Do AI Centers of Excellence really accelerate AI adoption?

A new pioneering program between Google Cloud and Digital Industry Singapore aims to establish AI Centers of Excellence within 300 companies over the next 12 months

AI Centers of Excellence are being developed all across the Asian region by both vendors and partners as they look to not only showcase the capabilities of GenAI but also plan and develop more use cases for customers.

Singapore continues to lead AI adoption in the Southeast Asian region as enterprises now focused on deploying agentic AI use cases to enhance their business productivity and capabilities. One of the main reasons why Singaporean businesses are capable of faster deployment is simply because businesses understand the value the technology brings to the organizations.

Apart from that, Singaporean enterprises continue to be exposed to the many use cases and capabilities of GenAI through the many AI Centers of Excellence (AICoE) that have been established in the country by both vendors and the partner ecosystem.

Recently, Google Cloud and Digital Industry Singapore (DISG) launched AI Cloud Takeoff (AI CTO), a full-fledged national program to establish CoEs within 300 digitally mature, Singapore-based companies over the next 12 months. This will empower them to create AI-driven intellectual property, products, and services that boost their competitiveness and unlock new revenue opportunities.

As the pioneering program under the Singapore Government’s Enterprise Compute Initiative, the success of Google Cloud and DISG’s initial AI CTO pilot with 30 companies in November 2024 validated the program framework while providing valuable insights that informed the development of the broader Enterprise Compute Initiative.

According to Philbert Gomez, Senior Vice President; Head and Executive Director, DISG, the Enterprise Compute Initiative is a pioneering national program designed to bring together cloud service providers and IT consulting partners to accelerate AI-driven transformation for businesses.

“Our successful pilot with Google Cloud laid a strong foundation, enabling Singapore-based companies like Embed, Seaco, and YCH Group to harness tailored AI solutions that enhance operational efficiency and strengthen global competitiveness. Through the Enterprise Compute Initiative, we’re excited by the potential for hundreds of Singapore-based enterprises to be enabled by AI – driving innovation, productivity gains, and sustainable growth across industries,” said Gomez.

The AI CTO program will enable companies to establish a dedicated in-house AICoE that will centralize AI-related expertise, resources, and governance through a proven framework designed by Google Cloud. It will also focus on driving technology, process, and people transformation; and ensure AI innovation initiatives are aligned with business objectives, scalable, and implemented securely and responsibly.

“While businesses were initially hesitant to embrace AI, often associating it with consumer-grade tools, Google Cloud programs like AI Trailblazers successfully laid the groundwork by emphasizing enterprise AI’s distinct advantages. This led many to experiment with and adopt enterprise AI solutions. With companies now pursuing more advanced, purpose-built solutions to unlock greater value, they must address new challenges like building robust data-to-AI pipelines, fostering a learning culture, securing internal buy-in, prioritizing the right use cases, and integration with existing systems,” commented Serene Sia, Country Director, Singapore and Malaysia, Google Cloud.

Sia also pointed out that with DISG, Google Cloud has designed AI CTO to help these firms implement a practical roadmap for holistic transformation, empowering them to scale enterprise AI innovation with confidence and readiness.

Specifically, companies will work with their DISG-appointed, Google Cloud-certified technical consultancy and implementation partner of choice to establish their AI CoEs and receive financial incentives worth up to SG$500,000 from DISG and Google Cloud, disbursed in tranches as they meet various milestones.

Partners and AICoE

The AI TCO pilot was conducted last November and has already enabled 30 companies to enhance their operations and bring higher-value products and services to international markets.

Several Google Cloud partners have also been appointed by DISG for the program. They include Accenture, AsiaPac, CloudMile, Deloitte, Kyndryl, NTT Data, and Searce. Partners play an important role in ensuring enterprises make the most of the technology and implement it properly into the business to solve their problems.

For example, Embed, a worldwide leader of the integrated cashless business management systems and solutions for family entertainment centers partnered with Searce to develop Sidequest AI, a solution that uses BigQuery to process anonymized gameplay and transaction data to gain user insight and contextual understanding.

Another example is how Seaco has partnered with CloudMile to develop a multilingual, multimodal AI agent that automates container damage classifications and repair notifications. Utilizing Google Cloud’s full suite of services, the Seaco AI agent detects and qualifies damages from photos, extracts relevant details from voice notes, and converts this information into readable, actionable next steps in Seaco's cloud-based SAP enterprise resource planning system.

At Vietnam SuperPort, a first-of-its-kind multimodal logistics hub jointly developed by T&T Group and Singapore-headquartered YCH Group, the company has partnered with Kyndryl to embed next-generation AI capabilities into its off-airport cargo terminal (OACT) operations. Kyndryl and YCH have also built a customized object detection AI agent.