Remarks by Minister Josephine Teo at Databricks Data + AI World Tour Singapore

Moderator Simon Davies, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ), Databricks: Minister, how do you see the next phase of Singapore's AI journey? How do you see that coming together? A great amount of work has been done, but I think the future is even more exciting.

Minister: Firstly, congratulations to Databricks on joining the Singapore AI Garden. I see that there are many members of the audience who are not from Singapore, so perhaps it is useful to take a  short trip down memory lane.

AI is not entirely new in Singapore. In 2018, we started with the idea of putting in place an AI governance framework, even before we had our first edition of the National AI Strategy, which was published in 2019. In the pre-COVID days, all we were really focused on were AI projects, and you could count the number of significant projects on  one hand. But coming out of COVID, the scene changed very quickly, particularly when generative AI made a very significant appearance and caused all of us to pivot. The seeds of our AI Garden began to be planted much more readily as more activities gave it  impetus and momentum.

Today, when we look at the AI hub that we are seeking to build  in Singapore, using the metaphor of a garden – the seeds have been planted, the soil conditions have been improved, and there's a tremendous amount of sunlight. I think it is quite accurate to characterise this phase of our journey as the acceleration phase. You are seeing  many organisations  seeking to go beyond experimentation and the range of organisations seeking to go deeper is very broad.

We started out thinking that in order for this AI hub to be truly vibrant, we have to consider both the kinds of enterprises that could benefit from AI, as well as the  industries that  can be transformed. Importantly, we must not  forget the workforce – across the different functions  and at all levels.

It's a grand plan that is coming to life piece-by-piece. Whether it is individuals or organisations that have been touched, we see that they want to go much deeper than initially thought possible. However, to do so, they have to overcome some  serious impediments. It could be a  shortfall where skills are concerned. It could  be problems such as integrating AI with their existing enterprise workflows. Sometimes the problem is as basic as not being able to get access to good data. Those are the things that are occupying our minds as we look at how to activate all the necessary channels and ensure that this acceleration benefits everyone.

Moderator: I think that's core to a lot of the announcements that we brought to the table today. How do we support enterprise transformation? How do we help unlock high-value AI use cases and build capabilities? How do we unlock workforce development? How do these investments and  partnerships accelerate Singapore's AI ambition?

Minister: To me, it is win-win. Clearly, as a company, you look for opportunities to grow,  sophisticated customers and  organisations that have the ambition to use AI to a greater extent. Singapore is where many of these organisations are located, and the teams that engage in the highest-level decision-making are also very often based here, some looking after businesses that span several regions. So you have control tower functions  operated out of Singapore. That makes this a good environment for you to  bring your products and contribute to  a more vibrant AI hub.

Moderator: One of the amazing things I see in Singapore is the confidence that the Government gives organisations to  invest because it creates frameworks that mean they can do that with confidence. I think that unlocks a lot of value. As I talk to regionally headquartered organisations here, it's that ability to bring that capability to bear and do it in a trusted way that drives a lot of the high-value activity. We've chosen Singapore as our Asia Pacific and Japan hub, and we're very excited about that. We've just talked about the start-up investments, and we're very excited to be supporting up to 100 start-ups over the next three years with credits for Databricks, as well as hands-on technical capabilities. What makes Singapore such an attractive place for global AI companies to come and invest and grow?

Minister: It has to be a combination of opportunities and trust. Opportunity in the sense that if you are bringing innovative products to market, you will certainly need strong reference customers. Other organisations, when deciding whether or not to invest in  your innovative products, and they will  look to you to tell them who else has done it.

This translates to how we implement an AI strategy. We were clear from the outset that our efforts could not focus solely on the supply side. It is one thing to make sure that you have good compute, the right cloud infrastructure, and the utilities needed to support this compute. All those are important. But if we don't nurture the demand, if there are no interesting use cases in Singapore, no like-minded partners willing to experiment together with you, and no appetite to take risks, this doesn't make for a very vibrant environment. So we invested very deliberately in growing the demand side. We knew that many companies were taking a wait-and-see approach.

So we had to create programmes to support them in taking that first step. We worked with partners and created an environment that gave them a sense that this was a journey that is worth embarking on, because AI is here to stay, and you would be in a much better position if you learnt to master it ahead of your competitors.

The initial efforts were modest. We had to go out and present exactly how AI tools could be integrated into business workflows and demonstrate their productivity value to organisations, and then create opportunities for organisations that were brave enough to try them to share their experiences, to the extent possible, because there is, always going to be commercial confidentiality.

This created a very positive flywheel, and that is exactly what is driving the acceleration now. It has become much more apparent to companies with AI capabilities that, if they come to the Singapore market, they won't be looking at a potential addressable market that is clueless. This is a customer group that actually has some idea of what to do with AI.

We are continuing to invest in this effort, creating  more opportunity. For example, we have a very big programme (National AI Impact Programme), working with professionals across the legal sector,  the accountancy sector,  engineers and even tech professionals: How do you use AI in a more intelligent way? If the need for them to understand the power of AI  is not properly addressed, then they can't contribute to  introducing even more ambitious use cases. So this idea of closing the gap goes beyond baseline skills development. You have to fire up people's imagination by showing them how other people are using AI in  intelligent and very breakthrough ways. That is the kind of thing  we need to do.

On top of this are some of the core attributes that Singapore brings to the table – trust, trust and more trust. Trust that this is an environment that will continue to be pro-innovation. Trust that  regulatory frameworks, when  introduced, will always be done in consultation with industry, and  with reasonableness in mind. Trust that we will continue to invest in human capital development, whether in the institutes of higher learning or among those in the workforce across multiple domains and functions. And trust that when we say we have a plan, we really do, and we intend to implement that plan.

Moderator: I can attest over my 26 years here in Singapore, I've seen that bringing action to execution really kick in. I really like what you said there. It was about how do we not only teach people to use AI, but teach them to build businesses with AI, teach them to build it into their processes, teach them to govern it, but also then to deploy it securely, which is an important part of that. Minister, if we came back to this conversation three years from now, what's the one change you'd like to see for Singapore's businesses, workers and citizens on how they're benefiting from AI?

Minister: Three years is a very long time in AI terms. But if there is only one thing I can pick, I think it's the simple idea of how we move from doing work better to doing better work.

For example, if I visit a hospital today, they are using AI to summarise  patients’ conditions before discharge. They  have to pull together everything they know about the patient into a summary in order for the physician to make the final call on whether  this patient should be discharged. This has freed up the nurses’ time to engage in the activity that they love best, which is to provide better patient care and spend time with patients.  Patients don’t want to see you standing in front of a computer screen typing away, which is what nurses  very often have to do. Patient wants to speak to you. But this is still doing work better. This is making sure that the nurse is able to summarise better.

What I'd like to see is that if we free up all of the capacity that is now tied up in mundane work, work that we don't quite enjoy, what do we do with the new time that is now available to us?

I hope it is, number one, not doomscrolling. Number two, this presents an amazing opportunity for all of us to ask ourselves: What do we as humans create of value to other humans? What kinds of engagements do we busy ourselves with that actually improve the lives and well-being of other humans?

I think that is one idea that needs to be explored, and I hope that it doesn't take three years. We need to pivot our way of thinking about how we create value and support each other in our daily lives.