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Speaking as guest of honour at the Tech3 Forum 2025, Minister for Digital Development and Information, Josephine Teo, shared her belief that artificial intelligence (AI) is a new “national language”. Becoming fluent in it will make local workers valued, whilst benefiting both SME and MNC companies in Singapore.
According to the Straits Times, she said: “We believe that such bilingual AI talents will be highly valued, and building them up represents a real opportunity for Singapore. They will be pathfinders and pacesetters for meaningful AI adoption everywhere.”
Minister Teo added that the Government plans to help enterprises — including small and medium-sized companies — adopt AI-enabled solutions and train more bilingual AI talent in their companies.
Supporting local workers is a key outcome for the Government, she added.
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“It is also important that we do this with a growth mindset. Our desired outcome must be to grow these professionals’ value rather than to diminish their contributions.”
“This means actively seeking out new services they can provide with the help of AI.”
Accelerating AI adoption for SMEs
In November 2025, the Association of Small & Medium Enterprises (ASME) Singapore, Straits Interactive, and SMU Academy (SMUA), the professional training arm of Singapore Management University (SMU), announced a collaboration to unite three essential pillars of AI capability — training, technology, and community scale.
ASME will drive nationwide SME adoption, SMUA will provide the learning and certification pathways, while Straits Interactive will power the initiative with its award-winning Capabara Gen AI and governance platform.
Together, they aim to form an integrated ecosystem that takes SMEs beyond AI literacy to hands-on, operational capability — combining education, technology, and responsible adoption.
They also launched a new publication, The AI Factory – AI Capability Guide for SMEs. Developed with SMEs in mind, it will help them build and scale their AI capabilities responsibly and sustainably.
It will also be a key teaching resource for new Industry Graduate Diploma (IGD) programmes on AI that SMUA plans to offer. It teaches learners how to apply Gen AI in real-world contexts.
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Ang Yuit, President of ASME Singapore, said at the launch: “Singapore’s SMEs form the backbone of our economy, and their ability to evolve from passive users to active creators of Gen AI will determine our nation’s competitiveness in the digital age.
“According to Singapore’s Digital Economy Report 2025, AI adoption among SMEs has already risen to 14.5% — up from 4.2% the year before — but we need to deepen this capability.
He added that AI has flattened our regional skill curve, and our SMEs can no longer compete only on labour quality or education.
“Competitiveness now depends on how intelligently and quickly we integrate AI into our business systems.”
“The next phase of Singapore’s AI journey must involve closer public–private collaboration, where trade associations co-create solutions, co-administer grants, and measure real-world impact. Only then can SMEs truly harness AI to grow and compete.”
Delving deeper into the topic, we recently spoke with Professor Joseph Fuller from Harvard Business School at Workforce Singapore’s Career Health Summit about the impact of Gen AI on SMEs.
He shares tips on how local employers can achieve business profitability, employee efficiency, and improved workers’ career health by increasing and embedding the use of Gen AI at the workplace.
In addition, he also takes a closer look at how Gen AI changes the nature of jobs in Singapore, and how workers can also pivot quickly towards the new nature of multi-tasking at the workplace.
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