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<\/p>\n\u201cAs Singapore advances AI bilingualism, the real opportunity is to build a workforce that understands both the technology and the business context to apply it responsibly,\u201d says Eileen Chua, Managing Director, SAP Singapore.<\/p>\n
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Eileen Chua, Managing Director, SAP Singapore.<\/p>\n
Findings from the SAP Value of AI Report 2026 revealed that Singapore businesses expect stronger AI returns, while gaps in data, skills and governance could slow value realization. The report, which was released during the SAP NOW AI Tour in Singapore also revealed that Singaporean businesses are expecting an ROI from agentic AI amounting to US$9.8 million over the next two years.<\/p>\n
The report, which was conducted by Oxford Economics and SAP, surveyed 2,600 business leaders across 13 countries, including 200 from Singapore. The findings not only revealed Singaporean businesses are seeing significant value ahead from agentic AI but also are not fully prepared to govern, scale and realize its potential.<\/p>\n
Specifically, over eight in ten Singaporean businesses (89%) believe agentic AI has moderate to very high potential to transform their organization. Yet it remains early days for the technology, with only 2% of businesses saying they are fully prepared for agentic AI. The majority say they are either partially prepared or not prepared at all.<\/p>\n
According to Eileen Chua, Managing Director, SAP Singapore, while businesses in Singapore are moving from AI experimentation to AI execution, the expected returns from agentic AI show just how much confidence there is in the technology. However, she feels what is important for businesses to understand is that the value will not come from AI adoption alone.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt will come from connecting AI to business data, processes and governance, so organizations can move faster while still acting with control and confidence,\u201d Chua said.<\/p>\n
With over a quarter of all tasks (27%) in the average Singaporean business supported by AI, this is expected to increase to 47% in two years. However, many organizations are still building the leadership, skills and operating models required to scale AI effectively.<\/p>\n
The study revealed that less than half of Singaporean companies have a dedicated AI leader responsible for AI adoption, at 45%. Even fewer (32%) have leadership KPIs for AI or provide training on AI capabilities and risks (37%). This is creating growing pressure on workforce planning and skills. Almost eight in ten Singaporean businesses (79%) are not convinced their company upskilling is keeping pace with the evolution of AI tools.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI is no longer a side project. It is becoming part of how work gets done. As Singapore advances AI bilingualism, the real opportunity is to build a workforce that understands both the technology and the business context to apply it responsibly. That means organizations need to treat AI capability as a business capability. Skills, leadership accountability and responsible usage cannot sit behind the technology curve, especially as companies begin to explore more autonomous AI use cases,\u201d Chua added.<\/p>\n
Being AI ready<\/p>\n
In a media briefing session during the summit, Chua explained that what\u2019s really clear is that AI has gone beyond awareness and becoming a boardroom imperative. However, she also feels that AI has fleshed out a couple of areas where everyone needs to pay more attention.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany of the respondents in the survey revealed that enterprises are clearly struggling in four key areas. That is the harmonization of processes that’s taking a while to get processes integrated for data to be at the right places and as well as the topic of governance. We have read enough about how AI could be a productivity gain. It could help completely transform business processes. But there are risks involved as well if AI is being delivered in a manner that is not done with the right amounts of rewards,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Chua shared examples of customers that want every ERP modernization to have AI central as the strategy with some of the clients stating that they will not go live with their next generation ERP if there is no AI in these cases.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe pressure is on us to help make AI something that is consumable for large enterprises. And we do this in a couple of ways. We made some announcements today around how we are lowering the bar in terms of getting our SMEs on board on this journey. We have completely redefined the way we do commercialization of our ERP packages. It’s now something that many SMEs can really come on board and get a lot of the embedded AI in these cases that comes along with the ERP transformation,\u201d Chua explained.<\/p>\n
The SAP Sector-Focused Business AI Workshop is a structured discovery engagement designed to help organizations identify, prioritize and activate high-value AI use cases across their operations. Facilitated by SAP Business AI experts and SAP partners, and drawing on SAP\u2019s portfolio of embedded AI and Autonomous Enterprise capabilities, each workshop guides cross-functional business and technology teams through an accelerated process of use-case mapping, feasibility assessment, and adoption-roadmap development.<\/p>\n
SMEs will also be able to access ready-to-launch, partner-delivered packages with fixed pricing and scope. The ERP Package combines an AI-ready cloud ERP foundation with SAP Business AI for finance, procurement, sales, supply chain and operations. The HCM Package combines SAP SuccessFactors, payroll services and SAP Joule AI to modernize HR, payroll and employee services through a predictable managed model. Standardized delivery based on SAP Best Practices will help reduce implementation complexity, lower adoption barriers and shorten time to value.<\/p>\n
SAP also launched its AI-Bilingual Workforce Program, a workforce-development initiative that will equip more than 3,000 Singapore Citizens and Permanent Residents with role-based business AI skills over the next three years. The program will see SAP introduce Sector-Focused Business AI Workshops to help enterprises identify, prioritize and activate high-value AI use cases.<\/p>\n
A comparative advantage<\/p>\n
Manik Saha, Managing Director, SAP Labs East Asia, has a different view on the findings from the study. While he acknowledges the findings, Saha sees the capabilities that AI is bringing in as a comparative advantage for companies.<\/p>\n
According to Saha, AI allows employees and organizations to simply have the same capacity to deliver things faster, at scale, and also adapt to new things.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are much more agile as things are moving to meet increasing demands from the customer. I see this as a comparative advantage as opposed to potentially other discussions where some things are not required anymore. From a pure role point of view, I think every role is deconstructed with a certain series of activities. What we are trying to do is to look at those activities which don’t bring any value to the table and see how we can automate that through AI capabilities.<\/p>\n
For Saha, the value shifts from doing tasks and activities which contribute to value with the use of AI versus those which can be simply automated or more administrative to be shift to more agent input.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to add from the customer perspective because we do work with many clients who are going through the idea of modernization. It used to be about taking away customizations, adopting standard best practices, and keeping the core team. We are also talking to clients who are now not just looking at productivity gains with AI. It\u2019s about how we can help reduce the steps in processes. AI gives us this tremendous opportunity to even help many of the professional domains. So, it’s really an opportunity for us to really help professionals redesign, re-imagine what business applications and workflows would look like now because of AI,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cAs Singapore advances AI bilingualism, the real opportunity is to build a workforce that understands both the technology…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21036],"tags":[6409,21723,50639,9695],"class_list":["post-67523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sap","tag-ai","tag-autonomous-enterprise","tag-elaine-chua","tag-sap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}