President Tharman at Columbia University on AI's benefits for Singapore

Speaking at Columbia University's World Leaders Forum, President Tharman Shanmugaratnam says AI will be a large net plus for Singapore. The country is small enough that government, business, unions and community can coordinate to push new skill modules to every individual and keep careers moving.

Singapore is short of people, so AI works as an enabler — the country lacks coders, and AI is taking over coding work. The third strand is pace: AI accelerates innovation across every sector, and Singapore's edge has to be becoming one of the places in the world that adopts the latest innovations fastest.

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

My sense is that AI will be a big net plus for Singapore. We're a small society and we've got a way of organizing ourselves between government, businesses, unions and individuals of the community such that you can reach every individual you can reach every individual available to them, new clauses or modules that give them new skills and keep people moving in their careers so we can organize the skills of the future. And in fact, we intend to do so. Second, Singapore, short of people and AI is actually an enabler when you're short of people because it replaces many jobs that Singaporeans are not particularly keen on doing or not very good at doing either. We don't have enough people doing coding and programing, for instance, in AI is taking over the world of coding, coding and programing. Just to give you an example.

Thirdly, I think the pace of change is just going to the pace of innovation is going to increase in every sector because of AI and what Singapore's real strength has to be as a society and an economy is to be one of the places in the world where you can very quickly adopt the latest innovations.