The AI issues impacting Singapore's economy

The panel discussing AI for the future of Singapore economy consisted of from left: Dr Simon See Director and Chief Solution Architect for the NVIDIA AI Tech Center as the Moderator; Steve Leonard, CEO, SGInnovate; Pierre Legrand, Partner, PwC; Deepu Talla, VP and GM, intelligent machines at NVIDIA; and Dr Wanli Min, Chief AI Scientist, Alibaba Group.

A panel at NVIDIA's AI Conference has outlined what Singapore is doing to increase its artificial intelligence (AI) expertise and suggested some priorities for skills acquisition as well as future directions.

AI is changing operating models, producing new revenue streams, new asset classes and never-before seen capabilities in Singapore, said Pierre Legrand, Partner, PwC at the panel, titled AI for the future of Singapore economy. "We will require new skillsets, new training," he said, observing that there is a new emphasis on data scientists and analytics in Singapore today.

The Singapore government is already working on getting Singaporeans comfortable with AI, panelists said. Steve Leonard, CEO, SGInnovate, said his organisation is supporting researchers and nurturing AI-related skills. "The question is can we implement it, deploy it, adopt it," he said.

The Economic Development Board of Singapore is a key collaboration partner for SGInnovate, and the two are working to bring talent and opportunity to the same place, he said. "The No. 1 constraint is can we find the second, third and fourth team mate?" he asked.

As part of the AI Singapore initiative, SGInnovate is also working with event organiser NVIDIA on deep learning, Leonard shared, to bring more early education opportunities to Singapore. "We don't want it to be theoretical, we want it to be practical," he said.

Deepu Talla, VP and GM, intelligent machines at NVIDIA, said developers and researchers have access to NVIDIA's Deep Learning Institute, which has trained several hundred people in Singapore. NVIDIA's Inception programme for startups has  crossed the 2,000 mark in terms of companies supported, he added. Inception members receive access to NVIDIA technical resources, partnering resources, discounted access to hardware as well as access to prerelease software. Talla invited startups to join the Inception programme, saying, "The best is yet to come."

Dr Wanli Min, Chief AI Scientist, Alibaba Group. said Alibaba can help Singapore by providing scenarios from real world problems that startups and data tenants on the Alibaba Cloud can attempt to solve. "We can provide data resources and use case scenarios," he said. "We can look at use cases suitable for Singapore as a test bed and open up that data and computational resources to help data tenants to see if the new ideas can fly."

He also pointed out that attracting overseas talent becomes easier with Singapore as a testbed. "If you have very inspiring and exciting use case scenarios, tenants will fly to Singapore to try it, so can you 'harvest' the talent," he said. "Training talent will take time but harvesting is faster."

Once Singapore has the right formula, it could share it. Legrand sees smart city knowhow being exported from Singapore to other parts of the world. "The level of investment that is going into (the Smart Nation) is quite substantial," he said. "There is a huge opportunity to export it and get it right."

Another opportunity for Singapore to lead comes in focusing on the impact of AI on citizens. "How do we enhance and bring value to every citizen's life with AI? Is my health better, is my interaction with other colleagues better?" he asked.

Legrand explained that there are many issues to think about when it comes to introducing AI into established businesses. "There are completely human-operated processes and operating models that are not AI-ready," he said. "There are amazing AI capabilities. Who is going to learn the skills to integrate them into a human-operated (company)? How are you going to get people to fundamentally change the way they work? What does the human do, what's automated? There is a skill in that in itself."

Explore:

Read the TechTrade Asia blog posts on:

NVIDIA's AI strategy

How far AI can go: the Alibaba experience

Cutting-edge solutions from the NVIDIA AI Conference showfloor

The EDB-NVIDIA Future Talents Program

The shared NVIDIA and NSCC platform for AI initiatives in Singapore

Hashtag: #NVAICONFERENCE17