AI Strategy & Vision · 2026-06-08 · 01:34
PM Wong: Singapore can be an AI application hub
In Brief
Prime Minister Lawrence Wong discusses Singapore's approach to helping workers master AI and its strategic importance for city-states.
Why it matters In June 2026, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong personally sets the application-hub direction, marking Singapore's abandonment of the model arms race and pivot to nationwide skills transformation to maintain competitiveness
Readable transcript
Caption language: en · Fetched: 2026-06-09
In a city like Singapore where we are always labor short, you talk to companies and employers, they're always looking for people. And we cannot afford to, you know, just keep importing labor. We need to be more productive. I think AI can be a game-changer. The key though is not just to, you know, run AI chatbots and have a very superficial use of AI. The key is really to embed AI and start thinking about how it transforms processes across all organizations. And that will take time. I think we're still in a very early stage of this. And this has true across all, um, technology revolutions, whether it was electricity or the internet. At the start, everyone gets excited, very hyped up.
It's all about just getting acquainted with the technology, but the actual transformation of companies and organizations, the development of new business models will take time. Will take some years. The way for us to succeed and do well in AI is not so much for us to be a to be able to develop the biggest and best frontier models. That's not our competitive advantage, but as a small city to be uh AI application hub, where AI models, AI AI applications can be tested, can be applied in real-life use cases, and then can be scaled up further.
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