Is Singapore poised to be the Asia’s AI capital?

Enterprises in Singapore continue to invest heavily on AI technologies to not only improve productivity and efficiency but also aim to be a leader in the technology development.

Singapore's AI adoption rate continues to grow tremendously as businesses begin exploring more opportunities to invest and adopt the technology in their daily operations. The country has already reached significant milestones in AI development and adoption among both large and small enterprises.

According to IDC’s Worldwide AI and Generative AI (Gen AI) spending guide, investments for AI and Gen AI in the region are projected to reach US$110 billion by 2028. The increased investments signal the maturity among enterprises in the region to adopt and develop more use cases for the technology.

Looking at Southeast Asia, Singapore continues to lead the AI adoption and development in various sectors and industries. From large organizations to small, medium enterprises (SMEs), businesses in the country are now poised to develop and adopt more AI use cases into their workloads.

Part of this is due to the Singapore government's initiatives in supporting AI adoption among both enterprises and SMEs. For example, Singapore’s National AI Strategy 2.0 (NAIS 2.0), which was unveiled in 2023, focuses on enabling businesses to have easier access to AI. Singapore has also issued advisory guidelines on the use of personal data in AI recommendation and decision systems. This allows businesses to take a more coordinated approach to implementing AI in their systems as well as ensuring data remains protected.

Building talent in AI

With continuous AI development in the country, the focus now moves towards developing a workforce that is capable of working with these emerging technologies. In a whitepaper by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Singapore’s labor market is highly exposed to AI. Specifically, the exposure is driven largely by the concentration of high- and semi-skilled workers in its workforce. Based on the country’s 2022 labor force survey of resident workers, about 77% of Singapore’s employed workers are highly exposed to AI.

Interestingly, the whitepaper also states that there is equal distribution of roles that work with AI, with 38.9% in occupations that have AI complementarity and 38.6% having jobs with low AI complementarity. This distribution is based on the roles in most organizations in Singapore with those with more skills being able to interact with AI technologies efficiently.

However, this does not mean that the remaining roles are losing out. Instead, they are using AI to mimic or automate more tasks in their roles. Hence, organizations will end up having a rather fair amount of AI usage among their employees.

At the same time, tech companies are partnering with government agencies to upskill and reskill employees in using AI for work. Tech companies are also working with universities in Singapore to ensure graduates have the required technology skillset when entering the workforce. For example, AWS announced in May this year that it will host a series of workships with at least 100 enterprises to drive AI adoption in addition to planned investments up US$12 billion over the next four years.

Apart from AWS, Microsoft launched its AI Pinnacle Program in March this year with five Singaporean organizations to create real world AI solutions which are expected to drive transformation in key industry sectors. Microsoft is also collaborating with Enterprise Singapore and the Infocomm Media Development Authority to enable SMEs to accelerate AI adoption.

Through the NAIS 2.0 initiative, Google has also allowed organizations to use its generative AI models for developers to build, deploy and operate applications. There will also be 3000 Google Career Certificate sponsorships for local distribution partners that focus on upskilling mid-career professionals.

At the same time, Enterprise SG and Google Cloud have also thrown support to local SMEs as part of their ongoing collaboration. According to Google, SMEs in Singapore continue to build and launch AI products that address business challenges and unlock future growth opportunities.

Speaking to GovInsider, Enterprise SG Assistant Managing Director, Geoffry Yeoh mentioned that they will continue to collaborate with AI ecosystem partners like Google Cloud to spur AI innovation and adoption among businesses to strengthen their competitiveness, build new capabilities and capture emerging opportunities.

The increasing adoption of AI in Singapore has also enabled technology vendors and distributors in Singapore to offer more products and services to customers in the country. Increasing AI adoption will require stronger and efficient infrastructure to support the demand for more workloads by businesses.

This includes ensuring there is sufficient compute power to process the AI workloads. As such, Singapore has also been recording increased investments in data centers in the coutnry to support the demand. The government has also lifted a moratorium on data centers in 2022, and in May 2024 announced that there would be an additional 300 megawatts of data center capacity available soon.

With the government and tech companies realizing the potential of AI, the plans and changes that are in place are most likely to propel Singapore organizations to not just be a leader in AI adoption and development in the region but potentially enabling the technology to revolutionize the country, making it the AI capital of Asia.