Opening Remarks by SMS Tan Kiat How at AmChamSG Balestier Series

Good afternoon.

I am very happy to join all of you here today at the Balestier series, and to be able to visit your new hub. A big thank you to Hsien and her team for putting this event together and for the kind invitation. To all the supporters and friends of AmCham, thank you very much for many years of partnership with the Singapore Government and for working together on many of these meaningful initiatives.

Earlier I asked Hsien and colleagues what I should talk about - what would be of interest to people, given my portfolio and my perspectives. One topic I thought I would touch on, and even open up for discussion later, is the buzzword of the year, AI - Artificial Intelligence. It is a potentially transformative technology.

I do believe that we are only seeing very early, nascent stages of technological developments of AI, but nobody knows how fast AI will go and how powerful it will be.

We are feeling the impact of artificial intelligence in our businesses and in our daily lives. Many are using this technology, even for planning trip itineraries or looking for recipes. Even kids are using AI sometimes, although I think they're too young to be using AI. AI is really part of our lives, part of our business environment, and part of society. So how do we embrace it?

In Singapore, we embrace technology, and it is really because of our circumstances. This year, we celebrate 60 years of independence. We are a very young nation compared to many other countries in the world. Sixty years is a blink of an eye for many civilizations and many older cultures. Sixty years ago, Singapore did not have natural endowments or rare minerals.

Our forefathers came from different parts of world, different parts of Asia, and decided to make this small island state their home.

To make it work, Singapore had to be creative in staying relevant to rest of the world. Sixty years ago, the conventional economic wisdom then, for many of the newly developing countries, was to protect their own industries, close off themselves to the world, until the industries were strong enough before opening up, to avoid competition and the risk of exploitation.

Singapore took a very different route. We opened up to the world and welcomed companies and talents internationally to be part of the Singapore story. To work together with us to create value for the company's shareholders, stakeholders and employees, and to create opportunities for Singaporeans. That was our story: embracing technology, embracing the world, because it was the only viable path for us.

Sixty years on, the world has changed. We now fly around the world for business meetings, instead of taking steamships. We send emails and WhatsApp in the blink of an eye. Technology is very different from 60 years ago. But some fundamentals have not changed for Singapore.

One of which is our need to be plugged into the rest of the world, to be open, relevant, and continue to work with like-minded partners to create opportunities. This is even more important today, as many economies are turning inward, and become more nativist or protectionist, to the long-term detriment of their own people and the world.

Singapore has to continue to stay open and to welcome ideas and companies to create value together with us, for you, our people and for generations to come.

This is the backdrop for how we think about technology and AI.

We have always embraced technology from computerisation to the internet, to digital technologies like cloud computing, and now AI. Technology helps us overcome constraints in land size, market, population, and allows us to work together with like-minded partners to create new business models and opportunities beyond Singapore. Technology, therefore, is really something that we need to embrace, and AI is no different.

Let me talk about two aspects of embracing AI. One is embracing AI in the economy, and in companies. We believe companies large and small, can use technology.

There was a very interesting piece of research, which won the Nobel Prize for economics this year, on creative innovation and economic growth.

One of the findings was about how small companies, are often the ones creating new business models and innovation. The American economy is a gold standard in terms of encouraging innovation and creative destruction, or creative innovation.

But one aspect of it that I think is important is that it is not just about innovation, but allowing small companies to challenge incumbents, and allowing small companies to innovate.

When small companies innovate, sometimes it also benefits the larger companies, because it is part of the larger ecosystem, and value chain.

AI is no different. We are helping companies, large and small, especially smaller companies that may not have large budget or in-house teams, to support them in their AI journey, access technology, and use them in a meaningful way.

It is not just about adapting and adopting technology but changing business processes and creating new values. So that is one part of adoption, not just working with big companies, but also all companies across the board.

We also have a different strategy for different companies.

For larger companies like MNCs, we work together to set up Centres of Excellence within companies, to help them push the frontier of AI innovation.

We extend our welcome to companies that are in the room to work together with us to set up these Centres of Excellence. It benefits the Singapore system when you have a critical mass of talent, ideas and technology.

For smaller companies, we embed it in many of our digitalization programs. For example, helping them adopt AI tools that are easily accessible. You may have a CRM software, an e-invoicing software, but you can easily embed AI functions in many of those tools easily, and you get a marked improvement in terms of productivity and innovation.

We are working with technology and service providers in different domains, including hospitality, manufacturing and healthcare, to curate a set of AI-enabled tools that can benefit our SMEs.

Let me just speak briefly about AI innovation as well. We want to work together with like-minded partners to innovate.

For example, before I came for this session, I launched the AI Global Impact Lab, the first global impact lab with a few companies coming together, to be one of the first AI labs in the world to put AI in IoT.

That exemplifies the kind of innovation I am talking about. Because innovation is really about the openness to working together across the entire value chain and ecosystem.

In Singapore, it's not just about finding partnerships across government and academia but also finding meaningful partnerships, across different domains and ecosystem to create new business models and new business value.

So AI adoption and innovation are two big pieces. I am also a firm believer that technology use cannot be the main goal.

At the end of the day, technology is about improving lives and making an impact. It's about transforming society for the better. In AI, there needs to be a balance internationally, across multiple stakeholders, both government, private sector, people sector, and across different economic regions, who come together even as we compete.

In businesses, we compete with one another to provide better services for clients. We compete to have better products and better innovation to do things better.

But even in competition, there is also a need for collaboration.

Because only with proper guard rails in place can proper innovation happen. You compete to have the fastest car, but we collaborate on the nicest car, in terms of road safety, so that ultimately people benefit from technology.

AI is no different. We compete on AI services; on who can have better AI products.

But if technology and AI is important, we find that willingness and ability to walk across boundaries, sectors, countries and multilateral institutions to work together to implement guardrails so the solutions that we produce with AI will be trusted, safe, secure, ethical, representative and work to improve lives.

To end off, Singapore is happy to be a responsible partner, a like-minded stakeholder in adoption, innovation and working together to put those algorithms.

Thank you.