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Transcript of Minister Josephine Teo's Guest-of-Honour Address at Singapore Computer Society (SCS)’s Tech3 "Tug of War for Tech Supremacy"

29 August 2025

Ms Lim Bee Kwan, President, SCS

Colleagues and friends,

  1. Good morning.

  2. Thank you for inviting me to this year’s Tech3 Forum. I’m very happy to be back.

  3. At the recent National Day Rally, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong shared that we are entering a new era, a new one that has descended upon us, one that is heavily influenced by AI developments. Today, AI is widely accessible, and is steadily changing the way that we live, work and interact with one another.

  4. This has created new opportunities for our enterprises and our workers. But it also raises questions. How can enterprises use AI to adapt to a new business environment? How will our jobs change with AI, and how can our workforce remain relevant?

  5. Well, before we launched our refreshed National AI Strategy in December 2023, we have progressively laid the foundations for an AI-ready nation. This included thinking about issues like ethics and governance. At the same time, we sought to build capabilities within the government, industry, and workforce.

  6. At last year’s Committee of Supply debate, as well as the Tech3 forum, I outlined how we need to build up three communities:

    1. The first is AI Creators, these are people or organisations we broadly we broadly define as those pushing the boundaries for technology and innovation. And there are not that many of them in the world;

    2. The second is a very important group. We refer to them as AI Practitioners, and these are people or organisations, who develop and deploy solutions in business and society – the people who actually make things work; and

    3. Very importantly, another big group who were referred to as AI Users, and they can be found in every role and function. We want them to be equipped to use AI-enabled products and services to raise their productivity and take up better jobs.

  7. The conversation around AI and the workforce has gained ground. It is no longer just about preparation, but about activation and acceleration. Let me provide an update to everyone here today on our plans to equip our workforce for the AI age.

  8. We now have over 40 AI Centres of Excellence across our ecosystem. I have been visiting these centres and have a good sense of the impact that they are making within their organisations. The teams involved are innovating and developing AI solutions that are relevant and applicable to their own business use cases.

  9. We have made progress in building a strong pipeline of AI Practitioners and helping workers across various sectors become more aware about AI. In 2024, we expanded the pool of AI Practitioners. They include data scientists and machine learning engineers who are essential to making AI models work in specific settings. For the broader workforce, we updated the Jobs Transformation Maps, or JTMs, to help workers better understand the impact of AI on specific jobs and how they can adapt. We also refreshed our SkillsFuture programmes with content on the latest GenAI tools.

  10. With these efforts, there are encouraging signs that our workers are receptive.

    1. IMDA will soon be releasing the 2025 edition of the Singapore Digital Economy (SGDE) Report. It shows that 3 out of 4 workers surveyed are already using AI tools in their work regularly. This is self-reported. This is what the individuals who were surveyed said.

    2. Among them, 85% said AI makes them more efficient and improves their work quality.

  11. If we set ourselves a higher bar, it is likely at this stage that AI use that is being described is still exploratory for most of the people who responded to the survey.

    1. Deeper and more impactful use will come not just with practice, but with appropriate skills training and opportunities to apply them in the workplace.

    2. Fortunately, in this regard, among the companies surveyed that are already using AI to some extent, more than two-thirds plan to prioritise staff training and upskilling. So, the overall picture that we have, is one that is receptive among the workers and also reflective of an intention among their employers to level up their training.

To support our AI ambitions, we need a strong pipeline of AI Talent

  1. We want more companies to come on board and to bring their people along. And I believe we have identified a very significant opening, which I want to talk about today.

  2. In almost all of the AI COEs that I’ve visited, the AI Practitioners – the data analysts and data scientists in particular – tell me they absolutely need and value the inputs of their colleagues in other departments and functions.

  3. In manufacturing for example, the process engineers know the detailed workflows, much more than the data scientists. The technicians know when which machine needs maintenance and how the maintenance must be carried out. Without these domain knowledge and functional expertise, the AI practitioner will be hard pressed to produce meaningful business improvements.

    1. In the same way, at another AI Centre of Excellence that I visited, at PwC, the AI team worked closely with the tax agents and accountants to understand the key pain points of the tax filing process to develop a tool to enhance overall effectiveness and accuracy for the Tax team.

    2. Another example is Razer, a Singapore company, that specialises in gaming products and services. One key process in game development is quality assurance (QA), usually a time-consuming process where QA testers run the game multiple times to identify and fix bugs. Razer developed an AI tool to support the QA testers in bug detection and automating the bug reporting. One of the software engineers I spoke to shared that this tool can halve the usual time that he spends on QA, allowing him to focus on innovation and enhancing game design. The stuff that will make you and I fall in love with the game more.

