On 27 March 2019, Salesforce officially opened its new artificial intelligence (AI) centre to train up to 100 postgraduate students in Singapore over the next three years in various fields of AI, including natural language processing and deep learning. The centre is located at Salesforce’s office at Suntec City and is the American software firm’s first AI research centre out of their R&D hub in Palo Alto, California.

Salesforce will be training postgrad students from SMU, NUS and NTU from August this year and this talent programme comes amid plans by the government to devote more resources to R&D in frontier technologies to secure its economic viability in the digital future. It also adds to the list of other high-profile openings of several other AI centres in Singapore, including the NTU-Alibaba Research Lab and SMU’s Centre for AI and Data Governance.

Minister for Communications and Information Mr S Iswaran said the centre was “an endorsement” of the work Singapore is doing in the field of AI.