Microsoft and Digital Industry Singapore (sig) has launched an accelerator program to help up to 300 Singapore-based businesses build and deploy agent artificial intelligence (AI) systems, known as the digital workforce.
The Agent AI Accelerator Program, part of the government's Enterprise Compute Initiative (ECI), aims to make it a company that will become a “frontier company” where a hybrid team of human and AI agents collaborates.
For the next 12 months, participating companies will receive a baseline support package of up to S$250,000 with Microsoft Azure Cloud Credits, AI Training and Tools. Selected businesses with an ambitious roadmap can receive up to S$700,000 from Microsoft and can also co-develop Agent AI solutions. This allows the government's existing support to complement support up to S$105,000 per company, covering the consulting costs for setting up excellence for its own AI centre.
Agent AI refers to an AI system that can infer, plan and execute complex tasks with high degree of autonomy that acts like a digital team member. A recent Microsoft survey found that 82% of Singapore's business leaders plan to use such AI agents to expand their workforce capabilities in the next 12-18 months.
“We are committed to providing a wide range of services,” said Cynthia Yeo, acting managing director at Microsoft Singapore. “At Microsoft, we see frontier companies as the future. This is a new type of organization where teams of human and AI agents can work together to scale faster, move more agile, and create value in new ways.”
She added that the combination of government support and Microsoft's accelerator “helps innovation and Singapore to lead with AI.”
The initiative supports Singapore's refreshed national AI strategy 2.0. It aims to create a thriving AI ecosystem and promote widespread adoption of technology.
Speaking about the launch event, Law Yen Lin, Senior Minister of Trade and Industry, described Agent AI as the “next frontier” that can help businesses with “three ASs,” helping workers to improve their jobs, augment processes and automate tasks. “If you can lean forward and use AI and use agent AI in this context, it will help you really turbo-charge your abilities,” she said.
Founded in 2007, local high-tech company Patsnap uses Agent AI to help research and intellectual property teams search patents, comparing them with their competitors, summarizing key trends in weekly reports, significantly reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
How companies are using AI
During the on-launch panel discussion, industry leaders shared how organizations hire AI, balancing innovation and responsibility.
Rajesh Sreenivasan, partner and head of technology, media and telecommunications at the law firm Rajah & Tann, said the first step is to organize the company's vast knowledge repository. “It's not about which AI products you're getting, it's about sorting the data,” he says, explaining the company's efforts to build appropriate legal precedent banks from decades of information scattered across different systems.
By introducing data foundation, Rajah & Tann has developed a specialized AI bot that can answer questions from clients on topics such as data protection and compliance with subscription fees.
“We were charging $10,000 to answer a particular question, but we changed it to a subscription model that charges $3,000 to $4,000.
To address concerns about the use of client data, the company created a detailed web page about responsible AI policies and informed nearly 8,000 clients about how they use their data. “As lawyers, we have a very strict confidentiality obligation. If any of our data is compromised, our license is in danger,” Srinivasan said.
For technology services company NCS, embracing AI is an existential issue, said its lead scientist Ying Shao Wei. The company used AI to increase “developer speed” and built a safe, in-house version of CHATGPT for a strong workforce of 14,000 people, increasing productivity and promoting experiments.
Ying also noted the importance of creating AI that is useful to the community. He cited the MyResponder app that the NCS built by the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) to alert first responders to nearby cardiac arrest or small fires.
“Imagine using AI to better coordinate this entire network of volunteers. You can tailor your skills to the type of incident,” he said. “It's impossible for humans to manage and dispatch hundreds of volunteers, but AI can.”
