Speeches
Opening Address by SMS Tan Kiat How At EuroCham AI Summit 2025
26 November 2025
His Excellency, Artis Bertulis, Ambassador, European Union Delegation to Singapore
Ms Godelieve van Dooren, Vice-President, EuroCham Singapore
Fellow friends and distinguished guests,
Ladies and gentlemen,
A very good morning to all of you. It's my pleasure to be here with all of you at the EuroCham AI summit to talk about a very important topic.
We are at a very important juncture of our AI journey. Earlier, we mentioned the launch of EuroCham Beyond the Buzz AI Report in 2024. Now the very often-asked question is, are we in a bubble?
From buzz to bubble, it is a very fast swing in sentiments and questions in the course of just six to nine to 12 months. Well, going beyond the views of investors on specific valuation of companies, I believe that the technology itself is here to stay because it is a transformative technology that can potentially create a lot of value for companies and industries.
Like all general-purpose technologies, we ask how we can adopt and leverage it? Singapore has always looked at technologies like AI as a general-purpose technology. We are making bets on how we can make full use of this technology to build a vibrant ecosystem, support companies in innovation, improve productivity and efficiency, thereby creating opportunities for our people.
This is no different from how we think about the internet, enterprise software, or social media – how to use them for better digital marketing and new business models. AI will be a transformative technology. But we often say that in a technology life cycle, we overestimate its short-term impact and underestimate its long-term impact. So, a lot of it depends on how we use it and create an ecosystem around it for companies and people to make full use of it.
Since the launch of EuroCham Beyond the Buzz AI Report in 2024, we've seen remarkable acceleration in AI adoption across Singapore. In a recent study conducted by my ministry, we have observed an increase in AI adoption among enterprises in Singapore. Among the companies surveyed, AI adoption rose from about five in 10 in 2024 to seven in 10 in 2025. In Microsoft’s AI Diffusion Report released last month, Singapore stands as one of the top countries in AI adoption, reporting 58.6% of working-age adults using AI for work and in their daily lives.
The EuroCham report’s findings showed that while many companies were exploring AI, most were still in the early experimental phase and assessing AI's impact on their business models, workflows and their competitive advantage. What we’re seeing today goes beyond early days of AI experimentation.
Business leaders are asking themselves the hard question, “How can we deploy AI more effectively and meaningfully to derive real business impact?” Or in short, “What are my returns on investment for this technology?” This can be labour productivity and gains, better products and services for customers, or getting a competitive advantage compared to their competitors.
I see this as a positive trend, to question ourselves the real value of adopting technology. Because at the end of the day, we don't adopt technology for its own sake. We adopt technology to do something better or do better things. To do something better or do better things requires the hard work of making the transformation. This requires upskilling or reskilling our workforce to allow them to use the technology better or having more companies to think about technology in a more clear-eyed and hard-headed manner. And how are we supporting companies to do so?
It’s about understanding the technology – what you can do, what the limitations are. As His Excellency Artis Bertulis mentioned earlier, what you shouldn't do, what should remain in the domain of human skills and judgment. We are supporting companies in setting up their dedicated AI Centres of Excellence in Singapore. Since 2024, the government has partnered with over 50 companies to build up their internal AI capabilities and to develop AI solutions to address their business needs.
These companies have embraced more sophisticated AI applications. DBS, for example, has developed a Customer Service Officer (CSO) Assistant for their customer service officers to respond to queries more effectively. This Gen AI-powered CSO Assistant transcribes conversations in real-time, retrieves relevant information and assists with documentation. Overall, this has reduced call-handling times and improved information accuracy, improving the overall customer service experience of DBS’ customers. This is just one example of how companies are adopting technology into their workforce and supporting the needs of their employees.
Such progress was only made possible by willingness of companies to invest in AI, to experiment with the technology, even when outcomes weren't guaranteed; and to integrate this technology into the existing workforce and processes so many companies in the room here today, you are in the forefront of this bold experimentation and business transformation.
Prudential is another example. Last year, they launched the Prudential AI Lab in Singapore with the goal of accelerating the adoption of AI, GenAI and machine learning throughout the organisation to maximise operational efficiency and deliver a better customer experience. At its launch, the lab saw over 100 use cases submitted by employees from across Prudential’s 24 markets in Asia and Africa.
For companies who are thinking about making this leap, please reach out to us. We're happy to work together with you to set up your AI Centres of Excellence and to support your innovation experimentation in this space. By supporting companies at the forefront of innovation, we want to build the right skills, talent, and infrastructure needed for a thriving AI ecosystem.
