Shaping Singapore’s AI era.
Singapore has already built many of the foundations for an AI-powered economy: strong digital infrastructure, a deep research base, globally connected businesses and a workforce that is beginning to use AI in everyday tasks.
The next opportunity is to turn early adoption into deeper, more confident use across the whole economy. Used well, AI will not just save time. It can help Singapore innovate faster, support SMEs, reduce friction for businesses, free up time in public services and help address long-term pressures from an ageing population.
Today, we’re publishing a factsheet looking at some of the opportunities AI is starting to create in Singapore. We estimate that faster AI-enabled R&D alone could create an additional S$3.3 billion in economic value by 2040, while AI’s decade-scale impact in Singapore could rival some of the largest general-purpose technologies of the last two centuries.
Here are five opportunities and priorities from AI we looked at in Singapore:
If SMEs adopted AI at the same rate as large enterprises, they could unlock S$20 billion (US$16 billion) in additional value by 2035, equivalent to adding 110,000 extra workers.
Singapore already has high levels of AI adoption, but the biggest benefits come when people know how to use AI in more advanced ways. In Singapore, 21% of workers are “light users” of AI (simple chat and drafting only), 46% are “intermediate users”, and only 29% qualify as “AI Super Users”.
By generating and ranking new ideas, AI systems could help scientists and researchers in Singapore explore 2x more plausible hypotheses each year, increasing the chances of breakthrough discoveries in both the private and public sectors.
In our polling, 27% of workers said they wanted to better understand how AI models worked, 36% would like to know more practical use cases of how to use AI and 43% how they can best prompt AI models to get the most of them.
In our polling, over 85% of people in Singapore said that it was important for AI developers to incorporate safeguards such as pre-release testing, independent verification, and greater protection for children or other vulnerable users.
The factsheet also looks at how agentic AI could help Singapore respond to some of its most pressing challenges. AI tools integrated into business workflows could reduce compliance processing times by 30%, creating a productivity dividend worth S$1.5 billion a year. In education, AI lesson planning and personalised feedback could free up 5 hours a week for teachers. In healthcare, personalised AI health agents could help add 1.3 extra healthy years for participating Singaporeans, while AI risk stratification could shift 25% of chronic disease cases to earlier-stage detection.
The opportunity for Singapore is not just to adopt AI faster, but to use it better. With the right skills, safeguards and access, AI can help more people and businesses take part in the next wave of growth.