Embracing AI to save jobs and support companies

SINGAPORE is investing more than S$1 billion into artificial intelligence (AI) computing, talent, and industry development over the next five years under the renewed national AI adoption strategy announced by Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong during his Budget 2024 speech last Friday (Feb 16).

The adoption of AI has become a hot-button issue of late, not least following the recent wave of AI-led mass retrenchment exercises in tech industries around the world. The Singapore-headquartered ride-hailing and food delivery app Grab, for instance, announced that it will cut 1,000 jobs, about 11 per cent of its total workforce, due to industry changes and the rise of generative AI. This is the company’s biggest job cut since 360 employees were let go at the height of the pandemic in 2020.

As with every new technology that promises to disrupt industries, however, there lies the potential to not only create new jobs, but also improve them. The World Economic Forum predicts that while AI may replace around 85 million jobs by 2025, it will also create some 97 million new roles. Generative AI, used to produce various forms of content, in particular has the transformative potential to liberate workers from mundane tasks by automating them, and enhance productivity and innovation for companies, enabling a shift towards more meaningful employment.

The challenge lies in how to seize change as opportunity, and effectively reskill our local workforce to help them stay ready, relevant, and resilient in the AI-driven economy of the future.

To this end, the labour movement has championed tripartite partnerships among workers, employers, and the government to help workers pick up AI-related knowledge and skills. By adopting what we call an “ecosystem” approach, unions have pushed for collaboration among all stakeholders to effectively train workers to use AI to augment their work and prevent skills obsoletion.

Active upskilling to prevent AI-led skills obsolescence

There are two groups of workers whose work may be transformed by technologies like generative AI. The first is white-collar professionals, managers, and executives (PMEs) and knowledge workers, who form a sizeable segment of our workforce given Singapore’s status as a knowledge-based economy. The second is older workers who may find skills transition difficult to adapt to. This includes white-collar middle managers. There is also a gendered dimension to AI disruption – women hold a disproportionately greater share of jobs with high AI exposure.

These workers will therefore need to adopt a mindset of resilience and agility and actively learn how to apply AI knowledge and skills to their work. NTUC LearningHub, a continuing education and training provider, has embraced AI adoption and learning by providing job-relevant AI courses for workers.

Workers can also actively manage their careers by picking up new or adjacent skills to diversify their career paths. In a fast-changing economy, workers will need to explore mid-career transitions, make headways into new job roles, and embrace learning to stay prepared.

Consequently, the labour movement has advocated for training support for these two groups of workers, specifically training allowance, subsidies for a second degree or diploma, and financial support for the involuntarily unemployed. These calls were heard by the government during Budget 2024, and I am heartened that our efforts have paid off.

Investment in training opportunities by employers and the government

At the same time, however, the onus of responsibility cannot be placed solely on workers. Employers and the government must support workers’ learning and upskilling ambitions by providing access to adequate training opportunities, which will also benefit businesses and the economy by boosting growth and seizing new opportunities.

To this end, NTUC launched the Company Training Committees (CTC) initiative in 2019, which drives business transformation by adopting solutions and technologies to raise productivity, redesign jobs, and upskill workers. Companies can also apply for the S$70 million CTC Grant to cover up to 70 per cent of the qualifying cost of projects. To date, over 1,700 CTCs have been formed.

Commercial printing service Expressprint is one company that successfully leveraged CTC to integrate AI into their business transformation and workforce planning plans. Expressprint management worked closely with union leaders to transform their business by integrating AI in two ways: first, by replacing manual updates of their pricing table with dynamic pricing software PriceCal, and second, by enhancing their chatbot with AI.

This led to a significant increase in productivity and efficiency. The time required to process a price change for a product saw a reduction of up to 90 per cent, which freed up time for staff to focus on other high-value tasks. Expressprint is now looking at extending PriceCal to other printers, even beyond Singapore.

Tripartite partnerships such as CTC have led to mutually beneficial growth for workers, businesses, and the economy. Using financial support from the government and drawing on the expertise of union leaders, companies can reimagine their workforces for future business needs and retrain workers in areas such as AI-related skills at scale and at lower cost.

The CTC model was recently featured in a briefing paper produced by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, the publication’s commercial research unit, which described how the model can help upskill workers by encouraging collaboration among governments, companies, and their employees.

All hands on deck

We can expect that any work task that can be enhanced by generative AI will be enhanced by it. To successfully adopt AI and ride on this wave of change will require an all-hands-on-deck ecosystem approach from all stakeholders. Companies must transform and employers must support workers’ ambitions to learn and reskill by offering skills allowance and provide protected time-off for self-initiated training to create mutually beneficial growth opportunities.

To ensure that the benefits of AI adoption are also shared fairly with workers, the labour movement will also continue to prepare workers to make the skills transition, champion better protections and support for those displaced, and steer AI adoption to create better jobs and better wages.

The writer is assistant secretary-general of the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC)