The Sri Lanka Export Development Board has held a workshop on the practical use of artificial intelligence for small and medium-sized exporters in the Kandy region, bringing together 55 participants at the Grand Kandyan Hotel.
The session was sponsored by Habib Bank and aimed at showing SME exporters and entrepreneurs how AI tools can be applied to day-to-day business rather than treated as a specialist technology, the Daily FT reported.
What was covered
The programme focused on applications directly relevant to exporting:
- market research
- identifying potential international buyers
- digital marketing and content creation
- customer engagement
- business process automation
The stated case to participants was that such tools can cut the time and cost of routine work, improve decision-making, and help smaller firms find and reach new overseas markets — the last being the constraint that most often separates an SME from an exporter.
Uditha Bandara, founder and chief executive of Bluechip Tech Ltd and Bluechip Technologies Asia, led the session as resource person.
The EDB describes the workshop as part of a continuing effort to strengthen the digital capability of Sri Lankan SMEs and encourage exporters to adopt emerging technologies to compete in global markets. Holding it in Kandy rather than Colombo places it outside the Western Province, where most export support activity is concentrated.
Not reported
The filing does not give the date of the workshop, name any participating firm or sector, or say whether further sessions are planned in Kandy or other regions. It gives no cost, no figure for Habib Bank’s sponsorship, and no indication of how outcomes will be measured — so there is no basis on which to judge what the programme achieves beyond attendance. It does not say which AI tools were demonstrated.
Single source. This is an institutional announcement carried by one verified newsroom. A search of the Daily Mirror, the Island, Colombo Gazette, EconomyNext and news.lk returned no other account of the session; Ada Derana’s site has returned a CloudFront 403 to every fetch route for some fifty days and could not be checked. The description of the workshop’s value is the EDB’s own.
