Talent ‘for hire’: How firms can tap unicorn startup’s initiative for AI-trained interns to help boost work efficiency

For the last three years, enterprise orchestration platform Workato has been steadily growing Singapore’s artificial intelligence (AI) talent pool by providing training to polytechnic and university students.

On 22 Sept, Workato officially launched the AI Institute Alliance with seven institutes of higher learning: Nanyang Polytechnic, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, National University of Singapore, Republic Polytechnic, Singapore Polytechnic, Singapore University of Social Sciences, and Temasek Polytechnic.

It is the company’s first AI Institute Alliance in the countries it operates. Headquartered in Palo Alto in Silicon Valley, with offices in the US, the UK, Singapore, Japan, Australia, the Philippines, and India, Workato considered Singapore a “natural choice” for the AI education-enterprise initiative.

“Singapore’s leaders are really embracing AI and there is a focus on how to teach the younger generations how to use AI,” says Workato chief information officer, Carter Busse.

“What we’re doing here is bridging the gap between education and business by tapping into the talent here in Singapore, and by putting our powerful yet intuitive orchestration technology in the hands of students, we’ve seen some amazing creativity and magic happen.”
 

The AI Institute Alliance grew out of Workato’s Education Partnership Programme that started in 2022 in Singapore.

At its core is Workato One, an agentic orchestration platform that brings together AI, integration, and automation. It gives users an intuitive AI-powered build experience, enables complex workflows to be orchestrated with AI, and provides a secure enterprise-grade foundation for creating AI agents and agentic apps.

This means that even students with non-tech backgrounds, such as those studying business, are able to use the platform to automate processes for companies.
 

Students are not only trained to use Workato One, but they are also given the opportunity to use their skills in real-world projects at leading companies in Singapore and beyond.

“The ethos of our product, Workato One, is to make AI integration – which is really complex across businesses – easy and consumable for students to use and apply to real business problems,” says Mr Busse.
 

How Workato works for students, firms

Workato’s agentic AI makes automation actionable by understanding the context of each scenario and executing pre-defined skills to achieve goals set by the user.

Its agents, called Genies, act like assistants that learn business processes and suggest solutions based on the user’s intent. They can even build automation workflows in plain language, while giving users full control to adjust details.

Companies use agentic AI to automate complex or dynamic workflows, build virtual agents that respond in real time, create systems that adapt and learn from user interactions, and automatically escalate issues to the right people when needed.

FairPrice Group experienced these benefits first-hand when it welcomed a Workato-trained intern in June this year.
 

The student intern from Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s business digitalisation programme helped the company automate a human resources (HR) process involving work titles by applying what he learned from school and the Workato training.

“He sat with our HR colleagues to understand our requirements and why we do things a certain way,” says FairPrice Group’s head of process automation Miguel Ho.

“From there, he drew up a process map, re-engineered the workflow, and automated it on Workato’s platform.”

After the seven-week internship period, Mr Ho and his team were able to use Workato One to fine-tune the intern’s work to fit their evolving needs.

FairPrice Group joined Workato’s programme after being introduced to it by the PSA Singapore, which in 2024, hosted six Workato-certified students and a lecturer from Nanyang Polytechnic.

“They worked on our intern onboarding process by integrating it with our various internal systems, automating certain workflows that we were currently doing manually,” says PSA Singapore’s regional head of IT, Southeast Asia, Colin Yip.
 

The collaboration brought value to both the students and PSA Singapore.

“For the students, they get to see the complexity involved in organisations, which is not always apparent when they are studying, and they get to experience a real-life problem to solve,” says Mr Yip.

“For us, we gained productivity by automating what used to be a manual process.”

Professor Simon Chesterman, vice provost at the National University of Singapore and senior director of AI Governance at national programme AI Singapore, says universities are “taking a long view” on AI in education.

He stresses the importance of industry collaboration to expose students to AI opportunities, equip them with skills, and help them understand the risks and limitations of the technology.

“The students today are the AI natives and what that means is that often, they will have a much better sense of the potential for the technology to transform businesses, so we can get teams of students to address problems that businesses may not have time or the headspace to work on,” he says.
 

Source: The Straits Times © SPH Media Limited. Permission required for reproduction.