Singapore feels less like a nation and more like a functional prototype when you stroll through its financial district on a muggy weekday morning. Towers of glass reflect one another. E-bike couriers maneuver through traffic. A mid-sized company is most likely completing its application for cloud credits worth several hundred thousand Singapore dollars somewhere inside a building close to Raffles Place. This is the essence of what local officials have begun to refer to as the “AI bilingual” approach—fluent in deployment, fluent in policy, and making a concerted effort to avoid having to choose between the two.
Observing this from a distance gives the impression that Singapore has accomplished something that the US keeps promising and delaying. The nation hasn’t merely discussed adoption since launching the second iteration of its National AI Strategy in 2023. It has been integrated into the operating system that provides support to businesses. For example, the Enterprise Compute Initiative pairs businesses with Google Cloud, Microsoft, or AWS, providing cloud credits of up to S$500,000, S$250,000, and S$600,000, respectively, along with technical support, training, and a route to developing internal AI capabilities. It feels more like a structured handoff than a grant program.
Despite all of their executive orders and summits, American policymakers have not created anything comparable at the federal level. Instead of co-authoring AI strategy, the U.S. still views it as something to negotiate with industry. Singapore, on the other hand, drafts the curriculum and signs the contract. Currently in its second edition, the AI Trailblazers initiative has assisted about 84 organizations in addressing about 100 actual use cases. Visa is improving customer service. Building design is being streamlined by DP Architects. An intelligent chatbot is being used by Ocean Network Express. This doesn’t sound revolutionary at all. Perhaps that’s the point.
The figures are also significant. According to a recent Morgan Stanley report, more than 70% of Singaporean businesses have implemented AI in some capacity, with supply-chain efficiency, product development, and labor savings being the most common use cases. While Grab, Sea Group, and Singapore Airlines are leaning in as adopters, companies like Singtel, Keppel, and Sembcorp are discreetly acting as infrastructure enablers. It’s still unclear if this will result in long-term productivity gains because those are preliminary figures and AI hype has burned many hopeful predictions in the past. However, most American CIOs would raise an eyebrow at the participation rate alone.
The regulatory wager is subtly more intriguing. Speaking earlier this year at the Semafor Tech conference in San Francisco, Chan Ih-Ming of EDB described Singapore’s AI Verify foundation as a principles-based strategy intended to establish trust before establishing regulations. Washington, on the other hand, usually waits after debating the regulations. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that businesses like Microsoft and AWS selected Singapore for their first regional Innovation Hub and Southeast Asia AI lab, respectively. Clarity is followed by capital.
It would be naive to copy the blueprint in its entirety because it isn’t perfect. The United States is much more divided politically, larger, and messier. However, Singapore’s refusal to view AI as a threat or a moonshot, instead viewing it as an industrial transition that requires scaffolding, is instructive. From this vantage point, it might be worthwhile to borrow.
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