War for talent: First battlefield in the global AI race

RECENT announcements of billion-dollar investments by multinational companies augur well for Singapore’s ambition to become the artificial intelligence (AI) hub of the region.

What is heartening is that these investments do not come only from Big Tech – notably Amazon Web Services’ extra S$12 billion injection for its cloud infrastructure here. Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca told The Straits Times last week that its US$1.5 billion plans for Singapore include a “smart connected factory... leveraging digital and artificial intelligence”.

These sizeable investments will no doubt create thousands of local jobs across different roles, but to attract such investments in the first place, Singapore needs to demonstrate it has a ready pool of talent, and in particular, AI talent.

To be clear, the AI talent crunch is not unique to any one country but a pressing issue worldwide. In fact, any country that hopes to thrive and excel in the global AI race must first overcome their most basic battle: the war for talent.

On this front, China appears to be getting ahead, according to a global AI talent tracker developed by MacroPolo, the in-house think tank of the Chicago-based Paulson Institute.

China has been producing more top-tier AI talent than before – based on data comparisons in 2019 and 2022 – and more of them are also opting to work in China. The data also suggests that a smaller proportion of top-tier AI talent are choosing to work in the US over the same period.

But perhaps what is unsettling is the poor AI talent retention record in Singapore. Specifically in the Asia-Pacific region, 8.3 per cent of top-tier AI talent were working in Singapore in 2019, but the city-state had “fallen off the list” by 2022, MacroPolo noted. In that period, Singapore reportedly lost 65 per cent of its top-tier AI talent, appearing to have the second-worst AI talent retention rate in the region.

There could be several reasons for this, though, given that a considerable number of foreign employees left Singapore during the Covid-19 pandemic, which coincided with the period of comparison. More people were also re-evaluating their priorities during the period of The Great Resignation in 2021 and 2022, which led to career switches and, well, resignations. Meanwhile, the government’s new work passes to attract top foreign talent, including the Personalised Employment Pass, were only rolled out in 2023.

If it is any consolation, though, Singapore’s top universities remain competitive in the list of top institutions globally for top-tier AI research, according to MacroPolo. This offers hope that the government’s initiatives to triple Singapore’s AI talent pool to 15,000 may yet bear fruit, since these measures include an AI visiting professorship and a masters programme.

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Still, with AI talent highly sought after globally and hence highly mobile, being able to retain talent is arguably just as, if not more, important than developing and wooing them in the first place.