Dr Praveena Thandasseri Premakumar is a PhD holder in Business Administration (City University Malaysia) with an MBA in IT and over 20 years of combined academic and industry experience. She is a Partner Director of STEPS QM SDN BHD, and most recently served as Academic Head at Bignxt Academy, Dubai, where she evaluated postgraduate coursework and supervised research and capstone projects within a distance-learning model. Her teaching portfolio spans Business Statistics, Management Information Systems, System Development, ERP Training, Cybersecurity, SQL, and Java. A HRD Corp-recognised Train-the-Trainer (TTT), she brings hands-on expertise in LMS platforms, SCORM-based e-learning design, and AI-integrated digital transformation projects across Europe, the Maldives, India, and Sri Lanka. She actively contributes to academic quality assurance as a scientific committee member and peer reviewer, with a growing publication record in online learning, academic stress, and generative AI in creative and knowledge-based workflows.

From Digital Inclusion to Green Resilience: The Role of AI Skills in Women-Led Sustainable Entrepreneurship in South-East Asia                                                                                                                           Abstract:  By creating sustainable social impact, the Malaysia's twin push toward digital transformation and a low-carbon green economy, anchored in national initiatives such as MyDIGITAL and the New Industrial Master Plan, creates new opportunities for women-led micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to enter green value chains - from eco-tourism and sustainable food systems to recycling and renewable-energy services. However, women entrepreneurs remain under-represented in these emerging sectors, and existing evidence on the digital-green transition in Malaysia and the wider Southeast Asian region rarely examines artificial intelligence (AI) skills as a specific enabler or barrier to this participation. This paper addresses that gap by asking: how does AI literacy and digital-tool adoption shape women's ability to start, sustain, and scale green enterprises in Malaysia, and what role does this play in building household- and community-level economic resilience? This paper addresses that gap by asking how AI literacy and digital-tool adoption shape women's ability to start, sustain, and scale green enterprises in Malaysia, and what role this plays in building household- and community-level economic resilience. The paper proposes a conceptual model tracing a single causal pathway. Digital inclusion and AI skills acquisition lead to the adoption of AI-enabled tools for market access, financial management, and sustainability certification. This adoption, in turn, drives participation and growth in women-led green enterprises, and ultimately strengthens resilience to economic and climate shocks. The pathway is developed through a synthesis of recent regional and cross-country evidence on gender-inclusive AI, digital entrepreneurship, and green MSME development. This synthesis is s supplemented by an analysis of publicly available in south-east Asia particularly Malaysian policy and enterprise-support data. The analysis highlights four recurring barriers facing Malaysian women entrepreneurs in accessing AI-enabled green opportunities. These are limited affordability of digital tools, gaps in AI-specific training relative to general digital literacy, weaker access to green financing and certification support, and the absence of gender-responsive design in existing digitalisation and green-transition programmes. The paper argues that closing the AI skills gap for women entrepreneurs is not incidental to Malaysia's green transition, but a precondition for making it genuinely inclusive. It proposes targeted policy and training interventions to close this gap, including sector-specific AI upskilling and gender-responsive green financing. By narrowing the broader digital-AI-gender-green discourse to a single, testable pathway grounded in the Malaysian context, this paper offers both a research agenda for future empirical work and practical recommendations for policymakers, financial institutions, and development practitioners seeking to advance women's economic empowerment through Malaysia's green transition. Keywords: Women's Empowerment; Social Impact, Green Entrepreneurship; Artificial Intelligence; Digital Skills; South-East Asia; MSMEs; Economic Resilience