Why Singapore sees AI as opportunity rather than threat

In a Davos interview with Ian Bremmer, President Tharman Shanmugaratnam quoted William Gibson — the future is already here, but unevenly distributed. Singapore's AI diffusion is around 60%. Because the country is small, open and reliant on technology for competitiveness, it will face AI's full impact faster than most.

He treats AI as another form of productivity improvement, a plus. The real challenge is making that plus reach up and down the workforce — hard everywhere, requiring active public-private partnership. Continuous skills training matters more than ever. He frames it as a supply-side question: build people's capabilities and things work out, for individuals and for the economy. Don't try to predict the future or match demand to supply with industrial-policy precision.

Singapore's economic-policy model has always differed from the traditional Northeast Asian one. It watches the market, follows the market, and helps it work better and faster. Industrial strategy means talking to leading local and foreign companies, understanding their plans, and building ecosystems so those plans happen faster — with workers benefiting. Government has never been positioned against private enterprise. The same logic applies to AI.

Caption language: en · Fetched: 2026-05-02

So Thurman, one of my favorite quotes is from William Gibson. The author says, "The future's already here, but it's not evenly distributed. " We talk about AI. Uh Singapore has been one of the most technologyforward countries in the world, advanced industrial economy, 6 million peopleish, 60% diffusion of AI. How do we if we look at Singapore as near future in that regard? How do you experience AI differently in your country than a lot of other countries do? What are you already seeing happening in the way the government works and the way society functions? >> Right. Well, every uh city or economy or firm that's more exposed to AI uh is going to face a challenge.

uh we will face the challenge faster than some countries which you know don't have the basic digital infrastructure which is going to be a problem for them because they're not going to be able to take advantage of AI as much but we face the challenge quicker our advantage however is that we've always faced the challenge faster than other countries because we are small we are very open and we rely on technology as a source of competitiveness so we look at AI like every other form of productivity improvement as a plus and the real challenge is that we want that plus to be distributed up and down the workforce. That is going to be a challenge everywhere in the world and it's not obvious that we are going to succeed. It requires very active public private partnership.

We always knew that when we talked about skills upgrading, skills, continuous skills training, but it's going to be much more of a priority in future and it's going to be more important than ever before because I think if you think about about this challenge not as a a threat from a new technology, but if you think about it as a challenge of how to how do you maximize human capital, how do you achieve mass flourishing of a society? It's actually something on the supply side. It's about something you do to build up people's capabilities. If you build up people's capabilities, something works out. Something works out. It works out for them and it works out for your whole economy. You manage to move on to a new phase of competitiveness.

So focus on capabilities even if you don't go about it by way of traditional industrial policy trying to get an exact matching of demand and supply uh and and thinking you can predict the future. If we look forward in five years, >> is the Singaporean government going to be as powerful in Singapore or are private sector companies going to be a lot more influential? >> Well, you know, our whole model of economic policy in Singapore was quite different from the traditional model in Northeast Asia, for instance. It was always a model of watching the market, following the market and allowing the market to work better and faster.

So a whole industrial strategy, a whole economic strategy consisted of talking to leading companies local and foreign, finding out what their plans were for the future and then saying let's try and create an ecosystem to make this happen faster and makes make sure that workers can benefit. So we were always involved in ecosystem building. That's what the governor government was about. It was never about government versus private enterprise. It was about creating ecosystems where private enterprise can do well for itself but most importantly where our people can be part of the prosperity.