Indonesia embeds AI in Prabowo's $15bn free-meal program to reach 83 million people

Indonesia turns to AI to deliver Prabowo's biggest promises

Jakarta plans to fold artificial intelligence into its biggest state initiatives, starting with the $15bn free-meal drive at the centre of Prabowo's agenda. The most expensive promise Prabowo Subianto made on his way to Indonesia's presidency was lunch. His free-meals programme, budgeted at roughly $15bn to feed some 83 million children and pregnant women across an archipelago of thousands of islands, is the kind of undertaking that lives or dies on logistics. Now Jakarta wants to point artificial intelligence at exactly that problem, embedding the technology into the meal scheme and a handful of other flagship programmes as it tries to make the machinery of the state work harder, says Reuters in an exclusive work. The plan treats AI less as a moonshot than as plumbing. Indonesia's national roadmap names a set of near-term, practical uses: tools to monitor the free nutritious-meal programme, models to forecast crop yields in support of the country's food self-sufficiency drive, and systems to track financial reporting inside the Red-White cooperative initiative, another of Prabowo's signature schemes. The throughline is that these are not consumer products but back-office instruments aimed at waste, leakage, and the gap between what a programme promises and what actually reaches people. That focus on a single, very large meal programme is telling. A scheme that size, run across remote districts, is precisely where money goes missing and food spoils before it arrives, and the government has already moved to refocus the rollout on more remote areas while trimming the pace of new kitchen construction. An AI layer that can flag a kitchen falling behind, or a delivery that never lands, is a unglamorous use of the technology, but it is the kind that a finance ministry can actually measure. The ambition sits inside a larger framework. Indonesia published a National AI Roadmap White Paper in 2025 and issued a presidential regulation directing the use of AI across public services, part of a push the government has tied to improving bureaucratic efficiency and easing a stubborn fiscal deficit. The whole effort is yoked to Prabowo's headline economic target of 8 per cent annual growth by the end of his term in 2029, and to the longer "Golden Indonesia 2045" vision of reaching high-income status by the country's centenary. There are obstacles the roadmap cannot wish away. Indonesia's own AI regulation has slipped, with binding rules pushed into 2026 after the government missed an earlier target, which means the technology is being threaded into live programmes ahead of the legal framework meant to govern it. That sequencing, deploying first and regulating after, is the opposite of the order most governments claim to prefer, and it raises obvious questions about data protection and accountability when the systems involved are touching welfare payments and food deliveries to tens of millions of people. The country also has to build the underlying capacity, the data centres, the compute, the talent, in a region where AI infrastructure has become a contest in its own right, and where Indonesia is competing for the same chips, engineers, and cloud capacity as wealthier neighbours. That race is one we have followed across Southeast Asia, from Thailand approving $29bn in data-centre projects to Kazakhstan's $10bn deal with an Nvidia-backed builder, as governments try to avoid leaning entirely on a handful of US and Chinese clouds. Indonesia's twist is to lead with applications rather than infrastructure, putting AI to work inside programmes that already exist before the data centres behind them are fully built, an approach that risks running into the same sovereignty questions others are wrestling with. What Jakarta is attempting is, in one sense, the least futuristic version of an AI strategy: not chatbots or frontier models but a state trying to use software to deliver lunch to 83 million people more reliably. If it works, the proof will not be a demo. It will be a meal that arrives, in a village a long way from the capital, on a day it otherwise might not have.

Indonesia plans to embed AI in key programmes, including $15 billion free-meal drive, document shows

Indonesia's progress on AI has been slow when compared with Singapore and Malaysia. They ⁠are pushing ⁠to establish themselves as development hubs, securing billions of dollars from global tech firms that are seeking to build critical infrastructure to meet growing demand for cloud and AI services. Indonesia plans to embed artificial intelligence in some key government programmes including its $15 billion free meals plan, according to a presidential regulation draft seen by Reuters, part of a strategy that the government believes could lift its gross domestic product by 12% by 2030. Indonesia's progress on AI has been slow when compared with Singapore and Malaysia. They ⁠are pushing ⁠to establish themselves as development hubs, securing billions of dollars from global tech firms that are seeking to build critical infrastructure to meet growing demand for cloud and AI services. The presidential regulation lays out a roadmap for ministries and regional governments to adopt AI from 2026 to 2029, targeting "economic growth through development, facilitation and use of AI especially in the president's priority programmes." The draft has not been previously reported upon. It is currently awaiting President Prabowo Subianto's signature. The government says in its draft that another goal is to make Indonesia more competitive in AI use regionally and globally. Companies like Meta Platforms, IBM and Microsoft contributed to the draft, said Wahyudi Djafar, a tech analyst who wrote parts of the regulation and ⁠is a member of the AI government task force. The companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In 2024, Microsoft said it would invest $1.7 billion over a few years in expanding cloud services and AI in Indonesia. Analysts say Indonesia is not ready ⁠to be an AI developer, owing to a dearth of infrastructure including chips, as well as a lack of AI skills in the workforce. Derwin Suhartono, a professor of artificial intelligence at Bina Nusantara University in Jakarta, said Indonesia has yet to be competitive in the AI race and "may stay as a consumer of products that foreign companies sell to." He added that the government could use AI in government programmes, but so far "it's all rhetoric." Free meals In Prabowo's free meals programme, the draft says AI will be used to design region-specific menus, monitor kitchen hygiene, predict food demand and detect irregularities, as well as integrate health data for early warnings of emergencies. The free meals programme has been under fire due to a lack of transparency, and earlier this month, the head of the effort was fired and arrested. Irregularities have been detected in the setting up of kitchens, while safety standards and emergency responses have been criticised after tens of thousands of children suffered food poisoning last year. It has also raised fears of inefficient spending at a ⁠time when Indonesia has limited budgetary space. The draft notes that AI-driven automation has enabled organisations to "achieve remarkable efficiency while reducing operational costs." AI will also be used to analyse health checks in Indonesia's free health screening and testing for tuberculosis. The regulation built on a white paper that was issued last year. It is unclear when Prabowo will sign the new regulation. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The draft reiterates a plan for a "sovereign AI fund," which would be handled mainly by the country's new wealth fund, Danantara Indonesia. It also suggests providing fiscal incentives for AI researchers and adding talent to plug shortages. AI could lift Indonesia's gross domestic product by 12%, or $366 billion, by 2030, the draft regulation said. Accompanying the AI adoption plan is a draft regulation that says government bodies must also report AI-related risks, including misuse of biometrics, intellectual property violations and deepfakes.