Talent shortage a hurdle for Singapore’s AI startups as demand spreads across industries 

ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) talent is hot property and local startups are struggling to snag enough of it. Industry players said hiring competition comes not just from other players but also companies trying to incorporate AI into their businesses.

“AI is very easily deployed across a lot of the industries we know of: healthcare, finance, everything under the sun,” said Juliana Lim, executive director of talent networking at the government-led deep tech initiative SGInnovate.

The range of available talent is also too narrow for market needs, which means more development pathways are needed.

The AI field has been fertile ground for startups for some years.

Singapore had more than 800 AI startups in 2021, the latest year for which Enterprise Singapore has data, with the number having grown at a compounded 18 per cent a year since 2018.

To keep the industry in bloom, however, players said the talent pool needs to be larger and more diverse.

Talent development is a key prong in Singapore’s national AI strategy, with over S$27 million earmarked for programmes to grow the pool of researchers and provide opportunities such as AI-related internships abroad.

The aim is to treble the local talent pool to 15,000 over five years.

Early-stage startups have an especially tough time hiring, said Joshua Wong, founder and chief executive at Hypotenuse AI, a generative AI startup that helps e-commerce companies and teams focused on search engine optimisation to write content.

“You are not just competing for talent; you are competing for talent with typically lower resources. But you still need as strong or, if not, even stronger talent,” he added.

His comments were echoed by Mauro Sauco, co-founder & chief technology officer at Transparently.AI.

“Startups do not have the means to remunerate at the same level that (bigger players) do,” said Sauco, whose company uses AI to detect accounting fraud and manipulation.

“The talent that I really wanted, it was always hard to find,” he said, adding that he tries instead to attract talent by creating an environment where employees can experiment.

The types of talent required are also evolving as local startups are maturing in their use of AI.

Besides traditional roles such as full-stack developers, for instance, they are also looking for ethics specialists, as ethical concerns around this area are rising, said SGInnovate’s Lim.

“The field is moving very quickly and it also hasn’t stabilised yet, so even the exact roles and skill sets that will be needed in the area are changing on a scale of months,” added Wong of Hypotenuse AI.

“This means that it’s hard to find great talent in this area, because there’ll be no course or education system that covers this really well yet.”

Wong said it is important that initiatives to develop AI talent development rely on more than academic measurements.

“It’s easy to set KPIs (key performance indicators) such as the number of Masters, PhDs; but the problem is most of these courses don’t cover the frontier of the field as such research is coming out from the industry.”

In addition, some companies need employees with both AI capabilities and technical skills in other fields.

Vaisagh Viswanathan, the CEO & co-founder of enterprise-focused recruiting software provider Impress.ai, said his startup looks for those with a background in human resources and recruitment processes, in addition to those with AI skills.

Cross-training is becoming more valuable as companies incorporate AI into their business models.

For example, EM2AI, a wholly owned subsidiary of mainboard-listed dental group Q&M, has a team of dentists and radiologists working together with engineers to train their AI software to detect and recognise dental conditions in X-rays.

EM2AI aims to use software to lower the chance of misdiagnoses and better recommend treatment plans for patients.