SNTUC Deploys Microsoft 365 Copilot to 1,300 Employees and Builds AI Agents for Industrial Relations Work
Source: Microsoft Source
Singapore's labour movement is running one of the more unusual AI rollouts in the country — on itself. SNTUC, the national trade union congress representing more than 1.4 million workers, has moved Microsoft 365 Copilot from a 50-person trial in January 2025 to a full deployment across its 1,300 employees,...
Singapore's labour movement is running one of the more unusual AI rollouts in the country — on itself. SNTUC, the national trade union congress representing more than 1.4 million workers, has moved Microsoft 365 Copilot from a 50-person trial in January 2025 to a full deployment across its 1,300 employees, and its chief transformation and technology officer is now building autonomous agents for everything from daily briefings to industrial relations research.
The driving force is Siow Shong Seng, who has configured Copilot Cowork agents to run by themselves — delivering daily updates on technology trends, the labour movement's social-media presence, and economy and jobs developments without him retyping prompts each morning. He has also built an experimental agent that helps industrial relations officers pull information on labour laws, guidelines and procedures from sources including SNTUC, the Ministry of Manpower and other government agencies, positioning it as a template for a production version. Adoption numbers so far: about 93% of staff use Copilot, and roughly 74% use it at least weekly.
The deployment dovetails with the labour movement's broader AI-ready agenda. NTUC's AI-Ready SG initiative, run through the Job Security Council, pairs training pathways and job redesign playbooks with a first-of-its-kind funding scheme that subsidises AI tools for workers — and SNTUC's leadership argues the union must use AI itself before asking members and employers to. The rollout also tracks with Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index, which found Singapore's workforce ahead of regional peers on AI adoption.
What makes the experiment notable is that it pushes beyond chat. SNTUC is testing agentic AI inside an institution whose work is relationship-heavy — representing workers, mediating disputes, negotiating with employers. Siow's stance is that the tools deliver a first cut, not a final answer: humans still need to review and validate model output, which is why he spends as much effort on enablement — weekly tips, prompts and best practices — as on the technology itself.
Why it matters for Singapore: SNTUC's bet is a signal for the AI-ready workforce push that Singapore's tripartite partners have been building toward. If the labour movement can show 1.4 million workers and the companies that employ them a credible path from prompts to agents — with human oversight baked in — it gives Singapore a homegrown template for AI adoption that starts from the worker's side of the table, not the boardroom's.
