Tech Week Singapore 2025 における SMS Tan Kiat How による開会挨拶

Distinguished guests

Ladies and gentlemen

Good morning. It is a pleasure to join you at Tech Week Singapore 2025. Congratulations on the 11th edition of this event.

Singapore has always viewed technology as a key enabler to grow our economy and create good opportunities for our people.

From the early days of computerisation in the 1980s, Singapore set out to modernise government systems, boost efficiency and build a pool of IT professionals.

By the 1990s, these efforts transformed public services, enhanced business productivity and positioned Singapore as one of the most connected nations in the world.

This openness to technology has helped to build a vibrant and innovative ecosystem here, which keeps Singapore’s economy competitive and relevant to the world.

We adopt the same approach to AI, a new technology sweeping the world with the potential to transform industry sectors, while also mindful that there are unintended consequences and downside risks.

We are actively encouraging enterprises to adopt AI because we see its potential and want to harness its power of growth and productivity across sectors.

Let me touch on three aspects of how we think about AI:

First, regulations and guidelines about developing AI and the use of AI

Second, encouraging adoption of technology, especially AI, across all sectors

Third, talent and manpower development

Two days ago, we launched the Singapore Digital Economy Report. It gives us a sense of how we are doing in terms of growing the digital economy.

Today, our digital economy accounts for more than 18.6% of our GDP ($128 billion). It has grown faster than other parts of the economy and growing at a healthy pace.

Two-thirds of the digital economy is from the non-Information and Communication sectors.

We see AI adoption picking up across industry sectors, amongst large firms as well as SMEs. This means it is not just about developing technology that has value, but the effective use of technology across different companies and sectors creates significant value.

The AI adoption among SMEs has tripled in 2024, from around 4% to 15 %. There was a big improvement for larger companies using AI as well, from 40% to 60%.

Across the world, there are different models of regulation and governance when it comes to AI. I don’t think any country has found the perfect solution. All of us are approaching it based on our own context, ecosystem development, and governance and policies.

In Singapore, we want to put in place regulations that support businesses in innovation, but at the same time have sensible guardrails to mitigate the downside risk and manage the harm that may come with irresponsible and unethical use of technology like AI.

One important aspect is our collaboration and partnership with industry players. We take this approach with humility that the government will not know all the answers, and we do not know the intricacies of the technology and the industry, which is innovating at a very fast pace. It is also in the interest of the industry to have sensible regulations to guide the development and use of technology.

For example, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), which is the financial regulator in Singapore, worked with financial industry and relevant stakeholders to develop the Fairness, Ethics, Accountability and Transparency (FEAT) Principles, which guide the responsible use of AI and data analytics in the financial sector.

Through MAS’s Veritas Toolkit, financial institutions can assess their AI solutions against these principles in a practical and scalable way. In doing so, they can demonstrate to consumers that their AI solutions are responsible and give assurance to the regulators that their AI solutions meet the right principles.

Singapore is also prepared to make legislation when needed, when we are clear that there are risks to be managed and guardrails to be put in place.

Second, it is about regulations to support to innovation. A large significant part of the value derived from technology is really in its use across the different settings. I talked about how a large chunk of our digital economy is really in a non-technology sector. In this regard, industry partnership is all the more critical. We are building an ecosystem where enterprises can build, test, and scale AI solutions to create real impact for businesses and society.

One way we are doing so is through sectoral AI Centres of Excellence, or sectoral AI COEs. These aim to be centres where we bring in industry players with capabilities to encourage innovation across the entire industry sectors and scaling up its benefits across the value chain.

We launched the first such sectoral COE last September, focusing on Manufacturing. With expertise from A*STAR, our institutes for higher learning, and industry partners, it has co-developed solutions such as predictive maintenance and quality assurance powered by Gen AI and machine learning. Many of these problems are common ones facing the entire manufacturing sector. So, when you solve those problems, it helps to spread the benefits across the entire value chain, from large companies all the way to the suppliers.

We are also working with companies to set up individual COEs in the manufacturing, financial services, legal sector. If you are a company interested to use AI in your operations, we will work together with you to set up a COE to provide support in terms of manpower, development and innovation, so you can break barriers and push the boundaries.

We are partnering leading industry players such as Google Cloud, AWS and Microsoft under the Enterprise Compute Initiative to share expertise and resources with Singapore-based companies, including SMEs, to support them in building AI capabilities and creating innovative solutions, not just for Singapore, but for the region and the rest of the world. By doing so, we are concentrating talents and COEs in Singapore, which are essential ingredients for a vibrant ecosystem.

Take MiRXES for example. A biotech startup creating early cancer and disease detection. Through this programme, MiRXES is using Google’s open-source healthcare models like MedGemma to strengthen its research and development.

I launched the SMEs Go Digital yesterday, where we help companies that don’t have a large IT team and may not have a team of AI practitioners. What they want to do is typically is using off-the-shelf AI tools with minimal customisation for their business operations. IMDA is working with the industry to curate pre-approved digital solutions with AI functionalities that can easily be used by the SMEs and we are doing so sector by sector. This is because the needs of a SME in a manufacturing sector can be very different from healthcare or hospitality sector.

What I’ve talked about is on the demand side. We are inviting companies with good solutions to come on board and we bring both sides together to accelerate and jumpstart the AI adoption among our broad-based enterprises. We support the top-end companies who have ambition to grow their capabilities in AI, and many of them are MNCs with footprint across different parts of the region. This is how we are growing a vibrant ecosystem to support AI adoption across the board.

All these can happen only with the right people, not just AI practitioners, engineers and innovators, but people who are deploying solutions in the companies.

We have schemes and programmes to develop AI practitioners, engineers and innovators, and we are also developing programmes to train every worker in AI.

You could be a lawyer using AI to draft your contracts faster to be more competitive than other firms, or you could be a customer service officer, using AI to handle customer complaints.

More importantly, we have programmes in place to train the leadership of the company, because it is a C-suite responsibility and not something that is delegated to the IT manager.

We are developing talent in a systemic way.

Over the past year, our AI talent pool has grown by almost 25%. We are on track to grow our pool of AI practitioners to 15,000 in Singapore.

I believe that we are building a very good foundation for the next growth of AI use in the economy, and in the society as well. In Singapore, we have built a digital foundation over the last three to four decades and we believe that AI is a key enabler for our economic growth and will continue to create opportunities for businesses and our people in a competitive world.

Thank you.