Remarks by Acting Minister for Manpower and Senior Minister of State for Digital Development and Information Jasmin Lau at the ISEAS 41st ASEAN Roundtable 2026

Good afternoon, distinguished guests, It is a pleasure to be here at the 41st ASEAN Roundtable. In such sessions, the audience typically hopes to hear some insights from me about the world going forward, about AI technology, about the labour market.

But recently, I found it actually more useful to be here at such engagements, conferences, dialogues, because at this point, all the more leaders like myself need to hear from all of you.

We are trying to make sense of what is happening around the world. We don't have all the answers. We wish we did, but now it helps a lot more to hear from businesses, from experts, and gather these signals about how the world is evolving, how the economy is transitioning, because that's the best way for us to help our own people here in Singapore work through this transition.

The theme for this year’s Roundtable is very timely. ASEAN is navigating a period of significant disruption, and we are asking whether the region can continue to deliver growth and opportunity while responding to these challenges.

We can already see one part of this transition happening around us. A recent report on Southeast Asia’s digital economy, published by Google, Temasek and Bain, estimates that generative AI is already used by 243 million people across the region’s six largest economies. This is equivalent to 58 per cent of the working population.

There is, however, another figure in the same report that I find more telling. Per person, Southeast Asians use AI about a tenth as much as Americans do. So while many of us have tried AI, and in Singapore in particular, many Singaporeans do respond when the Government encourages you to try AI, most of us are still using it quite lightly. Getting from trying AI to using it well is what the next phase of the transition will be about.

We all know AI can raise productivity, create new products and services, and strengthen our competitiveness. But what it also means is that AI can move faster for some of us than for others, and that is what worries me. Larger companies are better placed to adopt AI at scale, while small and medium-sized enterprises may struggle to keep up. Then you have the micro companies or the new startups who are native to this and who may find AI the boost to their growth.

Over time, we will perhaps see a widening productivity gap that emerges, a two-speed society that emerges, with implications also for social cohesion.

When I speak to businesses and workers about AI, and this happens maybe two or three times a week now, because we are constantly talking about AI and its impact on the labour market, I find they are usually asking three questions:

1. Will it help me?

2. Can I trust it?

3. And, the last one, a little bit more grounding and serious, will there still be a place for me?

The first question is whether AI can actually help. For most businesses, especially smaller ones, that depends on whether it reaches them in a form they can use.

We need to get AI into the hands of more businesses and workers who can use it to solve real-world problems and raise productivity. Not to summarise their reports, not to answer questions like Google, but really to solve business problems and operational issues.

This is especially important for SMEs in Singapore that hire the majority of our workers. A large company may have engineers, data teams and capital to experiment with new technologies. SMEs may have none of these. Quite often, when I meet them, they would say, “I don’t have an IT department. It’s me, the CEO, trying to play around with some of these tools.” The owner may simply be asking, “Can AI help me as a leader save time? Can it help me serve my customers better, or make my business more productive?”

I met a young business owner recently, whose company runs enrichment classes for children. Every term, she says, some parents will forget to renew their child’s place, even though they want to continue. I confess I have been one of those parents. Now, if the company gives those places away too quickly, it upsets the parents that they’ve had a relationship with for years. But if the company holds on to these places for too long, the classes run half-empty, not filled up completely, and that would cost her some revenue. She wanted to explore how AI could help them remind the right parents with the right tone and the right nudges in time, and then decide how fast to fill the remaining slots with new bookings.

What struck me when she shared her story, was that she was not asking about the technology. The problem has existed for her for many, many years, but it felt to her that right now AI could become a solution. She just didn't know exactly how to deploy technology for her business question, but she knew she wanted to do it without losing the personal touch that her business had been already built on, and that is the kind of thinking and the kind of adoption that we want to enable here in Singapore. Of course, for her, the next step then is to figure out: Is she the one that has to try it out on her own? Are there consultancies and trade associations that can help her? Are there solution providers that have already a product made that could help businesses like her?

In Singapore, our approach is not only to make AI available and tell people to try it, but to translate AI into impact across the economy. We do have our National AI Missions. They are focused on four key sectors: Advanced manufacturing, financial services, healthcare and connectivity. This is where we think AI can drive deeper transformation. But alongside that, we also have our National AI Impact Programme. That’s a lot more broad-based and meant to help more enterprises, including SMEs, integrate AI into their business processes.

I think this is also the opportunity for ASEAN.