To support this initiative, we launched the Enterprise Compute Initiative, which sets aside up to $150 million to give enterprises, including small and medium enterprises, access to cloud credits, AI tools and consultancy through partnerships with cloud service providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft. This initiative gives our enterprises the support to turn their AI ambitions into action.
We recognise that digital transformation is more than just technology use, but fundamentally about people, which is why workforce upskilling and reskilling remain central to Singapore's approach. We have launched initiatives such as a TechSkills Accelerator (TeSA) and SkillsFuture to provide training courses for workers to remain AI-relevant and AI-fluent in this fast-evolving AI space.
We look forward to working with companies like yourselves to go beyond just experimenting with technology. Through Centres of Excellence and other initiatives, we want to support AI innovation. But more importantly, we want to work together with you to help your employees become AI fluent and AI capable in this new age of digital economy and AI-enabled services.
The government's effort alone is not sufficient. We have to work in collaboration, in close partnership with industry and organisations, and certainly with important partners like EuroCham. Through regular dialogues and collaborative initiatives like today's summit, we bring like-minded partners together. Companies, individuals, and different parts of the value chain come together to think about what we can do together as an ecosystem.
This is something where we want to continue the conversation. One important aspect of future collaboration goes beyond innovation, adoption, technology, workforce development, reskilling, and transformation – it's about trust. We need to put in place governance frameworks that support the healthy growth, use, and adoption of AI.
We have worked with partners on this front, and it's about putting guardrails in place. AI investments and developments are moving at such a fast pace. We're seeing hundreds of billions of dollars in investment flowing into different parts of the AI ecosystem - from frontier AI models to infrastructure to data centres. Huge amounts of investment are going into AI technology, and our frontier models are making rapid improvements, becoming more capable and intelligent. But at the same time as we hurtle down the road of AI innovation, I think all of us who are concerned about governance and trust must also think about what guardrails to put in place.
It's almost like thinking about going down a mountain path. As we turn the corner, we know there's going to be a sharp turn ahead, so how do we put the guard rails in place so that if anything happens, we will not fall off the cliff. There will be guard rails and speed bumps available to make sure that we take care of the downside of any technology we use, whether in terms of societal negative consequences, making sure that we stay united as people and not allowing technology to pull us apart, or to make sure that people are not left behind.
How do we put in place those guard rails and trust? We were working with like-minded partners on this. One example of the initiative we launched is called AI Verify Foundation, which is a community set up to manage the open sourcing efforts and develop AI testing and assurance community for Responsible AI. To date, we have more than 200 corporate members in this community.
In February this year, the AI Verify Foundation and IMDA launched the Global AI Assurance Pilot, which taps on the community's expertise to share key insights on the challenges faced by industry in AI testing and to put in place the relevant best practices. The Global AI Assurance Sandbox continues this success, acting as testing ground for deployers to get their GenAI applications tested by specialist technical testers.
Wearing my other hat as the Senior Minister of State for the Ministry of Health, we are also looking at how we use technology, especially AI, in supporting our doctors, clinicians and healthcare professionals in delivering better healthcare services to Singaporeans and AI features prominently. How do you make sure we deploy AI in hospitals in healthcare settings? It gives assurance to the medical professionals and patients that there are safeguards and governance in place. Guidelines and testing kits developed by AI Verify Foundation play an important role.
For talent, we are working closely with industry partners through many programmes like TeSA to provide on-the-job training opportunities to workers – from fresh graduates to mid-career workers looking to transition into this tech industry. There are opportunities to work on real-world projects and problem statements to help our workers develop skills that are relevant and applicable to market needs.
To drive the AI sophistication, we want to see in our ecosystem, we also work closely with research institutions to do cutting-edge work on AI, including fundamental AI, applied AI, and AI for science. In April this year, A*STAR and ETH Zurich signed an MOU to deepen research collaborations in Applied AI for drug discovery and life sciences. This partnership commits to explore ways to harness AI to accelerate and de-risk drug discovery – making it faster, more targeted and cost-effective to deliver therapies to patients.
It is our belief that if we want to develop a vibrant ecosystem, it has to be open and collaborative – partnerships with enterprises, institutes of higher learning, and research institutions coming together to develop the ecosystem.
So, this is an invitation to all our companies here – I look forward to working and partnering with all of you in developing this AI ecosystem. I also look forward to many more conversations and platforms organised by EuroCham to bring like-minded companies together to discuss how we can take this partnership forward.
We are approaching the end of the year, so I would like to wish those who are celebrating a very Merry Christmas. Have a peaceful, quiet end-of-year holiday season and I look forward to a wonderful 2026 with all our friends again.
Thank you so much.