Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison is positioning AI as a core skillset in SheHacks 2026, with a target to reach 27,000 women-led micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) over the next six months.
The program is designed around practical AI use in day-to-day business work, including marketing, content creation, customer insights, operations, and financial management, supported by remote learning and in-person workshops across 10 Indonesian cities.
Table of contents
Jump to each section:
- What SheHacks 2026 is trying to change for women-led MSMEs
- How the program is structured across online learning and 10 cities
- Where AI fits in: marketing, customer insights, and financial workflows
- Operational implications for SMB marketers adopting AI through training
What SheHacks 2026 is trying to change for women-led MSMEs
SheHacks enters its seventh year positioned as a response to structural constraints that often limit women entrepreneurs’ access to digital skills, mentorship networks, and business growth pathways. Indosat is making AI the program’s headline capability in 2026, reflecting how quickly AI tooling is becoming part of routine marketing and operating work for small businesses.
The scale target matters in an execution sense: reaching 27,000 women-led MSMEs in six months implies the program is optimized for repeatable training delivery, not just one-off events. Indosat also frames the initiative against Indonesia’s MSME ownership reality, citing the Ministry of Women Empowerment and Child Protection’s figure that 64.5% of MSMEs are owned or managed by women.
SheHacks has previously reached more than 61,000 women across Indonesia through training, mentoring, and digital learning programs, which creates a baseline for what “reach” has meant historically, and sets expectations for how participation and outcomes could be measured in 2026.
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How the program is structured across online learning and 10 cities
The learning journey runs for six months and combines self-paced modules with webinars, online workshops, mentoring sessions, and business showcase opportunities. The remote-first design is a practical choice for geographic reach, since it lowers the dependency on travel and allows participation regardless of location.
Indosat is pairing that with offline workshops in 10 cities: Bandung, Trenggalek, Medan, Bogor, Ternate, Bekasi, Pekanbaru, Badung, Singkawang, and Sragen. Those sessions are set to include talk shows, live-selling activities, and networking with other entrepreneurs, community groups, influencers, and Indosat representatives.
For marketers and operators, this hybrid structure signals two different learning modes: broad-based foundational training online, then applied practice in local settings where selling formats (like live-selling) and peer support can be tested in real time.
Where AI fits in: marketing, customer insights, and financial workflows
The program’s AI emphasis is positioned as applied, not abstract. Indosat describes use cases including content creation, marketing strategy development, customer insights, operational management, and financial management, which aligns with the tasks that tend to absorb time in small teams.
A key component is the introduction of AI-powered business applications through Sahabat-AI, described as Indonesia’s locally developed large language model. Within SheHacks, the intended outcome is that participants can use AI for marketing activities, content generation, and financial management, suggesting that “AI readiness” here is measured by workflow adoption, not just conceptual familiarity.
This approach also implicitly sets a bar for training quality: if the goal is practical usage, modules need to cover basic prompting, iteration, quality control, and safe handling of business information, especially when AI is used to generate external-facing marketing content or to support business decision-making.
Operational implications for SMB marketers adopting AI through training
For women-led MSMEs, the near-term value of AI training tends to show up in throughput and consistency: producing more drafts of ads, product descriptions, and social content; building repeatable campaign structures; and turning scattered customer feedback into usable themes. But the operational risk is also straightforward: low-quality outputs, off-brand messaging, or over-reliance on generated content without review.
The inclusion of mentoring sessions and showcases is important operationally because it creates checkpoints where participants can pressure-test what they built, get feedback, and identify where AI helps versus where it introduces errors. Offline workshops that include live-selling also create a setting for translating AI-assisted planning into performance under real constraints, such as limited time, real buyer objections, and product availability.
If SheHacks succeeds at scale, a practical indicator will be whether participants leave with repeatable operating habits: documented prompts, lightweight content review processes, and clearer decision routines for when to use AI for ideation, analysis, or drafting, versus when to rely on manual judgment.
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