Our economies are at different stages of development, and they will adopt AI at very different speeds. We do not need every country to follow the same path and the same pace. But we can make it easier for all our businesses and workers across the region to participate by sharing practical use cases, building capabilities, and making useful technologies as well as safeguards more accessible.

If we can do this well, then AI becomes a tool that can improve our productivity across the region. It can help ASEAN compete and grow.

But even a useful tool will sit unused if people don’t trust it.

So the second question is: Can I trust it?

We know that AI will increasingly be used in areas where mistakes can have very serious consequences. Our businesses want confidence that the systems they rely on are secure and reliable. Our citizens want to know that when AI is used in areas that affect them, there are safeguards in place to protect them. Today, many businesses are using AI for functions like digital marketing – quite safe, not too many big mistakes can go wrong. At some point, AI will be used to recommend decisions about whether people get benefits, whether people qualify for schemes, grants, incentives, and then it gets a little bit trickier when mistakes start to happen.

Trust is therefore not something that comes after innovation. It must be part of what enables innovation to happen at scale.

Yesterday in Parliament, my parliamentary colleague Ms Tin Pei Ling raised an issue that I think every economy in ASEAN will have to deal with soon. AI agents are starting to act on our behalf, making bookings, payments and purchases. In our region, three in four AI users say they would already let an agent find the best price and complete a purchase for them.

When that happens, a business does need to know which agent it is dealing with, what the agent is allowed to do, and who is responsible if something goes wrong. But no country has fully worked out how to do this.

In Singapore, our various agencies, MAS, IMDA, have started trying out some frameworks, working with industry to see whether existing internet infrastructure can be used to do agent verification and to put in place accountability frameworks. But I also did say in Parliament yesterday that a lot of this is still work in progress, and we don't want also a system where every sector, every industry, comes up with their own frameworks, and the agents then cannot act across systems and organisations.

Similarly, across ASEAN, we do know that we would at some point want payments and transactions to happen across ASEAN seamlessly if it makes sense, but it also means that our agents must be able to act in a safe way across the region.

Last week, our Prime Minister Lawrence Wong proposed that interested countries start a pilot on AI incident reporting, beginning with common categories of incidents and a secure way to share them. And if an AI system fails in one country, the rest of the region should be able to learn from it before the same thing happens elsewhere.

Through the ASEAN Working Group on AI Governance, we have already developed regional guidance on AI governance. As ASEAN Chair next year, Singapore will build on this. We will strengthen regional capabilities in AI governance, testing and assurance, including common testing tools for agentic AI and the adoption of international standards. We do believe that trust and assurance need to be a joint effort from day one.

Ultimately, these efforts are about building confidence, not adding more rules.

This brings me to the third question, and the one I hear most often from Singaporean workers since taking on my role as Acting Minister for Manpower. Most will ask me: Will there still be a place for me?

I will be honest. I do not think any country has figured out how to manage AI’s impact on jobs, and I include Singapore in that. Part of the difficulty is how fast the technology is moving. Of course, every company out there is putting out research papers on their own about the impact of AI on jobs. Some will say it's terrible, jobs will be wiped out. Some will say no, that's not going to happen, it will be slow adoption. And our job is to figure out what makes sense.

But the bigger part of this challenge is that a job means much more to people than a salary. It is how families plan ahead, and how parents decide whether to take on a home loan. For many of us, it is also a large part of our identity. When people worry about their jobs, they start to worry about whether life will be better for their children and grandchildren. That loss of hope is harder to fix than a loss of income. That, to me, is the biggest worry that we have, and perhaps the region would also have.

We cannot stop the technology’s progress, but we also cannot leave its outcomes to chance.

So therefore in Singapore, we are trying to approach the transition in a way that brings workers and businesses along. This means giving workers opportunities to build new capabilities, helping companies redesign jobs alongside technology, and making sure that productivity gains create opportunities for people rather than simply displacing them.

We are working towards making 100,000 workers AI-bilingual. By this, we mean workers who can combine their existing domain expertise with the ability to use AI tools effectively. We don’t hope that they will become AI engineers overnight.

In many cases, the most valuable person in an organisation is not the person who knows the most about AI. It is the person who has been in the company for decades, who knows the work, knows the customers, understands the problems, perhaps hasn’t found a way to solve it, but they can see how AI can be used to improve what the company does.

ASEAN’s economies will adopt AI at very different speeds, and that is to be expected. What I hope we can say, a few years from now, is that a worker in Manila, Hanoi or Singapore feels more secure about his or her future because of AI, and not the other way around. As ASEAN Chair next year, Singapore will do our part to bring us all closer to that goal.

Thank you.