Singapore's AI Returns Are Climbing — But Only 2% of Firms Are Ready for Agentic AI

For the past year, Singapore's AI conversation has been about investment — how much companies are spending and which sectors are pouring in first. The SAP Value of AI Report 2026, produced with Oxford Economics, suggests the conversation is shifting to returns. Based on 2,600 business leaders across 13 countries including 200 from Singapore, it found local companies now expect AI to deliver a 19% return this year — up from 16% in 2025 — and believe that figure will nearly double to 36% within two years.

The jump is driven largely by agentic AI. Singapore businesses expect agentic AI to return about US$9.8 million (S$12.6 million) over the next two years, roughly double last year's US$4.9 million estimate. That optimism is broad: 89% of Singapore respondents say agentic AI has moderate-to-very-high potential to transform their organisations. AI already supports 27% of tasks in the average Singapore business, a share projected to reach 47% within two years.

The report's detail, however, shows a widening gap between ambition and readiness. Only 2% of Singapore companies say they are fully prepared for agentic AI. Data readiness actually fell, from 62% last year to 55% now, while 82% of firms report problems with incomplete data and 81% have experienced rework or delays caused by low-quality AI output. Fewer than half have a dedicated AI leader, and just 32% tie leadership KPIs to AI outcomes.

These numbers echo what policymakers and regulators have been signalling all year: the bottleneck in Singapore's AI push is no longer models or compute, but the plumbing around them — data quality, skills and governance. Only 12% of firms say their skills are fully ready to govern AI, and just 10% say the same about their processes and frameworks. As agents take on more autonomous work, that governance gap becomes an operational risk, not a compliance footnote.

Why it matters for Singapore: SAP Singapore managing director Eileen Chua frames the moment as a shift from AI experimentation to AI execution — exactly the transition Singapore's National AI Strategy 2.0 is trying to engineer across the economy. For local businesses, the report is a useful benchmark: the returns are materialising, but the organisations that capture them will be the ones treating data quality, leadership accountability and governance as core infrastructure rather than afterthoughts.