Speeches
Opening Keynote by SMS Tan Kiat How at ATxEnterprise 2025
27 May 2025
Distinguished guests, industry partners, friends from the tech community
It is a pleasure to join you today at ATxEnterprise 2025. Gatherings like this bring together the policy makers, tech innovators and industry captains, who are shaping the future of our digital economy.
Around the world, we see rising geopolitical tensions and greater economic uncertainty. Amidst rapid technology breakthroughs such as in AI – we are reminded of how quickly the frontier is shifting. For our enterprises and workers, navigating this transformation presents immense opportunities, but also challenges.
Singapore’s strong fundamentals – our trusted business environment, skilled workforce and commitment to innovation – give us a solid foundation. But we cannot rest on our laurels and are always constantly working hard to be relevant to the rest of the world.
We need to:
Continue growing our talent pool to drive AI innovation and deployment;
Support our enterprises in unlocking the full potential of AI and digital technologies; and
Strengthen partnerships across the ecosystem to scale impact.
Today, I will outline how we are doing so through a new set of initiatives and deepening our collaborations with everyone.
The Digital Economy contributes to nearly 18% of Singapore’s GDP. Despite the global uncertainty, we expect technology, especially AI to continue to drive quality economic growth.
An important part of this effort is to develop industry-ready practitioners to support the development and deployment of AI.
More than 26 AI Centres of Excellence (AI CoEs) have been launched to drive greater AI innovation activities. As companies expand their AI teams and footprints in Singapore, deepening their capabilities here, they require more Practitioners with AI expertise.
We are committed to growing a strong pipeline of AI Practitioners and tripling our pool of Practitioners to 15,000 over five years.
We are boosting the AI-readiness of our undergraduates. Our universities are incorporating AI into our Information and Digital Technology (IDT) curricular.
For mid-career workers, we have expanded the Company-Led Training (CLT) opportunities under IMDA’s TechSkills Accelerator (TeSA), including the AI Apprenticeship Programme (AIAP) with AI Singapore (AISG).
After graduation, they can look forward to taking on roles such as AI and machine learning engineers, in companies such as AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, and SingTel.
The AIAP has been impactful in producing skilled AI Practitioners that meet industry needs. Jerald Han is one such beneficiary.
He studied Civil Engineering and started his career in the built environment sector, where he was exposed to AI solutions aimed at automating traditional work processes.
That piqued Jerald’s interest in AI and he enrolled in the AIAP for nine months.
He has now taken up a role in Singapore’s tech unicorn, Patsnap, and contributed to the development of an AI agent-driven product in just four months.
We see many AIAP graduates transitioning from one sector to another, willing to put in the hard work to pick up new skills and learn about the new technologies, and at the same time, finding it fulfilling and rewarding. They have all gotten very good roles in many companies in the AI and Technology sector. There are many examples like Jerald over the last 16 batches of AIAP graduates.
To enable more participants (to take on AI roles) like Jerald, I am happy to announce that IMDA worked with AISG to expand the AIAP through the new “AIAP Industry” (AIAP(I)) programme.
Trainees will pick up critical AI, data and machine learning skills, and apply them through working on industry projects. That’s a valuable part of the entire programme – you learn the theory and skills, and you apply them to an industry project because that’s where real world problems need to be tackled and solved.
The AI CoEs have partnered AISG to co-create the curriculum and provide projects for trainees to pick up industry experience.
Graduates of the programme will be well-equipped to take on available AI job opportunities in companies, such as Grab, Visier, and UOB.
To prepare our existing AI Practitioners to capture these opportunities, we are strengthening their capabilities too.
IMDA has partnered with AISG’s Southeast Asian Languages in One Network (SEA-LION) AI model team to pilot a new programme, the Pinnacle AI Industry Programme (PAIP). The programme will work with frontier companies involved in AI model building and fine-tuning activities to upskill local AI Practitioners to become “Expert Model Builders”.
These practitioners will build deep technical expertise in the LLM development life cycle, including data management, model training and development.
They will have hands-on training working on SEA-LION products and the engineering teams, in further honing their skills.
Collectively, our efforts will create a total of around 800 opportunities, for Singaporeans to take on good and exciting jobs in the AI domain!
Beyond developing our local AI talent pipeline, we must channel this expertise towards creating meaningful impact for our society and the region. To this end, AISG is launching the first Pan-Southeast Asia AI Developer Challenge, which will unite regional developers in building practical AI solutions using AI models like SEA-LION. This initiative will empower developers to create scalable AI solutions in the region.
