Singapore's banks and financial firms should use artificial intelligence to create better jobs and train workers for higher-value roles, not just cut costs, Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong said on Wednesday.
Gan's comments come a day after Standard Chartered said it would cut more than 7,000 jobs over four years as it steps up AI adoption. HSBC CEO Georges Elhedery said on Wednesday that generative AI would "destroy certain jobs" and "create new jobs", while urging staff to embrace the change.
"For Singapore, the answer cannot be to hold back change. If we slow AI adoption, we will weaken our competitiveness and ultimately hurt workers more, not less," Gan said at the DBS Leaders Dialogue event in Singapore.
A DBS report released at the event ranked Singapore third among 15 AI financial hubs, behind New York and San Francisco, and said the city-state was the open-market hub closest to combining AI capability with institutional trust at scale.
Gan said Singapore's next phase as a financial hub would depend on moving AI from experimentation into enterprise-wide adoption, ensuring it creates good jobs, and building trust, safety and security into the way AI is developed and used.
"When firms implement AI, they should not only ask: how much cost can we save? They should also ask: What new roles can we create? How can existing workers be trained for them..."
DBS Group CEO Tan Su Shan said Singapore's small size could become a strength if AI helped its limited workforce do more, describing the technology as a potential "great multiplier".
"Small amplified by AI means our limited workforce can now do many more things than we could before," Tan said, adding that companies needed to take employees and customers along because "humans matter".
