Jonathan Frederic De Santos

People walk past a banner with an AI (artificial intelligence) sign at the Frankfurt book fair on October 16, 2024, on the first day of the world's biggest book fair in Frankfurt am Main, western Germany. Kirill Kudryavtsev, AFP/File

Article (news)

Raine Musñgi

ABS-CBN News

<div><span class="fr-img-caption fr-fic fr-dib" style="width: 960px; display: block;" width="960"><span class="fr-img-wrap"><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/17886565404921788656538251.jpeg" style="width: 960px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib" width="960"><span class="fr-inner" style="text-align: left;">People walk past a banner with an AI (artificial intelligence) sign at the Frankfurt book fair on October 16, 2024, on the first day of the world&#39;s biggest book fair in Frankfurt am Main, western Germany. Kirill Kudryavtsev, AFP/File</span></span></span></div><p>MANILA &mdash; Philippine companies may be rushing to adopt artificial intelligence, but one of the biggest questions facing executives may not be how much AI they can deploy. It is who takes responsibility when the technology gets it wrong.</p><p>&ldquo;If an AI-generated report has an error in it, who is accountable?&rdquo; Sprout Solutions founder and CEO Patrick Gentry asked in an interview on ANC&rsquo;s Startup.</p><p>For Gentry, that question is becoming harder as AI moves from a novelty to an everyday workplace tool.</p><p>Companies are now grappling with whether employees are using AI efficiently, whether they are using the right tools, and what safeguards should govern AI-generated work.</p><p>The concern is not simply that AI might produce a bad answer. It is that people may stop questioning an answer because it looks good.</p><p>Gentry offered a marketing example: AI can produce a polished campaign script in a fraction of the time, but if managers approve it without critically evaluating whether it actually fits the target audience, a company could end up producing bad work faster.</p><p>&ldquo;People really need to maintain that critical thinking,&rdquo; he said.</p><div><a href="https://www.abs-cbn.com/news/technology/2026/9/4/openai-begins-rollout-of-new-powerful-ai-model-gpt-6-astra-0838"><strong>OpenAI begins rollout of new powerful AI model GPT-6 Astra<br></strong></a></div><p>That puts a new responsibility on managers: AI can accelerate the work, but humans still have to own the judgment.</p><p>The issue is already on the Philippine government&rsquo;s AI agenda.</p><p>The Department of Trade and Industry&rsquo;s National AI Strategy Roadmap 2.0 identifies ethics and governance, workforce upskilling, data access and regulatory uncertainty among the issues the country needs to address as AI adoption expands.</p><p>The DTI also notes that Philippine gross expenditure on research and development is only 0.30% of GDP, compared with the UNESCO-recommended 1% target.</p><p>And there may be another management problem hiding in plain sight: the bosses themselves may not know enough about AI.</p><div><br></div><div><strong>WHY YOUR CEO MAY NEED AI TRAINING MORE THAN YOU DO</strong></div><p>Gentry said Sprout initially found that more senior employees were less likely to see AI as part of their daily work.</p><p>But instead of simply sending them to training, the company pushed its middle and senior managers to get their hands dirty and actually build applications using AI.</p><p>The result surprised him.</p><p>&ldquo;Most of them created these dashboard apps,&rdquo; Gentry said, explaining that the managers were trying to solve their own problems around information visibility and bringing data together.</p><p>The lesson: AI training for executives may not be about teaching them how to write better prompts. It may be about teaching them how to rethink their jobs.</p><p>A rank-and-file employee doing repetitive, information-heavy work may immediately see where AI can help. A senior executive dealing with strategy, coordination and decision-making may see fewer obvious applications.</p><p>But once managers experiment with the technology, Gentry said, they can begin applying it to higher-level problems.</p><div><a href="https://www.abs-cbn.com/news/technology/2026/9/3/nu-professor-develops-tool-to-help-filipinos-spot-scam-messages-1645"><strong>NU professor develops tool to help Filipinos spot scam messages<br></strong></a></div><p>That matters as Philippine businesses try to catch up with a technology that is developing faster than many organizations can write their policies.</p><p>The DTI&rsquo;s AI strategy specifically calls for workforce upskilling and reskilling and identifies limited enterprise AI use, weak data strategies and uncertainty over regulation as barriers to adoption.</p><p>Gentry&rsquo;s warning to business leaders is blunt:</p><p>&ldquo;The biggest mistake leaders are doing is not investing enough into it or not looking into it enough.&rdquo;</p><p>He estimates companies may be using only &ldquo;10% of what they could&rdquo; from AI.</p><p>That could make the next competitive race less about who has AI and more about who knows how to deploy it across the organization without losing human judgment.</p><div><br></div><div><strong>FROM PAYROLL PROBLEM TO AI BUSINESS</strong></div><p>That challenge is particularly relevant to Sprout because the company itself was born from a business problem.</p><p>Gentry and his co-founder, Alexandria Gentry, started Sprout in 2015 after encountering HR and payroll headaches while building KMC Solutions. What began as internal tools became a potential B2B software business after Gentry realized other Philippine companies were facing the same problems.</p><p>In other words, Sprout did not begin by trying to build a technology company. It started by solving a problem its founders were experiencing themselves.</p><p>The company has since moved well beyond its original payroll tool.</p><p>Sprout raised $10.7 million in Series B funding in 2023, bringing total investment at the time to $18.3 million. &nbsp;By 2026, Sprout says more than 2,000 Philippine organizations use its payroll platform.</p><div><a href="https://www.abs-cbn.com/news/technology/2026/8/11/commission-warns-unauthorized-ai-deepfakes-of-real-people-may-be-violation-of-data-privacy-1553"><strong>Commission warns unauthorized AI &#39;deepfakes&#39; of real people may be violation of data privacy<br></strong></a></div><p>The company&rsquo;s next growth question is therefore no longer simply how to digitize payroll. It is how to use AI to turn HR data into business intelligence, productivity gains and better decisions, while maintaining the trust that comes with handling people&rsquo;s salaries, benefits and employment records.</p><p>Gentry expects the next five years to bring what he calls the &ldquo;agentification&rdquo; of everything, with personal AI assistants potentially becoming part of every worker&rsquo;s daily life.</p><p>Watch the full interview with Patrick Gentry on &quot;Startup&quot; for the other management questions AI will force Philippine businesses to answer, including what happens to HR when AI takes over more of the administrative workload, how companies should redesign jobs, and where human judgment remains indispensable.</p><div><em>Catch the full interview with Patrick Gentry on Startup and on YouTube with ANC 24/7</em></div><div><em><span class="fr-video fr-deletable fr-fvc fr-dvb fr-draggable" contenteditable="false" draggable="true"><iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wREOmpRCtXw??si=oOPlaYSLStM2WHMa&wmode=opaque&rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable"></iframe></span></em><br></div>

<p>The concern is not simply that AI might produce a bad answer. It is that people may stop questioning an answer because it looks good.</p>

The concern is not simply that AI might produce a bad answer. It is that people may stop questioning an answer because it looks good.

AI may create a new management problem: Who is accountable when the machine is wrong?

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AI may create a new management problem: Who is accountable when the machine is wrong?

Raine Musñgi,

ABS-CBN News

Published September 06, 2026 09:09 AM PHT

Read More:

Artificial Intelligence

Sprout Solutions

Patrick Gentry

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