The AI craze is happening and there is hardly any country or continent where the high wave is not being felt. In the early 1900s, only a handful of countries like the United States, Japan, and China had anything to do with artificial intelligence. Now, several decades later, almost every country in the world is engaged in one way or the other with AI development, investment, or adoption. 

There’s one country currently leading the AI adoption race. Unlike many other countries, this one country is going way beyond the casual, everyday use of AI by honing in on AI-augmented skills and building a powerful technical workforce in the process. Follow us as we discuss the amazing case of AI skills adoption in Singapore. 

The Research

LinkedIn is credited for being the world’s largest professional network and to increase its already strong hold on recruiters and job seekers, the social media platform began offering educational courses and certification. 

More recently, LinkedIn has gone a step further to perform and deliver insightful research and reports. One such report is driving our discussion here. According to it, Singapore has worked its way up to become the world leader in AI skills adoption. 

The Future of Work report was released a few days ago. It covers a survey conducted across 25 different countries with the aim of understanding how much AI skills adoption is happening in each of these countries. 

Statistically, Singapore came out tops of the 25 countries considered in the survey. Workers and employees in the country were found to have improved their AI skills up to 20 times what it was in 2016. 

Runner-up countries based on the same criteria of AI skills adoption were Finland with 16 times (16x) adoption in the same timeframe, Ireland with 15 times (15x) adoption, India with 14 times (14x) adoption, and Canada with 13 times (13x) adoption. 

All four runner-up countries in this survey showed remarkable interest in adopting AI. However, Singapore is a solid 4% ahead of Finland, proving that the Asian country has intentionally gravitated towards building what the LinkedIn Future of Work report refers to as a “diffusion rate”. 

What is Driving The AI Skills Adoption in Singapore?

If you’re curious enough, you would want to know what is in the minds of Singaporeans that has driven so much AI skills adoption among them for nearly a decade now. 

What we can tell you for sure is that Singapore may have a thing for emerging technology. The country collectively proved this in the way it adopted blockchain technology. 

As of 2018, Singapore stood out as a pioneer Southeast Asian country implementing blockchain in the airline industry. 

This CIO article also confirms that startups in Singapore have long used blockchain to ease administrative roles in the real estate industry and that the education, public sector, supply chain, energy, and food industries all had early and innovative engagements with the technology. Today, the country is towing the same path by aggressively adopting AI skills. 

Some Skills Potentially Augmentable by AI

Adopting AI skills does not mean that Singapore intends to replace its workforce with automated processes or intelligence. Rather, the country is simply moving to achieve better interaction and productivity between its human resources and the impressive generative AI technology. 

That being said, AI skills only serve to augment an already existing technical or hard skill set. The Future of Work report points to the following skills as being particularly improvable with the introduction of AI. 

Software Engineering Skills:

One of the many fascinating aspects of generative AI is its ability to write program codes in a large variety of languages. Open AI’s product ChatGPT, for example, has a thorough knowledge of Java, Python, C++, and many other programming languages. This makes it possible for the AI tool to create completely new codes on request. In addition, generative AIs can teach young programmers how to code from scratch and can also assist them by pointing out errors in their code or ven helping to debug those codes. 

The extensive capabilities of AI augment the role of software engineers and cut down on the long hours spent designing and developing software, especially for large businesses or enterprises. According to the LinkedIn report, AI can successfully perform 97% of software engineering functions leaving only 3% for human engineers. 

Customer Representation Skills:

Just like when getting AI to write codes, businesses can train generative AI models on the entire subject of their business products or services and watch it assist their customer representative role. The various ways in which AI can be applied to augment customer representation skills include providing suggestive answers to customer inquiries, analyzing customer sentiment towards a business or product, and directing unresolved cases from an automated AI chatbot to a human agent. 

The LinkedIn Future of Work report which we are focused on found that over 76% of the entire customer representation process could receive some form of generative AI assistance. This leaves only 24% of the entire job role for human intervention. 

Cashier Skills:

Singaporeans are also adopting AI skills to improve their cashier role performance. According to the LinkedIn Future of Work report, the new technology is believed to augment as much as 59% of the services delivered by cashiers. 

