Remarks by MOS Jasmin Lau at BEACON 2025 Conference by Better.sg

Good afternoon, everybody. I am so happy to be here with you today at BEACON 2025.

Before this, I had the chance to look at some of the products that have been developed in partnership with Better.sg, and I asked the team members, “Have you met each other before?” and “What made you join this particular group?” Most of the time, they would not have known each other beforehand. At a lot of events like today’s, it is really about showcasing and bringing together talents, and putting them in a space where they can create something remarkable. We also see a lot of young talents who have day jobs, who want to use their passions and talents elsewhere. We need more of these ground-up efforts. Such opportunities give us a chance to put together talents and put them to good use.

Now, all of us know that technology has huge potential to improve lives. Today, most of our services are delivered digitally. Our Smart Nation will go into its next phase of development, where we will focus on AI and look at how AI can help us develop services in a different or better way.

However, all of us will have to contribute in our own ways to make this happen. As we move into the next chapter of our Smart Nation story, we want to continue to partner with citizens and our community groups to tackle the challenges that matter.

I have been in this role for about five months, and I have attended several hackathons. Recently, I attended the Sparks X Build for Good Community Hackathon, where we saw 21 teams of over 90 members come together to develop prototypes to solve the problems that they feel strongly about, to better support vulnerable communities.

In these hackathons, participants receive mentorship, training, and resources to develop tech solutions. The winning teams then receive funding to refine and potentially scale their products. Such partnerships between Government and the community let us tap into our collective wisdom to identify problems and co-create solutions.

Most of these products and prototypes are great. The challenge we often have is scaling; to find people or organisations who will want to adopt these products to solve their problems. That is often the gap that we have, but I am very happy to try my best to do the matching because I can see that on the social service agencies’ side, many of them are looking for solutions. So we must try our best to match the prototypes and products being developed with users who will find them beneficial.

Now in its third year, BEACON 2025 is another great example of this ground-up problem-solving spirit. Take for instance the projects being showcased today, such as CheckMate. It was founded during the pandemic, when founder Bing Wen was very frustrated with health misinformation that was going around on WhatsApp. Through Better.sg, he assembled a team to create a crowdsourced fact-checking system. Mind you, during Covid-19, there was no ChatGPT – AI was not the way we use it today. Back then, the team had to crowdsource to check through the information and respond to citizens. Today, the team, with some additional members, has redesigned CheckMate into an AI-driven tool to help Singaporeans fight misinformation at scale. Examples like this reflect the ‘we-first’ spirit, and allow talents in our community to contribute meaningfully to the collective good.

Whether you are a non-profit with a pain point, a volunteer hoping to put your skills to good use, or just someone passionate about social impact, I believe we are all here today with a problem-solving spirit and a desire to make a difference. I wish all of you a fruitful afternoon of learning and exchanging ahead at BEACON 2025! Thank you also to the organisers for investing your time and effort in setting this up and bringing our communities and talents together. Thank you very much.