Singapore tech firm NCS commits $130m to accelerate AI development and adoption

SINGAPORE - Home-grown tech services firm NCS will invest $130 million over the next three years to develop AI intellectual property, pilot sector-specified AI projects and train its workforce.

NCS can also help smaller firms benefit from artificial intelligence (AI), Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong said on July 10 at its flagship forum NCS Impact 2025 held at Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre.

“Besides offering AI-enabled solutions, they can partner companies to co-develop use cases, redesign their workflows and even transform their business models.

“I am glad to note that NCS will invest $130 million over the next three years to support its clients in scaling AI adoption, through its proprietary suite of tools, methodologies and accelerators,” said Mr Gan.

As Singapore pushes ahead with innovations, it must ensure that the benefits of AI are shared broadly, he said, adding that there is a need to institutionalise the use of AI within firms big or small, even though larger companies tend to use AI more than smaller ones.

Based on the Singapore Digital Economy Report released in 2024, AI adoption has more than doubled among large enterprises over the past five years, to 44 per cent in 2023 from about 17 per cent in 2018.

But AI uptake among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) increased from 3.5 per cent to 4.2 per cent over the same period.

“Despite the lower rate of adoption among SMEs, it is heartening to note that both SMEs and large enterprises alike saw benefits from using AI – in fact, more than 90 per cent of both types of companies that used AI reported that the technology had improved productivity and processes,” said Mr Gan.

Under NCS’ $130 million investment, the company will develop Sunshine.AI, a suite of AI tools tailored for developers, IT operations teams and corporate users.

It comprises Sunshine.Coder, an AI coding assistant that supports language conversion; Sunshine.Operations, a platform that automates system log analysis; and Sunshine Productivity, a suite of tools that enhance day-to-day tasks such as summarisation.

Part of the $130 million will also be used to co-develop new concepts and pilots under new strategic partnerships.

For example, NCS will work with analytics company Databricks to trial new AI solutions for the finance, energy and utilities sector.

It will also work with Nvidia to expand the use of three agentic AI solutions to enable faster video search and summarisation; to automate operations; and to make issue resolution more efficient. Agentic AI is able to make decisions on behalf of users.

NCS chief executive Ng Kuo Pin said: “With AI reshaping industries as it becomes more accessible than before, we’re partnering government agencies and enterprises to help them harness the best of AI, not just for efficiency gains but to advance communities.”

The company will also ensure that its workforce of 13,000 employees continue to get comprehensive training and industry certification in AI, it said.

Mr Gan pointed out that AI can unlock a new frontier of economic growth for Singapore, which has made good progress in catalysing AI innovation within its economy.

For example, more than 25 companies including American Express, Grab, Oracle and Prudential have set up AI centres of excellence to drive creation of AI solutions.

Just as AI applications are customised for specific business contexts, there is also a need to localise AI models and solutions for specific linguistic and cultural contexts, said Mr Gan.

To that end, he noted Singapore’s development of Sea-Lion, a large language model, to understand and generate human language from South-east Asia. He said that NCS is among the first companies to adopt Sea-Lion, and hopes that more businesses can leverage AI for operations in the region, through the use of locally relevant models and applications.