Excerpst from WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM 

 February 2026

Article Summary: What Did Yana Peel Say?

In an interview at the World Economic Forum's Meet the Leader series, Yana Peel — President of Arts, Culture & Heritage at CHANEL — made a compelling case that human creativity is not threatened by AI but rather made more essential by it. Below are the key ideas from the article:

Key Themes at a Glance

•        Artists have never been more needed — yet never more under threat. As AI and AGI accelerate, the value of human imagination, emotional depth, and authentic storytelling rises, even as AI-generated content threatens the livelihoods of creators.

•        Collaboration is the answer, not competition. Grammy-winning musician Nile Rodgers described AI as 'a new colour in the palette' for artists — a tool, not a replacement.

•        AI can win at chess, but it cannot invent the game of chess. Quoting Google DeepMind's Sir Demis Hassabis, Peel underscores that originality, ideation, and creative invention remain deeply human.

•        Women's underrepresentation in the arts is a systemic problem. Only 11% of works acquired by American museums are by women, and women's artworks account for just 2% of auction values globally.

•        Culture is undervalued, under-prioritized, and underrepresented. In the age of AGI, Peel argues this must urgently change — culture should have a seat at every decision-making table.

•        Copyright and authorship are frontier challenges. As AI generates content trained on human creativity, questions of ownership, compensation, and attribution remain dangerously unresolved.

•        CHANEL's programs — CHANEL Connects podcast, the Next Prize, the Culture Fund, and the Culture Pass — are practical examples of how private enterprise can champion arts access and artist empowerment at scale.

"AI can win at chess, but AI cannot invent the game of chess."

— Sir Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind — cited by Yana Peel 

IT Expert Insights: Reading Between the Lines

As someone who lives and breathes technology, I find Yana Peel's perspective both refreshing and urgent. The global discourse on AI often swings between two extremes — breathless techno-optimism and apocalyptic fear. What Peel offers is something more nuanced: a framework where human culture and artificial intelligence must evolve as co-creators, not competitors.

1. The Creativity-Technology Paradox

Here is the paradox that every IT professional must grapple with: the more powerful AI becomes at generating content, the more we need to define and protect what is distinctly human in that content. Generative AI tools — from OpenAI's GPT and DALL-E to Google's Gemini, Adobe Firefly, and Suno AI for music — can now produce in seconds what once took human creators weeks.

But Peel's insight cuts through the noise: AI can remix, iterate, and optimize. It cannot originate. The 'game of chess' metaphor is apt — AI can master any game once taught the rules, but the original act of imagination that created those rules? That remains irreducibly human.

From a systems thinking perspective, what we are witnessing is an amplification loop: AI makes creative output faster and cheaper, which floods markets, which makes genuine human originality more valuable as a differentiator. The creative economy, paradoxically, becomes more important as AI scales.

2. The Copyright Crisis Nobody is Solving Fast Enough

Peel briefly mentions copyright and authorship as 'really interesting' — but as an IT expert, I'd call it the defining legal and ethical battleground of the next decade. Training large language models and image generators on billions of copyrighted human works without compensation is not a gray area — it is an ongoing redistribution of creative labor to technology companies.

The music industry, which Peel cites as a $50 billion industry where 70% of musicians fear AI, is already experiencing this. AI tools trained on recorded music can now produce near-identical stylistic replicas. The same is true for visual art, writing, and even architectural design — Peel's colleague the late Zaha Hadid's unique computational design aesthetic could, in theory, be reproduced by an AI trained on her portfolio.

This is not a future problem. It is happening now, and regulatory frameworks — especially in the Philippines — remain years behind. 

Applying This to the Philippine Context

Everything Yana Peel discusses at the World Economic Forum in Davos has direct — and urgent — relevance to the Philippines. Let me break this down through a Filipino IT lens.

The Philippine Creative Economy: A Sleeping Giant

The Philippines has an extraordinarily rich creative tradition — from the visual arts of Fernando Amorsolo and Benedicto Cabrera (BenCab) to the global reach of OPM (Original Pilipino Music), the international acclaim of Filipino filmmakers, the literary tradition of José Rizal, and the extraordinary cultural diversity of over 100 ethno-linguistic groups, each with distinct artistic traditions.

The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) has recognized the creative economy as a vital contributor to GDP. Yet investment, infrastructure, and policy support remain woefully inadequate. If Peel argues that culture is undervalued globally, it is doubly undervalued in the Philippines, where budget allocations for the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) and cultural institutions consistently pale in comparison to infrastructure spending.

🇵🇭 Philippine Reality Check

The Philippines ranks among the world's top BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) nations, yet we have not translated this tech workforce advantage into a robust local creative-tech industry. Millions of talented Filipinos produce content, art, and creative work — but for foreign platforms, foreign clients, and foreign IP holders.

The OFW-Artist Parallel: Exporting Talent, Losing Value

There is a painful parallel between the OFW (Overseas Filipino Workers) phenomenon and the Filipino creative worker in the digital age. Just as the Philippines exports nurses, engineers, and domestic workers who send remittances home while their talent enriches other economies, Filipino digital creators — illustrators, musicians, game designers, voice actors, writers — generate massive value on platforms like YouTube, Fiverr, DeviantArt, and Twitch, most of which are owned by foreign corporations that capture the majority of that value.

When AI tools now threaten to replace these same workers, Filipino creatives are doubly exposed: they lack the legal protections of workers in stronger economies, they have minimal recourse in IP disputes with foreign platforms, and they have few locally-owned alternatives to turn to.

"Culture attracts capital faster than capital attracts culture."

