professional knowledge, reliable information, collaborative communities and clear ethical guidance.

The same systems lens applies to learners and learning. SEAMEO’s discussions with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on the recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results provided an opportunity to consider their implications for Southeast Asia and how global evidence may be read alongside regional evidence such as SEA PLM. As learners gain access to AI systems capable of producing convincing explanations and arguments instantly, the ability to read deeply, evaluate evidence and exercise independent judgement becomes even more important. The question is not whether AI causes learning challenges, but whether learners with weak foundations are sufficiently prepared to question authoritative sounding AI outputs. Digital capability and foundational learning can therefore no longer be treated as separate agenda.

SEAMEO’s engagement with the UNESCO Teacher Task Force added another layer by focusing on the current regional work on teachers, particularly in developing initiatives in response to the findings of SEAMEO’s TPD Landscape Analysis. The exchange reinforced the need to move from fragmented training towards coherent professional learning systems that connect policy, institutional support, professional pathways, classroom practice and teacher voice. At the same time, discussions on higher education widened the systems perspective further. Universities prepare teachers, support TVET, produce research, engage governments and communities, and help societies address questions that technology or markets alone cannot resolve. Strengthening education therefore requires stronger connections across basic education, teacher education, TVET, higher education, research and lifelong learning.

A further critical consideration emerging from the UNESCO discussions in Riyadh was the question of voice: whose voices are included, whose are excluded, and whose knowledge ultimately shapes the systems increasingly used for learning. This creates a risk that some voices become more visible while others are marginalised or excluded. For Southeast Asia, responsible AI in education therefore requires stronger attention to whose knowledge is represented, how local languages and cultural perspectives are reflected, and whether the region is contributing to the knowledge systems that increasingly shape learning. Strengthening local research, data, languages and institutional capacity is essential so that Southeast Asian educators and learners are not only consumers of AI generated knowledge, but active contributors to and shapers of it.

Taken together, SEAMEO’s participation in these UNESCO global events points towards a broader agenda of rethinking systems for the future. AI may be the immediate catalyst, but the deeper questions concern how teachers are supported, how learners build strong foundations, how institutions connect, how knowledge is represented, and how decisions are governed. Regional cooperation should not seek one Southeast Asian model of AI adoption. It should enable countries to learn together, pool research, strengthen professional capacity, develop local language resources and share approaches to governance while respecting different contexts. The central lesson is clear: as technology becomes more capable of helping with the how, education systems must become even clearer about the why, and strong enough to turn that purpose into practice.