Dinesh Vasu Dash

MOM Committee of Supply 2026 — AI, Workforce & Career Resilience

2026-03-03 · Parliament 15

The MOM Committee of Supply debate was the centrepiece for AI and workforce issues in the Budget. Minister Tan See Leng framed AI as transforming the nature of work — not only what jobs people do, but how work is organised, skills are built, and careers evolve. Key threads: (1) AI as a gamechanger that can augment or displace workers depending on how jobs are redesigned; (2) SkillsFuture participation exceeding 600,000, with 458,000+ Singaporeans using SkillsFuture credits; (3) reframing "job redesign" as "human-with-AI job redesign", using design thinking to combine AI with human judgement, empathy and creativity; (4) mid-career PMEs face the highest risk and need career health to become mainstream, preventive and personalised; (5) generative AI poses higher risk to white-collar work than to manual / dexterity-based roles. MPs' threads: Industry Transformation Maps (ITMs), forward-looking when introduced in 2016, must be sharpened to give clear direction on AI-driven business process redesign, workforce-transition timelines and credible pathways into new roles; Ms Yeo Wan Ling argued the 2026 expansion of the Non-traditional Sources Occupation List (NTS-OL) must be coupled with productivity-linked conditions — structured training of locals, skills transfer from foreign workers, and job redesign; NMP Assoc Prof Terence Ho warned of an "AI divide" and proposed free or subsidised time-limited access to premium AI tools (the US$20–30/month tier) for mature workers, with longer-term subsidies for lower-income Singaporeans; Assoc Prof Jamus Jerome Lim cautioned that agentic AI threatens entry-level positions and called for institutionalising the GRIT programme as a national on-the-job training subsidy.