For Singtel, it’s about democratizing AI for everyone

“AI will become more possible and feasible for not just someone of our size to use, but even smaller companies,” says Anna Yip, CEO of International Digital Services at Singtel.

As AI adoption continues to gain momentum in Southeast Asia, Singtel is making sure it plays a key role in enabling customers, both public and enterprises, to get the most out of the technology.

Following the launch of RE:AI, an AI Cloud service offering in October 2024, Singtel remains focused on democratizing AI to make it widely available to organizations. This includes ensuring both enterprise and public sector customers not only have affordable access to AI technologies but also be able to develop more use cases with the technology.

According to Anna Yip, CEO of International Digital Services at Singtel, the telco company has taken a lot of steps in ensuring the technology can only benefit its customers but also transform the company as well.

Speaking to CRN Asia at GITEX 2025, Yip explained that Singtel has four foundations that to build AI. First is the use of AI by the organization whereby there has to be AI for everyone, AI for leaders and AI for specialists at different levels to ensure the technology is democratized.

The second foundation is on governance and ethics. Yip explained that Singtel has a team that looks at this, not just from meeting regulations in Singapore but globally as well to ensure compliance as well as the responsibility in data quality and the safety of using AI.

The third foundation is the AI platform tools. This includes development platforms, agentic workflows as well as AI gateway catalogues. For Yip, these are all areas to help different parts of the organization because everyone is looking at AI to see how they can rmake AI grow and be adopted across.

Lastly, it’s the foundation of data, which is something that Singtel started more than two years ago, which is to have a unified data platform.

“This i is an ongoing process. We have reached multiple milestones, but it will continue to grow as we look into more areas to use AI. When it comes to user AI, it's about the customer and the way we develop and deliver products and services. So, on the customer front, we already started working on customer care use cases two years ago. Customer care is the first unit to really look into the power of AI, starting with core summarizer,” explained Yip.

Explaining more, Yip mentioned that in the past, conversations with customers would take about 15 minutes over a call and someone would need to write a report or summary based on that call. Today, AI agents can summarize this and also suggest the next septs including sentiment analysis, detecting any red flags, and even look at the compliance side, which Singtel has all built in. Yip added that there are also outbound calls to customers that are AI.

“In a way, operationally, it's easier to get started than inbound. Because inbound, there are many reasons people call us. But outbound actually, if the flow is clear, for example, sending a customer a message regarding their car insurance, time to renew, they won’t read it. The AI can call the customer and say, sir, would you like to look at this email from this day? That's a very nice flow and a very nice exchange, we found. So that was really one of the first ways and we'll continue to push through a lot more use cases, particularly on the inbound side,” said Yip.

On the network side, Yip highlighted that AI is being used to find scams, especially via the predictive element of the scam control. As the growth of scams is truly scary, whether it's voice or message, there is now a stronger push for this.

Collaborating on AI development

“We have multiple layers of collaboration. On a broad level, we have an AI alliance with several other telcos. This includes GTAA, SKT, EN, SoftBank, Deutsche Telekom and more. We are also still creating, because we are looking at the usage, developing an LM suitable for our needs that is better than off-the-shelf models, especially in terms of the detail and the way that it can be tailored for telco use. At the same time, we are also working with a lot of bigger vendors,” said Yip.

Interestingly, Yip also pointed out that a lot of the smaller companies have clever solutions that fit Singtel’s certain needs. Apart from that, Singtel is also developing its own use cases to help on its monitoring side by relying on off-the-shelf models.

“There's a lot of interesting angles when it comes to collaboration. They can be our provider, they can be our customer, and they can be our partner. What do I mean by that? For example, a provider may have certain tools that may fit certain purposes, which is very neat for us. At the same time, they could be our customers,” said Yip.

Yip highlighted NCS as an example. The Singaporean SI does a lot of work with government enterprises and other telcos. These players could be Singtel’s partners, and sometimes Singtel can also help them sell to partners.

“It could be NCS, it could be telco, they sell. So that's why I do see this as a multifaceted opportunity, not just using their service, but also helping them grow,” added Yip.

When asked about the cost of AI, Yip clearly acknowledged that this is a very fundamental question today.

“Just like any investment we make, we need to make sure that as much as we can, that it will pay off for us. I do think that the good thing for us is that we can really leverage many different types of technology. And as the innovation law goes, the cost should get cheaper. At the same time, the usage and the impact should get bigger. AI will become more possible and feasible for not just someone of our size to use, but even smaller companies. So that's why I think for us, helping the other enterprises, even small enterprises to go on the curve is very important,” concluded Yip.