Industrial Research Unit · Straits Institute for Applied AI
Applied AI in Singapore
Singapore has put AI to work first in its universities, its banks and its national training system, where the National AI Impact Programme is committed to training 100,000 workers by 2029.
AI readiness
0.80
Rank 1 of 171 — IMF AI Preparedness Index
On the record
17
entries across 7 industries
National programme
2023
National AI Strategy 2.0 — more than S$1bn over five years
National programme
National AI Strategy 2.0
Announced 2023, more than S$1bn over five years. Its pillars are compute, public datasets, talent and reskilling.
Services 71.6% · Industry 22.7% of gross value added — World Bank, 2025
Kind
Role
17 entries
Education & Training
8
Both national universities have opened commercial AI suites to their entire student bodies — NUS to ChatGPT Edu, NTU to Google's — and the Ministry of Education has built its own tool, Markly, for marking geography essays.
DeploymentEducation & TrainingSingapore5 Sep 2026
Singapore gives geography teachers an AI tool to mark essays
Ministry of Education, Singapore — Singapore's Ministry of Education has opened Markly, its AI essay marking tool, to secondary and junior-college geography teachers. Its feedback on essays and extended responses is grouped by content and language use, and pilots in some secondary schools cover history, social studies and English language. Teachers review, edit or reject each marking suggestion before students see it and own all feedback; the ministry will judge the pilot before any wider rollout.
NTU Singapore gives all undergraduates a Google AI suite
NTU Singapore — NTU Singapore has given all undergraduates a Google AI suite (Vertex AI, Google AI Studio, Gemini Enterprise) plus its own NTU AI Learning Assistant (NALA). President Ho Teck Hua aims to embed AI in higher education across 40% of courses in 52 undergraduate degree programmes by 2030, from about 5% now, with students building and deploying AI agents on real problems. NTU calls itself Singapore's first university adopting AI at this scale.
DeploymentEducation & TrainingSingapore11 Aug 2026
NUS gives all students and staff access to ChatGPT Edu
National University of Singapore — The National University of Singapore is giving all students, faculty and staff ChatGPT Edu from 31 August 2026 under an OpenAI collaboration. It also launched AI Sense Maker, a conversational AI research platform built on 150,000-plus digitised NUS Libraries materials for topic summaries, semantic search and knowledge-graph creation. Professor Aaron Thean says the tools amplify, rather than replace, human intellect.
Singapore merges its skills and workforce agencies into one board
Singapore combined SkillsFuture Singapore and Workforce Singapore into one statutory board, the Skills and Workforce Development Agency (SWDA), operating from 1 July 2026. The Ministry of Manpower and Ministry of Education oversee it jointly.
Singapore pairs subsidised AI courses with free premium tool access
Singapore's Ministry of Manpower says Singaporeans taking selected government-funded SkillsFuture AI courses will get six months' free access to premium AI tools from the second half of 2026. Pairing subsidised training with subsidised tools is meant to get learners applying skills through regular use and experimentation; qualifying courses and tools will be named later, according to its March 2026 press release.
Evidence of adoptionEducation & TrainingSingapore2026
Singapore's AI programme will train 100,000 workers by 2029
Singapore's National AI Impact Programme targets AI skills training for 100,000 workers by 2029 and support for 10,000 enterprises over three years, including sector-specific courses for HR, legal, accounting, manufacturing and other non-tech professions. Budget 2026 set aside over S$400 million for an Enterprise Workforce Transformation Package, and Singaporeans on selected SkillsFuture AI courses get six months of free premium AI tools.
Evidence of impactEducation & TrainingSingapore2025
AI teaching assistant did not lift outcomes in Singapore VET study
A co-designed generative AI teaching assistant at a Singapore vocational institution improved teaching processes but produced no significant gain in student assessment outcomes, an evaluation found. High-ability students used it to verify work strategically, while low-ability students often used it to skip cognitive effort, potentially widening gaps.
Evidence of adoptionEducation & TrainingSingapore2024
Singapore's AI and digital-skills training nearly tripled to 96,000
Singapore's SkillsFuture AI skills training nearly tripled. Participants in AI, cybersecurity and digital marketing courses rose from 34,000 in 2023 to 96,000 in 2024.
Singapore Airlines runs more than 160 AI applications in production, and Eastern Pacific Shipping is extending Orca AI's collision-avoidance system to dozens more vessels after a pilot on five.
CEVA runs driverless pallet movers inside its Singapore hub
CEVA Logistics — CEVA Logistics is trialling driverless pallet movers at Blue Hub: two Zelostech Z10 autonomous electric vehicles on existing multi-level ramps, shifting stock between floors. CEVA expects at least 4,600 kilograms a year in cut emissions. Zelostech met CEVA via the 2025 CMA CGM Startup Awards; this warehouse automation trial decides whether the vehicles reach other CEVA sites.
