Heng Swee Keat announces US$50m investment to grow AI tech talent

Singapore is set to invest US$50 million in artificial intelligence (AI) talent, and open three new centres of innovation to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with testing new projects.

These measures are expected to go some way to address the barriers to innovation such smaller businesses face. In his speech at the opening of Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology (Switch) 2022, Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat listed three such barriers: not having enough talent, technology moving ahead too quickly, and sustainability efforts being too slow.

The growing talent crunch has left education systems across the world struggling to keep pace with the demand for talent, especially at the bleeding edge of tech.

Heng said: “The traditional feedback loop for developing new skills – from industry to academia to curriculum – and years of full-time learning by students before they graduate simply cannot cope with the pace of change.”

Partnering industry is key to solving the talent crunch and keeping pace with the demand for AI talent. He noted that Singapore started the AI Apprenticeship Programme in 2018, and has since trained more than 200 apprentices.

The US$50 million to be invested into growing AI manpower aims to double the number of AI apprenticeships in the next five years. A new National Research Foundation Fellowship for AI will also be created to attract researchers, who can pull in and mentor new talent to pursue research in Singapore.

“This is a virtuous circle to collectively ease a critical innovation bottleneck, and make good careers available to more individuals,” said Heng.

With technology moving so quickly, SMEs are finding it tough to keep up with and access new technologies, Heng noted. Going online has helped them keep going during the pandemic, but it is really just one foundational aspect of their journey. For them to thrive, they would need to innovate and develop new products and solutions.

“For many innovating SMEs, what they need is access to mature, ready-to-scale technologies and facilities at which they can test out new projects,” said Heng.

He highlighted the eight Centres of Innovation (COI), which provide lab facilities, consultancy and training to develop and test tech projects. To date, almost 300 innovation projects have been completed.

The COIs have contributed an economic value-add of S$150 million. Enterprise Singapore (EnterpriseSG) has set up another three such centres in the built-environment, beauty and personal care, and urban-agriculture sectors.

“All three are growth areas, with an increasing number of companies which are keen to innovate and try out new ideas. These three new COIs will be hosted in our polytechnics, and support up to 1,500 SMEs in the next five years,” said Heng.

Addressing also the trend that sustainability efforts are moving too slowly, he said climate change is now a much more urgent crisis, with more-extreme weather patterns emerging. The current energy crisis has also halted a green recovery from Covid-19.

Singapore is moving to put sustainability back on track, first with a carbon tax. Next, it aims to catalyse the financing of the green transition, which it has also facilitated, with the trading of carbon credits on the carbon exchange.

Lastly, sustainability will be placed back on track through open innovation around key problem statements, noted Heng. This year’s Sustainability Open Innovation Challenge will focus on making textiles more sustainable. The Sustainability Open Innovation Challenge is an initiative by EnterpriseSG to bring together innovators and industry partners to co-develop sustainable solutions to problem statements issued every year; 2022 is the fourth edition of the challenge.

The Sustainability Open Innovation Challenge is teaming up with The Liveability Challenge run by Temasek Foundation. The Liveability Challenge is a platform to connect investors and entrepreneurs with innovative solutions to problems facing tropical cities, and offers a chance of securing funding for these solutions. Over US$2 million will be made available to support the development of such solutions.

Heng said: “We can strengthen the global innovation movement – with greater emphasis on developing human capital to meet talent shortfalls.”

 

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