The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) is collaborating with technology giant Microsoft to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) among local enterprises with two key initiatives. One, targeted at any local small & medium enterprise (SME) that is looking to enhance their business capabilities with the adoption of GenAI solutions. Two, specially tailored for digitally mature enterprises to help them develop and deploy bespoke GenAI solutions. To complement the efforts, both parties are working together to build up the local tech workforce’s capabilities on the development and deployment of AI-enabled solutions through I&C JTM training partners, an official news release stated.
Uplifting tech vendors’ capability and solutions to help SMEs scale adoption of GenAI
To date, more than 90,000 SMEs have benefitted from the SMEs Go Digital (SMEsGD) programme. Through the programme, IMDA works closely with tech vendors to support the digitalisation journey of SMEs with a pool of pre-approved digital solutions. Today, around 20 percent of these solutions have AI-enabled features in areas such as human resource, digital marketing and customer relationship management. In 2023, over 3,000 SMEs adopted and benefitted from these AI-enabled pre-approved solutions. IMDA expects 15,000 SMEs to benefit from AI-enabled solutions over the next two years.
To accelerate the adoption of GenAI among local SMEs, IMDA and Microsoft will support these tech vendors to integrate their solutions with GenAI and Copilot capabilities. This will enable SMEs access to more GenAI solutions to boost productivity across business functions, foster product and service innovation, and deliver superior customer experiences.
Moving forward, IMDA will form more such partnerships with tech giants like Microsoft to uplift the capabilities of the tech vendors and boost their solutions with GenAI capabilities so that they can better support the SMEs.
Developing bespoke GenAI solutions for digitally mature enterprises, tailored to their business needs
To deepen partnership, the collaboration with Microsoft will help digitally mature enterprises identify business use-cases, navigate technical complexities, and deploy their own customised GenAI digital solutions that are suited for their business needs under IMDA’s GenAI x Digital Leaders initiative. The initiative is tailored for larger and more digitally mature enterprises looking to deepen their in-house digital capabilities and leverage GenAI to improve productivity and expand business prospects with the support of tech vendors and technology giants.
In collaboration with IMDA, Microsoft will conduct tech discovery workshops to raise digitally mature enterprises’ understanding of GenAI and provide access to tech advisory to help identify and prioritise use cases that meet enterprises’ business needs. These tech discovery workshops will be conducted over the next two years, reaching out to over 200 such enterprises.
Enterprises attending these tech discovery workshops will receive 1-on-1 guidance on whiteboarding, prototyping and scoping of customised GenAI use-cases. During implementation, enterprises will be connected to Microsoft’s network of tech partners and given access to Microsoft’s GenAI tools such as Azure OpenAI and Copilot to support in the development of the Gen AI solutions. In addition, IMDA is providing funding support for eligible enterprises to develop and deploy their GenAI solutions, with the support from tech partners.
Local food company Bee Cheng Hiang has undergone a significant digital transformation in the past two years. The company evolved from manual work processes to a unified system integrating Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and omnichannel operations to streamline processes and improve customer experience. Their omnichannel platform, which was officially launched in Singapore and has expanded to other regions such as Malaysia, allows customers to seamlessly shop and redeem points across multiple sales platforms, both offline and online.
This integration has empowered Bee Cheng Hiang to gain comprehensive insights into sales, member acquisition, and operations, enhancing their eCommerce presence and customer experience. They are also looking at leveraging personalised and targeted marketing by developing the ability to understand every customer’s shopping preference so that they can provide the most relevant promotion at the right moment, while ensuring that the sales opportunities can be captured by respective sales channel. Moving forward, Bee Cheng Hiang hopes to tap on GenAI to elevate omnichannel shopping experiences for their customers and improve supply chain prediction and efficiency.
Another home-grown company Mocha Chai Laboratories (MCL), a leading local digital film lab with over a decade of experience in end-to-end media production, is making significant strides in integrating cutting-edge technology like Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos into its operations.
Today, post-production for content is still a largely labour-intensive process that requires specific skillsets and experience to produce quality end-products. This is a common challenge for the sector as the process can be costly and tedious, limiting the amount of business opportunities companies can capture. MCL sees the opportunity to leverage on GenAI to augment their team in its production and design capabilities, as well as to reduce the time required in this process. This strategic move is expected to significantly improve efficiency and productivity, giving rise to more opportunities to capture new revenue streams, and cementing MCL’s position as an industry trailblazer.
Building tech workforce’s capabilities to develop and deploy AI-enabled solutions
To build the tech workforce’s capabilities to develop and deploy AI-enabled digital solutions, IMDA and Microsoft have been equipping tech professionals with AI skills through the I&C JTM Training Partners. In collaboration with Microsoft, IMDA’s Training Partner NTUC LearningHub offers Microsoft certification courses in Azure AI. These courses help trainees master the fundamentals of AI technology, build awareness of common AI workloads, and identify relevant Azure services to support them.
As of December 2023, the JTM Training Partners collectively offer around 200 AI-related courses and have trained about 1,600 individuals to be confident AI users. Over the next three years, IMDA is targeting to reskill and upskill about 18,000 tech talents in tech roles in AI and Analytics with an emphasis on GenAI and two other in-demand areas – software engineering, and Cloud and Mobility.