Localisation and niche markets: How Singapore’s AI startups can stay competitive 

SINGAPORE’S artificial intelligence (AI) startups can hold their own against larger international players if they focus on niche markets and aim to localise, said industry players.

Laurence Liew, director of AI innovation at national AI programme AI Singapore, said big companies such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google tend to play a “horizontal game – serving a large user base all at the same time – and this leads to very generalised applications”.

These companies also have an interest in nurturing the startup ecosystem.

“That’s the way they can multiply the consumption of their cloud,” he added.

Smaller startups can therefore win by “dominating certain verticals”, said Joshua Wong, the founder and chief executive at Hypotenuse AI.

His company helps e-commerce brands produce search-engine-optimised content, in particular product descriptions. “This is not well-suited for ChatGPT, which is generalised,” said Wong.

AI Singapore’s Liew said that some types of AI applications, such as large language models and computer vision, also have to be localised for higher accuracy.

Computer vision is a type of AI that lets computers interpret and analyse the visual world, simulating how humans view and understand their environment.

“Singapore startups can (create) solutions that may be similar to that of larger players, but theirs will be a lot more accurate than (those of) foreign players who don’t have local data sets,” said Liew.

“Localisation is one advantage that not just Singapore startups, but any startup in other countries, will have against the bigger boys.”