Singapore’s businesses have largely figured out how to buy AI tools. What they have not figured out is what to do with the humans sitting next to them.
That is the central finding of a sweeping new report by Accenture, released Monday, which warns that Singapore’s AI ambitions risk stalling not because of a tech gap, but a people one. Titled Singapore’s Growth Mandate: Why the AI future will be won or lost on people, not technology, the report draws on four research streams conducted between December 2025 and February 2026, and paints a picture of a nation caught between digital momentum and human inertia.
The headline numbers are, on the surface, encouraging. Nine in 10 Singapore enterprises have moved beyond merely exploring AI tools into active implementation. Nearly half have deployed generative AI within specific business units, and nearly three quarters are experimenting with or exploring agentic AI.
But peel back the tech layer, and the numbers grow uncomfortable. Only one in three organisations has a talent strategy that is fully aligned with its AI strategy. Nearly half of tech leaders surveyed admitted their companies had yet to redesign job roles or responsibilities at all.
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The cost of this misalignment is quantifiable. Organisations that placed people at the centre of their AI transformation in 2025 grew revenue 1.8 percentage points higher and profits 1.4 percentage points higher than peers that did not. In a market as competitive as Singapore’s, that is not a rounding error.
Young workers, old assumptions
Perhaps the sharpest finding concerns the country’s entry-level workforce, a cohort that is ambitious, digitally native and, according to the research, being quietly set up to fail.
Entry-level job postings rebounded eight per cent in 2025, suggesting the labour market is upgrading rather than collapsing. But what those roles demand has shifted dramatically. Postings for entry-level ICT positions fell 38 per cent between 2022 and 2025, while demand for AI, machine learning, and data management skills accelerated sharply. Routine, repeatable tasks are being compressed. Roles that combine domain knowledge, analytical reasoning, and the ability to deploy AI tools are expanding.
Young Singaporeans sense the shift. Fully 95 per cent believe Singapore’s ambition to lead in AI is achievable. Yet just 31 per cent strongly agree that the ambition is genuinely people-centric. Their anxiety is specific: 81 per cent report beginner-level or zero understanding of prompt engineering — the skill most commonly cited as a gap — and 80 per cent report the same when it comes to AI ethics and governance. Nearly half worry about keeping pace with the speed of AI change.
The report reserves its most striking finding for last. Only 23 per cent of Singaporean employees genuinely trust their employer to act in their best interest when introducing AI tools, a figure that sits in stark contrast to a global benchmark of 83% from Accenture’s separate Pulse of Change research.
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That gap is not merely a morale problem. Trust, the report argues, is a hard operational requirement. When employees do not believe their organisations will invest in them through an AI transition, they disengage from upskilling. And 47 per cent of respondents already identify a lack of leadership support as the single biggest barrier to building AI fluency effectively.
Accenture frames the challenge as a leadership imperative, not a human resources task. Mark Tham, Accenture’s Country Managing Director for Singapore, said business leaders must elevate talent strategies to an equal — or greater — priority than technology adoption, noting the country has largely mastered deploying AI tools but has yet to grapple seriously with redesigning the work around them.
Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s Budget 2026 pledge of “no jobless growth” in the AI era gives the report a pointed political context. Accenture’s conclusion is blunt: Singapore’s CEOs are, in effect, the implementation layer of that national mandate. The algorithms are ready. The question is whether the organisations built around them are.
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Image Credit: Annie Spratt on Unsplash
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