Singapore's AI adoption numbers look strong — but much of it rests on a single person

Singapore's AI adoption scoreboard is genuinely impressive. Up to three-quarters of financial-services SMEs now say they use AI, and a majority in healthcare and manufacturing do too, according to an AWS-commissioned study of 1,500 local firms. On paper, that puts the city-state well ahead of much of Southeast Asia. But a closer reading of the same data reveals a fragility beneath the headline numbers: in around 60 per cent of companies, the entire AI capability rests on one person.

The finding comes from Hadri Sopri's commentary in The Business Times, timed to Singapore's push toward the Asean chairmanship in 2027 and the signing of the Digital Economy Framework Agreement (Defa) expected in November. The study found that in most firms, remove the single person who champions AI and the work stalls or stops altogether. The capability is not yet institutionalised — it lives in an individual rather than in the company's systems, processes and talent base.

That single-point failure matters because of who actually extracts value from AI. The commentary points to a global AI hackathon where the top finishers were not developers but a cardiologist and a lawyer — domain experts who had never shipped production code. Their advantage was knowing their industry's problems deeply. The people who build AI models are seldom the ones who benefit most from them; the value lands with the plant supervisor or relationship manager who can judge whether an AI's output makes sense for a specific customer, shipment or patient.

This is the missing layer in what observers call AI diffusion. Singapore has responded with deliberate policy — the Economic Strategy Review flagged the importance of "champions of AI," and a market for "forward deployed engineers" who combine software skills with the ability to explain technology to clients has opened up. But if that expertise is concentrated in a handful of hires rather than embedded across the workforce, the diffusion story stays fragile.

Why it matters for Singapore: The distinction between adoption and capability is the real test for Singapore's SME economy, where most firms are too small to carry dedicated AI teams. If capability lives in one person, then employee turnover, retrenchment or even retirement quietly erases a company's AI advantage. As Singapore gears up to shape Defa and lead a region of 600 million people on digital trade and AI capability, how deeply it converts adoption into organisational strength will determine whether its regional leadership is substantive or just a numbers game.