Talent, however vital, needs the right tools and strategic direction to make an impact. Technology offers enterprises opportunities to boost productivity, enhance customer experiences and create new business models to stay competitive.
To empower enterprises to unlock the transformative potential of AI and digital technologies, the Digital Enterprise Blueprint (DEB), jointly developed with industry last year, sets out our collective vision to enable our enterprises to thrive in this digital economy.
We launched several initiatives at MDDI’s COS this year to support businesses in using AI, such as the GenAI Playbook and Navigator.
For enterprises looking to develop customised AI solutions for complex business needs, we have the GenAI for Digital Leaders initiative. This enables enterprises to discover and scope Gen AI projects through tech discovery sessions and advisory support, in partnership with major tech companies.
As of April this year, more than 200 enterprises have benefitted, with 50 projects supported.
An example is Lumens, a major fleet operator that developed a GenAI-powered Car Rental Assistant, to automate time-consuming vehicle inspections, calculate repair costs, and handle insurance and billing.
This led to 75% in time saved for pre- and post-rental checks per car, resulting in $300,000 cost saving annually.
Lumens is looking to deploy GenAI in other functions, to provide a seamless end-to-end customer experience, and to capture new market segments.
Another example is Allen & Gledhill, which implemented GenAI for internal knowledge management. This includes summarising and drafting documents, which achieved up to 50% in time savings.
More than half of the use cases were in customer engagement, knowledge management and content creation. IMDA will continue to work with tech partners such as AWS and Microsoft to:
Double the number of tech discovery sessions that aim to translate business’s needs into potential Gen AI projects;
Halve the development cost and time for Gen AI solutions using latest tools such as pre-built Gen AI modules; and
Provide greater access to tech expertise, such as model developers, and resources such as compute and cloud credits.
I am pleased to announce that we will scale-up the Gen AI for Digital Leaders initiative to benefit an additional 1,000 enterprises and support up to 500 projects, in the next year.
While the Government has put in place initiatives, we need strong partnerships with industry stakeholders to collectively strengthen our ecosystem.
Last year, eight partners – AWS, DBS, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, SGTech, Singapore Business Federation and Singapore Computer Society – pledged their commitment with various initiatives to support our enterprises and workers.
To date, more than 10,000 enterprises have benefited.
We have received many good feedback.
For example, Institute of Life's founder Mr Eric Sim joined the DBS Spark GenAI programme, and experienced how GenAI tools helped him with his work.
Eric signed up for the GenAI solution with grant support and developed a company website in three weeks, cutting development time by half.
His business has seen an increase in clients, and he anticipates traffic to his website to triple in the coming months.
Eric is now an advocate for other SMEs to experiment with GenAI!
Our SMEs continue to show strong digital adoption, with more than 7,200 businesses embracing AI-enabled, integrated and cloud-based solutions in the past year. Building on this momentum, I am happy to share that IMDA is launching three new partnerships, in support of the Digital Enterprise Blueprint.
Alibaba Cloud has pledged to raise the digital capabilities of up to 3,000 SMEs and digital solution providers in cloud technologies and AI, through the “Alibaba Cloud Digital Accelerator” Programme.
ST Engineering will launch the SME CyberResilience Programme to equip SMEs with knowledge and tools to identify cyber risks and enhance their security posture to better prevent cyber-attacks.
For example, 2,000 SMEs will enjoy complimentary Cyber Threat Scanning services for up to 10 endpoints and receive a post-assessment analysis by cybersecurity analysts.
Prudential Singapore will launch “GenAI Xponential” to provide SMEs with knowledge and hands-on experience in implementing GenAI solutions. This includes up to 10 GenAI tech explainer videos to help SMEs understand and adopt GenAI tools confidently.
These new initiatives will be available on IMDA’s CTO-as-a-Service platform. I encourage all SMEs to visit the platform to learn more and sign up for these initiatives.
My heartfelt thanks to all the companies and partners for coming forward. We welcome more like-minded companies to join us in supporting our enterprises and workers.
It is a collective effort, working together as an ecosystem, continuing to maintain this momentum in terms of digital adoption and embracing innovation in this new AI-enabled era.
At the heart of this all, whether it is about adoption of AI or cloud-based solutions, Singapore’s value lies not just in our capabilities, but in our consistency – in being a partner you can count on, even when the world is less certain. And we are committed to being a reliable and trusted partner in driving impactful digital innovation, alongside like-minded stakeholders.
By staying agile and collaborating closely, we can ensure that Singapore continues to thrive as a vibrant hub for innovation, opportunity and growth.
On this note, I wish you all a wonderful conference. Thank you!