— Mayor Michael Bloomberg — cited by Yana Peel

What the Philippines Must Do: An IT Expert's Prescription

1. Build a Philippine AI Ethics and Creative IP Framework

The Philippines must develop — urgently — a legal framework that protects Filipino creators from AI systems trained on their work. The Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL) needs to be empowered and resourced to address AI-generated content, algorithmic copying of indigenous art forms, and the use of Filipino music, film, and literature in training datasets without consent or compensation.

Countries like the EU with its AI Act and the UK with its ongoing copyright consultation are ahead. The Philippines risks becoming an IP colony in the AI age if it does not act.

2. Establish Filipino Creative Technology Hubs

Rather than solely positioning the Philippines as an outsourcing destination for foreign tech and creative firms, government and private sector should invest in establishing Filipino-owned creative technology studios — combining the country's strengths in IT, animation, music, and storytelling. BGC and Makati already have the infrastructure. What is missing is strategic vision and funding analogous to what CHANEL's Culture Fund provides to international institutions.

The DICT (Department of Information and Communications Technology) and NCCA should be directed to co-develop a Creative Technology Innovation Fund that supports Filipino creators in building with AI tools, not just being displaced by them.

3. Integrate Arts and Technology in Philippine Education

One of Peel's most powerful points is that technology without art produces soulless efficiency. The K-12 curriculum in the Philippines already includes arts education, but it is grossly underfunded and underemphasized compared to STEM subjects. The global creative economy — games, film, XR/immersive experiences, digital fashion, AI art — demands workers who are both technically fluent and creatively confident.

Philippine schools and universities should establish Creative Technology programs that blend coding, design, storytelling, and AI literacy. This is not an luxury — it is an economic imperative.

4. Address the Gender Gap in Philippine Tech and Arts

Peel highlights the stark underrepresentation of women in global art markets. The Philippines, to its credit, has stronger gender representation in some sectors than many of its ASEAN neighbors — but disparities persist, especially in STEM leadership and in recognition of female Filipino artists at the institutional level.

The intersection of gender, art, and technology is where some of the most important Filipino voices are emerging — from digital artists to indie game developers to Filipina entrepreneurs building apps for the local market. These voices deserve targeted support, mentorship, and platforms.

5. Champion Indigenous and Regional Filipino Art in the Digital Space

The Philippines has a breathtaking diversity of indigenous artistic traditions — Maranao okir, Ifugao weaving, Kalinga tattoo culture, Tausug brassware, Pampangueño pabalat. These traditions are at extreme risk of being appropriated, replicated without credit, or simply erased by AI systems trained on global datasets that don't recognize their existence.

There is an urgent need to digitize, archive, and legally protect these traditions — not as museum artifacts, but as living creative assets of the Filipino people. This is exactly the kind of needs-based, community-centered cultural investment that Peel advocates for in CHANEL's global programs. 

The Philippine Creative-Tech Opportunity

Reading Yana Peel's words through the lens of a Filipino technology professional, I feel equal parts inspiration and frustration.

Inspired — because Peel's vision describes exactly what the Philippines could become: a nation that harnesses its extraordinary creative tradition, its youthful and digitally native population, and its growing technology sector to position itself as a global creative-technology hub rather than merely a service provider to wealthier nations.

Frustrated — because the structures that make Peel's vision possible at CHANEL (long-term commitment, resources freed from ROI pressure, strategic cultural leadership) are precisely what is absent from Philippine cultural and technology policy. The Philippines is reactive, not strategic. It responds to trends rather than setting them.

💡 My Core Argument

The Philippines does not have a creativity problem. We have an infrastructure, policy, and investment problem. Filipino talent is globally recognized — from anime and game studios in Manila to OPM artists with millions of global streams. The challenge is ensuring that Filipino creators OWN their work, EARN from their creativity, and BUILD institutions that endure beyond individual talent.

Peel's observation that 'artists have never been more needed, but artists have never been more under danger' applies with painful precision to the Filipino context. We produce creative talent at scale. We export it. We do not retain it. And now, AI threatens to commoditize it.

The answer is not fear. The answer — as Peel argues and as Nile Rodgers embodies — is intelligent, empowered engagement. Filipino artists must learn AI tools. Filipino technologists must learn artistic thinking. And Filipino policymakers must stop treating culture as a soft addendum to hard economic planning, and start treating it as the strategic economic asset it truly is.

"Our capacity to collaborate across ideologies, across the arts, across countries, across cultures and across artistic endeavours defines the power of the Intelligent Age."

— Yana Peel, CHANEL

Conclusion: What Davos Can Teach Diliman

The conversations happening at the World Economic Forum — about AI, creativity, copyright, gender equity, and cultural soft power — are not distant from the Philippines. They are about us, even if Filipinos are rarely in the room where those conversations happen.

Yana Peel's work at CHANEL demonstrates that private enterprise can and should invest in culture beyond ROI metrics. The Philippine private sector — from conglomerates like SM, Ayala, and Jollibee to growing tech companies and startups — has the resources and the reach to do the same. Corporate social responsibility in the Philippines should evolve from scholarship programs and tree-planting to serious, sustained investment in Filipino creative institutions, digital art infrastructure, and artist protection.

The Intelligent Age, as Peel calls it, will be defined not by the country that builds the most powerful AI — that race is already won by the US and China. It will be defined by the countries that best combine AI capability with human creativity, cultural depth, and institutional wisdom. The Philippines, if it acts with urgency and vision, has exactly the ingredients to be among those countries.

Only connect — as E.M. Forster wrote, and Peel echoes. The Philippines must connect its technologists with its artists, its BPO industry with its creative economy, its diaspora talent with its local institutions, and its ancient artistic traditions with its digital future.

That is not a Davos aspiration. It is a Pilipino imperative.

Published: February 2026  |  Category: AI, Culture, Technology Policy, Philippines

Original article: World Economic Forum — Meet the Leader with Yana Peel, CHANEL