  4. These examples show that increasingly, we need “bilingual” AI talents. Their “mother tongues” are actually their domain or functional expertise. It is a language they have already mastered. The process engineer knows what to do as a process engineer, the accountant and tax agent know what to do as accountant and tax agent. What we can now help them to do is to learn a new “national language” – the language of AI – and become fluent in it. This means acquiring AI-related skills that will allow them to work with AI Practitioners to transform their work and improve outcomes. You need to know how the technology can help. If you do not have an adequate understanding of AI, you will continue doing your work without it and be unable to bring about its most significant benefits.

  5. We believe these bilingual AI talents will be highly valued and building them up presents a real opportunity for Singapore. They will be pathfinders and pacesetters for meaningful AI adoption everywhere.

  6. So, our action plan to nurture AI-fluency has a few components.

  7. First, we will help the broad base of enterprises, including SMEs, adopt AI-enabled solutions and train more “bilingual” AI talents in their companies. IMDA will work with tech vendors to bundle training into the packages of AI solutions they offer. In other words, the companies adopting AI solutions will not just get the AI tools, they will get training support to ensure their employees get the skills and knowledge to make full use of these tools. The Government will also find opportunities to collaborate with partners including our Trade Associations. We will jointly promote AI awareness through workshops and showcases and develop AI solutions that are relevant to their specific needs.

  8. Second, we will work through our flagship TechSkills Accelerator (or TeSA) programmes to help non-tech professionals gain AI-fluency. This means partnering professional bodies in horizontal functions, such as accounting and HR, to identify core activities in each function that can be optimised with the help of AI. But it is also important that we do so with a growth mindset. Our desired outcome must be to grow these professionals’ value rather than to diminish their contributions. This means actively seeking out new services they can provide with the help of AI. For example, the traditional role of professionals in Financial Forensics is to investigate something after a bad occurrence has taken place. But they can learn to use AI to solve more complex cases and help clients prevent fraud. It has even been suggested that those with knowledge of digital forensics can transfer their skills and pivot to new job roles, like “Ethical Hacking”! Imagine a hacker helping you to hack your own system in a responsible way, to help you uncover your own vulnerabilities.

  9. Third, we believe the tech workforce remains important and will also benefit from becoming more fluent in AI. Along with increased digitalisation, our tech workforce has expanded considerably from around 172,000 in 2019 to around 214,000 in 2024, a 25% growth over five years. A noteworthy development is how there are now more tech talents in “non-tech” firms than there are in “tech” firms.

  10. Wherever they work, tech professionals have the potential to make a bigger impact. We should help them deepen their core engineering skills and stay relevant. We can also raise them to be “full stack” developers and orchestrators of complex systems and workflows using AI agents.

  11. IMDA will therefore also ramp-up support for tech professionals through TeSA, such as the new partnership with AWS and Trainocate on the Career Launchpad programme, which we will hear more about later.

We will work with industry partners to develop multiple pathways and provide opportunities for the broad base of Singaporeans to work with AI

  1. I have sketched out some of our plans to help level up in AI skills development that will benefit our workforce as well their employers.

  2. Besides nurturing AI Practitioners and “bilingual” AI talents, we are also working with colleagues in SkillsFuture Singapore and Workforce Singapore to help more people become AI-literate, before they advance to becoming AI-fluent.

  3. However, training and uplifting the broad base in an ecosystem is something that requires the support of many partners - and the Government cannot do it alone. Organisations, such as SCS, are essential in creating pathways for equipping Singaporeans.

  4. I am therefore pleased that SCS is launching the Cloud Skills Pathway in partnership with IMDA and SSG. It adds to the suite that Bee Kwan was talking about in her speech. As cloud infrastructure underpins our digital economy and powers AI technologies, this pathway aligns training with industry demand. It also provides learners a clear path into cloud roles that support our AI aspirations.

  5. Last but certainly not least, I’d like to acknowledge the communities that support and uplift each other, such as the Singapore Women in Tech community.

  6. Bee Kwan shared that we are now at our 4th edition of Singapore 100 Women in Tech, with a record number of 110 nominations for the Girls in Tech category – the highest since the category’s launch in 2021. This is a good development that we should continue to encourage.

  7. Let me highlight some honourees today:

    1. Ng Pei Fern, a senior manager at AMD, is concurrently the President of the Society of Women Engineers Singapore and has paid it forward by launching youth mentorship programmes.

    2. Eve Ang, she’s in school and she can’t join us today. She studies atat SJI., She is developing ethical AI for cancer detection. And why? She is inspired by her mother’s battle with breast cancer, and motivated to make such technology accessible to all.

  8. So, I want to say, well done, Pei Fern and Eve, as well as to all the honourees this year!

Conclusion

  1. Let me conclude, I would like to thank SCS and the tech community for having laid firm foundations for our digital future. It is really because of your efforts, that we now have a real chance of enabling workers, enterprises and communities to thrive with AI. I cannot overstate the contributions that you have made.

  2. The Government looks forward to working with you and all our partners to make the most of the opportunities.

  3. I thank you and wish you all a fruitful time at the forum.

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