Google Cloud and Singapore Post Limited (SingPost) today announced a strategic collaboration to accelerate SingPost’s digital transformation journey and drive its next phase of sustainable growth. This multi-year collaboration aims to empower SingPost employees with easy-to-use AI-powered tools, helping them boost productivity, streamline repetitive tasks, and foster seamless collaboration with external partners and customers.

Establishing a secure foundation for digital, AI-driven innovation

SingPost has migrated all IT workloads hosted in its on-premises data centers to Google Cloud and is in the process of harmonizing and consolidating its technology stack, establishing a robust and secure foundation to power accelerated AI-driven innovation. This strategic move has not only yielded substantial cost savings of 30% in IT operations, but also allows SingPost to take advantage of Google Cloud's AI-optimized infrastructure, purpose-built to handle complex AI workloads, while ensuring cost-efficiency, scalability, and sustainability.

To further safeguard its enterprise data and applications, SingPost is also deploying Google Cloud's BeyondCorp Enterprise platform to enforce zero trust security principles like multi-factor authentication and device verification, ensuring that only authorized staff can access proprietary company information.

Supercharging logistics and supply chain management with gen AI

A successful participant in the AI Trailblazers initiative, SingPost has developed an AI solution prototype to streamline its eCommerce logistics operations. This solution eliminates the administrative burden of manually re-entering partner and supplier information from trade documents—including those with handwritten inputs—into its database. It also liberates employees from the drudgery of digging through document archives to find the information they need, enabling them to focus on making strategic decisions and delivering high-quality customer interactions.

Built using Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, foundation models, and Document AI, SingPost’s AI solution transforms unstructured data from trade documents into a searchable repository, with a gen AI-powered chat interface that comprehends natural language queries and surfaces accurate and relevant information.

In collaboration with Google Cloud, SingPost will scale the use of its solution, with the goal of optimizing supply chain orchestration across its logistics network and facilitating faster deliveries. Additionally, SingPost is leveraging Vertex AI to explore solutions for several other use cases, including automating internal legal document reviews and providing more personalized interactions to enhance customer care.

Vertex AI gives customers full control and segregation of their data and intellectual property. When using Vertex AI, SingPost retains complete control over its data, including prompts and user inputs at in*ference time: the data does not need to leave SingPost’s dedicated Google Cloud environment, is encrypted both in transit and at rest, and is not accessible by Google Cloud or any other external parties.

Democratizing the use of gen AI tools across the workforce

SingPost is replacing previous legacy productivity tools with Duet AI in Google Workspace to help its employees write, visualize, organize, and connect more meaningfully. Duet AI in Workspace enables a powerful new way of working, by seamlessly embedding gen AI into familiar cloud-native communication and collaboration applications like Gmail, Drive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, Meet, and Chat. With Duet AI, SingPost’s sales teams can produce memos and presentation decks with greater velocity in response to requests for proposals (RFPs), while marketing and customer support teams can speed up marketing copy development and reduce average response times to customer inquiries.

To empower citizen developers and foster a culture of digital innovation, SingPost is also deploying Duet AI in AppSheet. Integrated with Google Workspace, Duet AI in AppSheet lets anyone rapidly build applications for streamlining work tasks by describing their idea using natural language, all without writing a single line of code. This could include applications for frontline service management, inventory management, delivery route optimization, and more, with IT administrators setting governance parameters for how these applications can be created and consumed.