Cashiers are responsible for tracking business transactions, receiving and processing payments, and issuing receipts. Their role requires some level of communication and interpersonal skills, attention to detail, and sound knowledge of basic mathematics and finance. 

Due to their access to customers, cashiers have the power to create a good or bad impression of the company or business they work for and this can be the difference between having a huge customer base or struggling to get conversions - especially in the case of a small business.  Adopting AI skills for this role comes in really handy for removing errors in processes such as data entry and financial analysis. 

Salesperson Skills:

The cashier skill and the salesperson skill both have the same AI augmentation rates of 59%. What this means is that slightly more than half work these professionals do could be assisted by AI technology, but the remaining 41% of skills required for this role must come from human agents. 

Adopting AI skills for a salesperson's role involves using the technology to create persuasive or brand-specific emails, round-the-clock responses to inquiries, automatic note-taking or data entry, and more. However, the aspect of emotional intelligence and empathy in sales processes cannot be delivered by AI technology. 

Teacher Skills:

In Singapore, the rapid “diffusion rate” of AI skills is also happening along career and professional lines relating to teaching. Still referring to the LinkedIn Future of Work report, AI skills prove helpful in improving the performance of teachers by over 45%. 

The reason why adopting AI skills can only help fulfill less than half the work of a teacher is that the supporting AI technology lacks adaptability, creativity, and emotional intelligence which is a critical classroom component. Furthermore, existing generative AI sometimes responds to questions with sexist or fictitious answers. 

Event Manager Skills:

Event management has everything to do with budgeting, marketing, choosing a suitable venue, setting up logistics, making security arrangements, and handling unexpected outcomes. An event manager’s pre-program and post-program schedules could be augmented using generative AI. For example, AI tools could create relevant message reminders to event participants or gather weather and traffic information to help with logistics and program scheduling. 

According to our reference report, AI is thought to augment just about 39% of event management skills. This low involvement comes from the fact that the generative AI technology does not understand complex human emotions so it cannot fully function in bringing desired levels of warmth and affection. 

Outstanding Realisation From The Research on Singapore AI Skills Adoption

One thing stands out from LinkedIn’s Future of Work report and it is the statement that “humans will always be in control.”  

Anyone who has followed the thread of conversations around the development of artificial intelligence (AI) or who has thought about the future of technology would have probably come across the idea that the world could be overtaken by AI-infused humanoids or just some other smart tech. Our opinion piece on the need for AI regulation also reveals shocking, evidence-based truths. 

All of these frantically oppose the prospect of humans always being in control. Nevertheless, the Future of Work report has a point in its assessment. The report indicates that soft skills are far more relevant than technical skills and that generative AIs cannot successfully take over the world because they cannot express emotional intelligence, flexibility, and analytical judgment. 

Obviously, we are transitioning to a period in our workspace where technical and hard skills are readily available. This is all thanks to the AI craze. However, while hard skills act like a cover, it is really the soft skills that knit together the quality of workplace performance - and unfortunately, generative AIs are unable to perform in this role.

So what you get is AI technology expressing top technical skills and even being able to augment human workers in delivering on their technical roles but lacking the ability to promote critical interpersonal and emotional skills. It is the same as having a very talented hire who lacks the knowledge of communicating or collaborating with team members, customers, or clients. 

Conclusion

Generative AI became popular with the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. Since then, the world has been buzzing with developing AI technology adopting AI skills, or both. While all of this is going on, workers in Singapore are breaking the glass ceiling by vigorously learning to improve their work performance using the trendy new AI technology. 

We don’t exactly know if the rapid AI skills adoption in Singapore is out of the country’s love for emerging tech or if they see potential present or future benefits, but it is clear that radically adopting new technologies in this manner could create positive economic outcomes in the country

The key takeaway from this is, therefore, the need for governments to take a top-first approach towards embracing impactful technologies such as blockchain and AI. Government support and actions are effective in propagating adoption among citizens, leading to the kind of results we are seeing in Singapore. 

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