Tapping the SME opportunity in Singapore

“We do have quite a fair bit of business with the enterprise market, but the mid-market is actually where we are growing the highest,” says Richard Koh, Area Vice President and Country Leader, Salesforce Singapore.

For Richard Koh, Area Vice President and Country Leader, Salesforce Singapore, what makes the opportunities in the country unique compared to the rest of the region is the readiness and eagerness customers have in their AI journey. Koh, who joined Salesforce in January 2026, believes that Salesforce and its partners are capable to meeting these demands in Singapore.

In an interview with CRN Asia during Agentforce World Tour Singapore 2026, Koh shared that Salesforce sees significant opportunity in Singapore as it aligns with the nation’s vision towards a digitally savvy and empowered workforce. While Singapore is a small nation, he believes that leveraging technologies like agentic AI becomes a key component of how businesses can actually improve on productivity.

“If you look at a broader context, the countries in the region, Southeast Asia, and further, in India and China, businesses are also making use of AI. So, it is an important time that the business here in Singapore keep ahead of the technology and not fall behind. And this is what we envision to do together with not only the government, through programs with IMDA, like the AI Verify Foundation, to align on the nation's AI strategy 2.0. So, we do see a lot of opportunities, and we are actually very well used to really support not only Singapore but also using it as a base to service the region, especially the Southeast Asian countries,” Koh said.

At the same time, Koh also highlighted the increasing focus towards the midmarket companies and even the SMEs in Singapore.

“We do have quite a fair bit of business with the enterprise market, but the mid-market is actually where we are growing the highest. Being a SaaS, it is also an easier way for SMEs to get started leveraging cutting-edge technologies because they don't have to build the whole thing themselves, and they don't have to operate. We do have a broad spectrum of SME customers covering all the different industry verticals. That's because when we look at providing a solution to our customers, we have different tiers and different editions. There's a starter edition, enterprise edition, unlimited edition,” he explained.

Koh also mentioned that while enterprise customers are exposed to the broader portfolio, Salesforce has a lighter version used for the SMEs. But what is more equally important for Koh is that as the business grows, Salesforce solutions grow together with the SMEs.

“The plus point is they don't have to worry about the nitty-gritty details of running an IT shop, having a lot of accounts. And skilling up the team is also going to be a bit of a challenge for SMEs. So, we take that away from them, let them focus on the business while we take care of the rest,” he said.

Partners enabling SMEs

According to Koh, Salesforce's partner ecosystem plays an important role in helping SMEs in their AI journey. As SMEs need more help, Salesforce works closely with its partners who understand customers' business, especially in the SMEs sector.

“Partners bring this technology together with them, helping SMEs to explore, experiment, and put it into use for specific business use cases to deliver the outcome they desire. This is a three-way partnership which helps us in the longer run because at the end of the day, we want to make sure that the customers get what they need from us, and we are doing this together with our partners in a very tight manner,” Koh explained.

As Salesforce has a variety of partners, Koh pointed out the GSIs (Global system integrators) are more focused on the enterprise customers, but there are regional SIs and boutique partners that are more active in the commercials and the SME space.

For example,NCS, which won the title of ASEAN Reseller of the Year at Salesforce's ASEAN Partner of the Year Awards, has been a long-time player in the public sector space, and have commercial businesses as well.

“That's where we try to leverage on the success that has been built together in the public sector, so working with some of the other commercial customers to help reach the gap, to enable their customers on this journey to the agentic AI as well,” Koh added.

Koh also shared that in conversations with SMEs, while they do appreciate the potential of agentic AI, one of the common questions that they have is understanding how they can bring the technology to their business.

“How are they going to bring this state-of-the-art technology into their businesses and transform with the help of it? There is a lot of exploration that is involved in identifying what are some of the use cases that is more common, high volume, low-hanging fruits, where we can deploy agents to help remove some of the endpoints for the businesses, so that they can actually focus on higher impact work. I would say this is more related to AI fluency. It's not only about the technological aspect of AI, but how can AI be applied to the business to derive the desired outcome,” Koh said.

“So that is the key connector. Working with partners, they have a good balance of both. They understand Salesforce technology; they understand the customer's needs. Then what we usually do is identify one or two key use cases. Let's get it running as sort of a pilot and this pilot is important for the customers to appreciate what this technology can do for us, gain the confidence and then replicate with running of more use cases,” he added.

Goals for the year

Given that Koh has only been with Salesforce for a few months, he is determined to achieve a lot more, given the noise in the market currently. With Salesforce well positioned to be the trusted advisor for its customers, announced customers like Grab, Singlife, Kaplan are successors with deploying Agentforce and serve as very good use cases that he believes Salesforce can actually share with customers so that they can think about how agents can be used in their work environment.

“My hope is to continue building on the momentum that is already there. We have a growing pool of customers who are successful. We'll continue working with them, but at the same time, showcase this to other customers so that we can actually bring them on to this journey as well, together with our partners,” he said.

For Koh, while cost is always a consideration when investing in technology, the success of deploying AI and getting the real measurable output or impact does not only sit with cost itself, but it also sits with the leadership. This is because the success of winners will eventually come from those who go beyond just investing in AI but is committed to transforming with AI.

“It is not technology that you just deploy and move on. You need to make sure that we have the alignment from an organization perspective to manage this change and to embrace this change, educate the team. To be fair, I think a significant amount of work needs to be done to really be successful in scaling the use of AI in organizations. We were talking about this 4R framework, where you redesign your work and then reskill your workforce, you redeploy your human talents into other areas where you can deliver a greater impact for the businesses. You also look at how to rebalance the mix of humans and agents. The agentic future will be a combination of hybrid humans and agents,” he added.

As such, Koh believes that it is not just simply by putting more agents. Instead, humans and agents will be able to work together and drive success as a holistic goal towards achieving business growth.

“We have a trusted platform that brings together humans, agents, applications and data. As we all know, agents can be very intelligent, but they need access to the right data to make the right decisions and recommendations. And we have expertise working with large and small organizations. We have been working with enterprises for over 20 years, since the founding of the company, all the way down to the SMEs as well. Our ability to engage with customers, to help explain technologies to them and introduce new technologies, differentiates us from our competitors today,” he concluded.