Josephine Teo on AI's role in SMEs, education and society

Teo argues that SME adoption looks different for every business. She describes meeting a small eatery owner who, instead of buying GPUs, used an AI assistant inside an existing platform to analyze past sales and identify which promotions had worked — and used that to plan the next one. Manufacturing accounts for roughly 20% of Singapore's GDP, and many of these SMEs do precision engineering. A new AI Centre of Excellence for Manufacturing has built a shared model for CNC machine predictive maintenance.

On education, talent competition between countries will happen with or without intervention — the real question is whether people retain the ability to learn. Teo says AI in Singapore's education system is still being experimented with. Early efforts focused on freeing teachers from administrative work, which is fine but misses the point. The real value of AI is personalized learning that attends to each learner's strengths and shortcomings. Singapore's Ministry of Education now treats AI as a way to support learning, not just teachers.

A deeper question follows. If more work can be done by AI, we must return to first principles: what is education actually for? If a child grows up with an AI chatbot as their best friend, what does that mean for community and family bonding? Singapore convenes the Forum of Small States and is pushing to ensure smaller countries are not left out of AI rule-making — so their citizens don't end up with the short end of the stick.

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

If more and more of those types of work can be done by an AI, then we have to come back to the original question of what is the purpose of education. For example, if a child grows up learning that the best friend is an AI chatbot, what does that mean for communities? What does it mean for family bonding? These are questions that we have to work together on. memes memes are very heterogeneous bunch and there is no one single way of characterizing them and in terms of their adoption likewise there will be different pathways I'll tell you a story it was quite um you know encouraging for me uh this is a little hole in the wall along road they are a small ery and um I happened to chance upon them one day and I asked them how business was and I we ended up talking about AI and they told me something quite unexpected.

They said AI has been helping them do better business. I said how? They said, "Well, you know, I have to run promotions and I've been running promotions in the past years. Some are more successful, some are less successful. " And um as it turns out, I now go to the platform which has an AI assistant I can use and I can ask it based on my past sales record to tell me which of my past promotions have been more successful. And that has helped me tremendously to plan the next promotion. Uh the point of raising this example is to say that not every single theme is going to have to to need its own access to GPUs. In this case, it's not even GPUs. It's just an app. There will be othermemes where being able to use um a fine-tuned model uh could be meaningful.

If you take the fact that uh Singapore's GDP still has about 20% contributed by manufacturing and many of thesememes perhaps engaged in precision engineering work. We now have an AI center of excellence for manufacturing that has recently developed a common model that does predictive maintenance for CNC machines which many of thesememes will use. There will be different methods of us being able to supportmemes. Some will come through tools that are made available by bigger platforms. Some will be through efforts that are targeted at the sector, targeted at the kinds of companies in them. I think it's more important that we look at how we can make meaningful differences to how the the way businesses are operated.

There's definitely going to be competition to try and get as much of an advantage as possible in terms of raising the quality of human capital in each of our countries. And I don't think you can stop anyone from doing that. Um this sort of effort um will take place with or without um anyone you know putting a stop to it or trying to boost it. I think what people um can attempt to do is to ensure that they themselves have the ability to learn in our education system. We do want to make sure that people uh children have exposure at a young age but in an appropriate way. Um the way AI is being used in our education system I think is being experimented upon. At one level it was about enabling the teachers to be more productive but it also kind of misses the point.

The great value of AI is in personalizing learning in a way that attends to the unique strengths and shortcomings of every learner and trying to find ways to enable them to achieve better learning outcomes.

Our ministry of education is looking at it not just as a way to support teachers but more as a way to support learning and that is the direction I think we all should try and move towards and since we said in Singapore AI for the public good for Singapore and the world um that being our vision we hope that the benefits don't just acrue to students in Singapore but potentially to students elsewhere if more and more of those types of work can be done by an AI and less and less require the kind of training that we have put putting in to prepare individuals for then we have to come back to the original question of what is the purpose of education what do we train or what do we help people to learn so it's not just learning outcomes it's what do you learn in the first place >> and I don't know that there are easy answers to this question but I do think that this is an area that is very well worth our effort in investing in research in understanding more deeply uh about the impact uh of AI on human societies and how we need to interact in human society.

So for example, if a child grows up learning that the best friend is an AI chatbot, what does that mean for communities? What does it mean for family bonding? And what does that require us to do in either to lean against it or to help the individual understand the use of this AI in the context of his daily interactions? It is a serious concern because there are so many things in AI that requires collaboration. For example, the setting of standards to make sure that this AI doesn't end up, you know, harming human interests in a very significant way. Singapore, as you know, is the convenor of the forum of small states.

There's been tremendous interest in how we can advance the interests of countries that are smaller in size, but who also want to benefit from this technology and who also want to make sure that their citizens don't get the short end of the stick. It's hard to say whether we should be hopeful or not, but [music] it's an area that we have to pay serious attention to.