Becoming a global aI talent hub: Aligning Indonesia’s aI strategy for clarity, cohesion, and implementation

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Indonesia’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy (STRANAS-KA, 2020–2045) suffers from strategic ambiguity, institutional fragmentation, and weak implementation. This article asks how a singular focus—transforming Indonesia into a Global AI Talent Hub could address these weaknesses, and what comparative lessons Canada and Singapore offer. Using George and Bennett (Citation2005, Case studies and theory development in the social sciences. MIT Press) structured, focused comparison across six analytical dimensions, the analysis develops a promoter-with-guardrails framework that extends Papyshev and Yarime (Citation2023, Policy Design and Practice, 6(1), 79–102) typology of state roles for middle-income democracies. The framework couples a talent-first promoter orientation with three structurally embedded guardrails: constitutional-rights anchoring, civil-society co-design, and decolonial-AI evaluation. Four architectural pillars are supplemented by a fifth cross-cutting enabler of rights-based accountability. The framework is advanced as a conceptual proposal derived from comparative analysis rather than as an empirically validated intervention. The article translates it into a three-phase policy roadmap, contributing both a theoretical extension for middle-income-democracy AI governance and a practical implementation template generalisable to comparable Global South contexts.