Singapore Wants Banks to Use AI to Create Jobs

Singapore’s government wants the country’s banks and financial firms to rethink their use of artificial intelligence.

Rather than simply using AI to cut jobs, these organizations should deploy the technology to create better jobs and train employees for better roles, according to Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong, Reuters reported Wednesday (May 20).

“For Singapore, the answer cannot be to ⁠hold back change,” ⁠Gan said at the DBS Leaders Dialogue event, per the report. “If we slow AI adoption, we will weaken our competitiveness and ultimately hurt workers more, not less.”

His comments came one day after Standard Chartered, a bank that counts Singapore as one of its main hubs, said it would cut around 8,000 jobs by the end of the decade as its AI usage increases.

“It’s not cost-cutting; it’s replacing, in some cases, lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we’re putting in,” CEO Bill Winters said in remarks he would later try to walk back following online outrage.

As Bloomberg News reported, some of that outrage came from former Singapore President Halimah Yacob, who blasted the CEO’s terminology in a Facebook post, calling it “disturbing” to speak of workers in such clinical terms.

Gan said Singapore’s evolution as a financial hub would depend on safe and secure enterprise-wide adoption of AI, while making sure it creates good jobs, according to the Reuters report.

“When firms implement AI, they should not only ask, ‘How much cost can we save?’” he said, per the report. “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 an asset, with AI serving as a “great multiplier,” according to the report.

“Small amplified by AI means our limited workforce can now do many more things than we could before,” Tan said, per the report, adding that companies must still take employees and customers into account because “humans matter.”

In other AI news, new research shows that the technology is becoming less visible as it grows more useful.

“The closest analogue may not be the smartphone or social media boom, but the rise of mobile banking,” PYMNTS reported Tuesday.

It happened gradually, with people moving from checking online balances to deposits to peer-to-peer transfers.

“Consumers today are not building trust in AI because they are mesmerized by the technology,” the report said. “They are building trust because the technology increasingly removes friction from ordinary life.”

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