Securing Singapore’s AI Future Together: Temus Reactions to Singapore Budget 2026

Budget 2026 marks a decisive shift in Singapore’s workforce strategy: AI adoption is now a national people agenda.

Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s commitment that no worker will be left behind recognises a fundamental truth — sustainable AI transformation depends on how intentionally we redesign work, reskill our people, and build confidence at scale.

At Temus, we have seen this firsthand. Step IT Up demonstrates that mid-career individuals can be reskilled into meaningful tech roles when training is integrated with employment outcomes. Our T-Shape Community, where over 20% of employees serve as AI champions who build capability through hands-on experimentation, peer learning, and cross-functional collaboration shows that capability accelerates when learning is embedded into real work.

In PM Lawrence Wong’s Singapore’s Budget 2026 speech, he rightly acknowledged that AI’s pervasiveness, its use in a more contested security environment, and its ability to probe Singapore’s perennial vulnerabilities, including social cohesion, pose real risks.

Yet, in the same breath, he argued that AI, if mastered rather than feared, could still become Singapore’s strategic advantage.

It’s a given that we cannot rewrite our vulnerabilities of geography, demography, or the wider balance of power in our region. AI, however, offers a way to manage these disadvantages if we treat it at the systems-level. By choosing to chair the new National AI Council himself, the PM is effectively pulling AI into the core of Singapore’s “grand strategy”, where defence, economy and society are meant to be orchestrated in concert.

Budget 2026 makes a decisive move — from experimentation to national-level execution. PM Wong’s call to move beyond individual pilots and “organise at a national level, and move with speed and scale” matches what we see on the ground every day.

Now it’s time we make AI adoption boring, mainstream, and real.

In our work with organisations, the shift is clear: the question is no longer “Can we try AI?” but “Can we operationalise it at scale?” Companies are challenged by workflows that are not optimised, messy data, lack of governance, teams that are not keeping up with the introduction of AI, and productivity gains that are not measured consistently.

Singapore organisations are developing impressive AI pilots, but scaling remains the critical challenge. Research shows only 30% of AI use cases successfully reach full production, a gap that Budget 2026 must address.

We have strong foundations. Over 50 AI Centres of Excellence are now established across sectors. The government’s S$150 million Enterprise AI Catalyst Initiative provides essential cloud compute and tools. Singapore’s governance frameworks: AI Verify and sector-specific guidelines are among the world’s most mature.

Yet the execution gap persists. Organisations struggle with three barriers: operationalising governance frameworks in practice, integrating AI with legacy data infrastructure, and building workforce readiness alongside technology deployment.

Budget 2026 lays important groundwork. The government is moving in a few clear directions: targeted support for firms ready to transform comprehensively, not just experiment; broader incentives to lower the barrier for enterprise AI adoption; a more joined-up approach to workforce readiness through skills infrastructure and institutional reform; and national AI missions that give key sectors a clear direction to organise around.

The scaffolding is now in place. Here’s what success looks like as we move into execution:

1. Focus on adoption, not just shiny new technology. This means process redesign and change enablement.
2. Make trusted AI easier to deploy — more plug-and-play reference architectures, evaluation support, audit-ready templates.
3. Drive AI into core operations — not just chatbots, but finance ops, procurement, casework, compliance, scheduling.
4. Treat workforce transformation as a priority — protected time for learning and coaching, with incentives for job redesign. The government’s investment in skills infrastructure gives organisations no excuse not to act.
5. Standardise outcome measurement — move from “we deployed AI” to “we improved cycle time, quality, workload”.

The opportunity is clear and the policy environment has never been more supportive. We look forward to helping companies to move beyond pilots to making AI operational.

Budget 2026 should deliver targeted interventions: extend the Enterprise Compute Initiative with tiered support helping organisations scale pilots; establish sector-specific implementation programmes in healthcare, logistics, and finance with mandatory governance compliance; and create workforce transition support, ensuring AI-driven productivity generates good jobs.

The question isn’t whether to invest in AI, it’s whether we can build the practical infrastructure that transforms pilot potential into measurable business outcomes and citizen value. Budget 2026 will signal if Singapore leads in AI implementation, not just experimentation.

The next phase requires organisations to go beyond access — to reimagine roles, performance models, and leadership expectations. AI must not sit at the edges of the organisation; it must reshape the core of how value is created.

Sovereign AI has to be defined where Singapore can credibly win. We won’t own chips or hyperscale cloud, but we can shape 1. models, tuned to local needs; 2. application at speed, scale, and coherence, and 3. gov and assurance stack.

Singapore’s comparative advantage has always been the capacity to keep a fragmented world connected – even loosely. Where AI model and governance regimes between states can align, we should be the bridge; where they cannot, we should be the junction that securely hosts parallel, but insulated AI and data corridors. Singapore’s relevance in the AI era lies in remaining the place where otherwise incompatible systems still meet – which, in a contested order as today, is a strategic role in itself.