DeploymentTransport & LogisticsSingapore26 Aug 2026
Eastern Pacific Shipping expands Orca AI collision-avoidance to more ships
Eastern Pacific Shipping — Eastern Pacific Shipping is extending AI collision avoidance from Orca AI to dozens more ships after a five-vessel pilot of over 130,000 nautical miles. The companies report 48% fewer close encounters per 1,000 nautical miles and 10% wider average passing distances, figures with no independent evaluation. Its computer-vision SeaPod bridge unit picks out and classifies surrounding objects and vessels, even craft without AIS.
DeploymentTransport & LogisticsSingapore18 Aug 2026
Singapore Airlines runs more than 160 AI applications in production
Singapore Airlines — Singapore Airlines has more than 160 airline AI applications in production, among them a Flight Recommender fielding nearly 10,000 queries a day by the end of FY2025/26. 'JARVIS', its generative-AI staff assistant, serves about 5,079 of 5,600 ground staff, per the annual report and senior vice-president of IT George Wang.
DBS has scaled AI agents to about 1,500 relationship and credit-risk managers, and UOB has more than 300 AI and analytics use cases in production behind an assurance framework.
DeploymentFinance & InsuranceSingapore1 Sep 2026
UOB runs more than 300 AI use cases in production
United Overseas Bank — United Overseas Bank has put more than 300 AI and analytics use cases into production under an AI assurance framework that tests, validates and continuously monitors models across their lifecycle. It also runs 30-plus domain-specific chatbots and has given Microsoft Copilot to over 30,000 employees. Alvin Eng, UOB's head of enterprise AI, says scaling AI safely hinges on operating discipline, governance and controls more than on having the strongest individual models.
DBS scales AI agents to 1,500 relationship and credit managers
DBS Bank — DBS Bank is scaling agentic AI in corporate banking to about 1,500 relationship and credit-risk managers globally after a 150-person pilot, with specialised agents covering more than 70 tasks and drafting review-ready credit memos. Credit memos and related work can take up to 40% of these bankers' time, which DBS aims to cut by at least 30%, says group head of institutional banking Han Kwee Juan.
DBS reported more than 2,000 AI models across over 430 use cases in 2025, which it valued at about S$1 billion — the bank's own figure, with no independent evaluation published.
DeploymentBusiness OperationsSingapore2025
DBS runs over 2,000 AI models delivering S$1 billion in value
DBS Bank says its AI value in banking reached about S$1 billion in 2025 from more than 2,000 AI models across 430-plus use cases, up from over S$750 million across 370-plus in 2024. The figure, from the annual report's chairman and CEO letter, is DBS's internal estimate of costs saved and revenue gained, unaudited, and harder to isolate as AI embeds in daily workflows.
DeploymentGovernment & Public SectorSingapore10 Sep 2026
Singapore will open an AI grant recommender to every business
Ministry of Trade and Industry, Singapore / Enterprise Singapore — BizSG launches 30 September 2026, as Singapore's Ministry of Trade and Industry and Enterprise Singapore fold schemes into one BusinessSG roof. Its AI grant recommender reads a firm's goals to point it toward matching funds, an early case of AI-based business grant matching already used by roughly 700 firms in beta since October 2025. Low Yen Ling unveiled the plan at the SME Centre Conference.
National University Hospital has taken Ainex's real-time AI endoscopy system into every one of its endoscopy units.
DeploymentHealthcare & Life SciencesSingapore4 Aug 2026
Singapore's NUH adopts Ainex AI endoscopy across all its units
National University Hospital — Singapore's National University Hospital has put Ainex's ENAD real-time AI endoscopy system in all its endoscopy units to find and characterise gastrointestinal lesions in upper and lower GI procedures. The rollout follows HSA approval; Ainex says a 998-patient multicentre randomised trial found ENAD-assisted colonoscopy lifted the adenoma detection rate from 36.1% to 52.3%.
The Infocomm Media Development Authority has issued a governance framework for AI agents.
RegulationTechnology & SoftwareSingapore22 Jan 2026
Singapore issues a governance framework for AI agents
Infocomm Media Development Authority — Singapore launched the Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI at the World Economic Forum in Davos, covering AI agents that reason and act autonomously for users. The Infocomm Media Development Authority sets out technical and non-technical measures for agentic AI governance across four dimensions: bounding risks up front, meaningful human accountability through checkpoints, technical controls over the agent's lifecycle and end-user education. Minister for digital development and information Josephine Teo announced it.
Every entry on this page is a named organisation putting AI to work in a real job, taken from the State of Applied AI record. Each one is traced to the report it came from and dated, and where a figure is the organisation’s own the entry says so rather than presenting it as an independent result. Readiness, ecosystem and policy figures, where shown, are attributed on the card to the body that published them.
The record is maintained continuously by the Industrial Research Unit of the Straits Institute for Applied AI: entries are added as they are found and verified, not on a schedule, and nothing is published without an open source behind it. It currently holds 1114 entries across 249 countries.
Singapore5 Sep 2026
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