A new international AI recognition program just crowned its first-ever class of winners — 30 organizations across 10 countries, honored in Taipei for everything from tax-administration AI to golf-swing analytics.
The World Innovation, Technology and Services Alliance (WITSA) announced the winners of the inaugural WITSA Global AI Awards 2026 on September 1–2, 2026, during the WITSA Global AI Summit in Taipei, Taiwan. It’s a first-of-its-kind program from an alliance that represents tech industry associations across more than 80 countries and economies — and the winner list is a genuinely global snapshot of where applied AI is actually being deployed in 2026, not just where it’s being hyped.
What WITSA Is, and Why This Program Matters
WITSA isn’t a new organization — it’s the group behind the long-running World Congress on Innovation & Technology (WCIT) and the WITSA World Cup, among other platforms focused on international trade, innovation, and tech-sector growth. The Global AI Awards is a new addition to that portfolio: an inaugural recognition program built specifically around applied AI, judged across seven distinct pillars rather than a single “best AI company” category.
That structure — infrastructure, talent, entrepreneurship, use cases, data, public policy, and investment — is worth paying attention to on its own. It signals that WITSA is trying to map the full AI ecosystem, not just celebrate flashy consumer products. Public policy and infrastructure categories, in particular, are unusual inclusions for a tech awards program, and point to WITSA positioning this as much for governments and institutions as for private companies.
The Winners, by Category
Infrastructure (5 winners): DOTSOFT S.A. (Greece) for its NOONiot smart-city predictive analytics platform; TM Research & Development (Malaysia) for ANTRIX, an autonomous network operations system; Taiwan’s Fiscal Information Agency, Ministry of Finance, for AI-powered tax administration; and Consultores e Ingenieros CONSEIN (Venezuela) for BanIA, a multi-agent infrastructure platform.
Talent (3 winners): Motor Oil (Hellas) S.A. (Greece) for an enterprise-wide AI adoption program; PEOPLElogy Berhad (Malaysia) for a digital workforce transformation framework; and Syscom Computer Engineering (Taiwan) for a virtual healthcare coach.
Entrepreneurship (5 winners): Doutor-AI (Brazil), building clinical guardrails for hospital AI workflows; EPSILONNET S.A. (Greece), an AI CFO assistant built for small businesses; TabSense Limited (Jordan), an AI restaurant-management platform; MYPOCKETDOC SDN BHD (Malaysia), a digital patient monitoring system; and BIG DATA Co., Ltd. (Taiwan), whose KEYLM platform handles enterprise knowledge management.
Use Cases (8 winners, the largest category): Grupo KELSOFT’s SoyBot (Argentina), a governed WhatsApp communication system; entrovy.ai’s kinetic8 (Bahrain), a cyber asset intelligence platform; Motor Oil’s nrg (Greece), call-center conversation intelligence; ProgressSoft Corporation (Jordan), signature recognition for financial documents; REDtone Digital Berhad (Malaysia), an enterprise AI voice and engagement platform; BRINEL’s IQANTO (Romania), a manufacturing intelligence platform; DOUZONE BIZON (South Korea), whose ONE AI platform integrates directly into ERP systems; and Kaohsiung City Government’s Linker Vision project (Taiwan), an AI system for municipal camera streams.
Data (3 winners): Draiven Technology LTDA (Brazil), a multi-agent decision intelligence platform; INFOPRO SDN BHD (Malaysia), whose SYNERGi platform coordinates credit intelligence; and Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), for HoleInOne — an AI-powered golf analytics device, easily the most unexpected entry on the list.
Public Policy (4 winners): IDIKA S.M.S.A. (Greece), for myHealth AI, built for citizens and healthcare professionals; Sarawak Digital Economy Corporation (Malaysia), for an unmanned retail ecosystem; and the Information Management Center of New Taipei City Government (Taiwan), for an AI governance framework.
Investments (2 winners): Sarawak Digital Economy Corporation (Malaysia) again, this time for a connected investment pathway program, and Taoyuan City Government (Taiwan), for a portfolio governance screening model.
Sarawak Digital Economy Corporation is the only organization to win twice, taking honors in both Public Policy and Investments — a detail worth noting for anyone tracking Malaysia’s growing footprint in applied government AI.
The 10 Countries Represented
Winners came from Greece, Malaysia, Taiwan, Venezuela, Brazil, Jordan, Argentina, Bahrain, Romania, and South Korea. Taiwan and Malaysia are the clear volume leaders — unsurprising given Taiwan hosted the summit and Malaysia has been actively building out its digital economy policy infrastructure (Sarawak’s double win reflects that). Greece is the strongest showing from Europe, with four separate winning organizations across three categories.
What the Organizers Said
WITSA Chairman Dato’ Dr Sean Seah framed the results around responsible AI: “These twenty eight winners prove that responsible AI is not a constraint on innovation, it is what lets innovation scale.” (Worth flagging: the official winners list totals 30 organizations across the seven pillars, not 28 — a small discrepancy between the ceremony remarks and the published list, possibly reflecting an earlier count before final tallies.)
WITSA Deputy Chairman Robert Janssen highlighted a common thread across the winning entries — governance built in “from the start, not bolted on afterward” — while WITSA CEO Dato’ Dan E Khoo described the program as reflecting “the collective effort” of AI development happening across “six continents,” framing the winners as a set of “national AI champions.”
Why This Is Worth Watching
Awards programs are common in tech; what makes this one worth tracking is the combination of scale (30 winners, 10 countries, a genuinely international judging scope) and the specific categories WITSA chose to recognize. A program that gives equal weight to “public policy” and “investment” alongside the more expected “entrepreneurship” and “use cases” categories is making a statement about what mature, deployable AI actually looks like in 2026 — infrastructure and governance matter as much as flashy applications.
As the inaugural edition, this year’s winner list also functions as a baseline. If WITSA runs this annually, 2026’s class becomes the reference point for measuring how the map of applied AI shifts — by country, by category, and by the kind of problems organizations are actually choosing to solve with it.
