Speech by SMS Janil Puthucheary at GovTech's Innovation Day 2024

OPENING ADDRESS BY DR JANIL PUTHUCHEARY, SENIOR MINISTER OF STATE FOR DIGITAL DEVELOPMENT AND INFORMATION & HEALTH, AND MINISTER-IN-CHARGE OF GOVTECH AT INNOVATION DAY 2024 ON 15 NOV 2024

1. Good morning everyone and welcome to Innovation Day.

2. There are many exciting highlights today:

a. Our officers will be showcasing their prototypes developed under the LAUNCH! programme. LAUNCH! is a new innovation programme spearheaded by GovTech in collaboration with various agencies and industry partners, including AWS, Databricks, Microsoft, Outsystems and Snowflake.

b. Similarly, participants from the inaugural AI Champions Bootcamp (ABC) will also be showcasing the prototypes they have developed to address problems in their agencies.

c. We also have the Finale of the Data & AI Tournament’s Prompt Royale competition. This is the largest whole-of-government prompt engineering competition for public officers.

3. What you see here today is an illustration of our National AI 2.0 vision: to enable Singapore's citizens, businesses, and public sector workforce to use AI confidently, responsibly, and creatively. Specific to the Government, we hope to empower our officers with the AI skills to make a difference within your agencies and across Singapore.

4. Today, I am thrilled to see how far we’ve come—not only in skills at scale, but with the right problem-solving spirit, and with the support of our private and public sector stakeholders.

Expanding AI Skills at Scale Across Government

5. Today’s event is the culmination of the efforts of thousands of officers from over 75 agencies over the past few months. The prototypes you see today are an illustration of how Government agencies and officers have enthusiastically taken up the call to develop and apply their AI skills at scale.

6. Take for example the Data & AI Tournament (DAT), which has grown significantly over time to include Prompt Royale today.

a. The DAT started in 2018 with about 400 officers from 30 agencies. In 2023, GovTech introduced Prompt Royale as part of the DAT. This is a prompt engineering track which enables participants to deepen their prompt engineering skills.

b. This year, over a thousand officers from 75 agencies took part in Prompt Royale including 11 AI workshops organized by GovTech. These sessions focused on hands-on skills for prompt engineering, AI chatbot design, and practical AI tools for everyday use.

c. Through the Prompt Royale tournament, we have seen participants applying their prompt engineering skills to a wide range of problems, from streamlining communication, to creating engaging content, and even tackling complex data analysis.

7. Similarly, under the LAUNCH! programme, we have gathered more than 600 ideas from public officers, supported 16 agency-led Ideathons and ran 3 hackathon sprints to develop 26 innovative prototypes to solve agency problems.

Fostering the Spirit of Problem Solving through AI

8. This brings me to my next point, which is the spirit of problem solving. We use AI not for the sake of doing so, but to solve problems that our agencies and officers face.

9. The design of the inaugural AI Champions Bootcamp (ABC) was thus focused on this spirit of problem-solving. In 12 intensive weeks, bootcamp participants learn about advanced prompting techniques and how to build LLM pipelines based on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agent-based frameworks. Most importantly, participants identify problem statements in their agencies and develop fully working prototypes by the end of the bootcamp.

10. For example, Workforce Singapore (WSG) officers faced the challenge of having to manually evaluate job descriptions of roles for mid-career individuals under the Career Conversion Programme. To address this, WSG developed a tool incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs) to streamline the evaluation process, resulting in up to 78% time savings. This in turn freed up the officers’ time to take on other value-adding tasks such as engaging more companies to onboard the programme and ultimately improving the outcomes of the programme.

11. I am very encouraged by how our officers have leveraged their skills through the bootcamp to turn ideas into solutions that address real agency challenges. I am certain that they will bring this problem solving spirit back to their agencies and their day-to-day work.

Support from Agency and Industry Stakeholders

12. The activities we see today are part of GovTech’s efforts to drive innovation and uplift Government digital capabilities through ideations, hackathons, and AI upskilling initiatives. However, these efforts would not have been possible without the strong support of our stakeholders.

13. I would like to commend the participating agencies for being willing to send their officers to these programmes and competition. It is a significant commitment, given the day-to-day demands of our work, but it is a critical investment to enable our officers to develop the most up-to-date AI skills.

14. I would particularly like to call out the nine agencies which have partnered GovTech to expand Prompt Royale to their agencies through Prompt Royale X, namely HDB, HSA, MCCY, MOE, MOM, MSF, MUIS, SCDF, and SFA. Through Prompt Royale X, over 550 officers tackled prompt engineering challenges tailored to their agencies’ specific needs. And that is a very long-term, big picture outcome – not just that GovTech and MDDI develops these solutions centrally, but that you are taking these approaches, these technologies and these ideas back and applying them to the problems that you face; such as analysing blood donation trends for HSA and streamlining Parent’s Gateway Letter generation for MOE. All of these are agency specific, domain specific, and it is your ability to take these ideas, learn from colleagues in the room that come and participate, that enable the outcomes for your agencies, for your ministry, for your colleagues.

15. Similarly, I would like to extend my appreciation to our industry partners AWS, Databricks, Microsoft, Outsystems and Snowflake, for their invaluable support for the LAUNCH! programme. Their partnership has been critical to transform great ideas into impactful solutions for the public sector.

16. To conclude, I would like to thank everyone involved in Innovation Day for your commitment and for embodying the National AI vision of a trusted, impactful, AI-enabled public service. This journey is just the beginning, and I am excited to see how each of you continues to lead in AI, driving innovation for a better public service and a better Singapore.