SMS Tan Kiat How’s Keynote Address at Inauguration of Google Cloud’s Singapore Engineering Center (SEC)

Good afternoon, everyone.

I am very happy to join all of you for the launch of the Google Singapore Engineering Center.

Google has been a longstanding partner of Singapore. Earlier this year, at ATxSummit, MDDI and Google refreshed our partnership to deepen collaboration on AI to explore how frontier AI can be harnessed for the public good.

Today's launch marks another important milestone.

What makes this Engineering Center significant is not simply that Google is expanding its presence in Singapore. It is what Google is choosing to build here: engineering and product development; multilingual and agentic AI; cloud and data infrastructure; developer platforms and automation. These are substantive capabilities, close to the frontier of how AI is being developed and put to work.

And that matters because Singapore does not simply want to be a consumer of AI. We want to be a place where AI is developed, engineered, adapted and importantly, deployed - a place where our people work on difficult problems at the frontier, and where frontier technology is translated into real economic and societal value.

For much of the recent AI conversations, attention has focused on the technology. Who has the best models? Who has the most compute? How quickly are capabilities improving?

Don't get me wrong, these questions remain important. But I think the next phase will increasingly be shaped by another question: who can put these technologies to work best?

As AI becomes more powerful and more widely available, access to the technology will increasingly be only the starting point.

The harder task is to absorb it. Adapt it. Combine it with domain knowledge. Integrate it into real organisations. And deploy it reliably and at scale.

So, the next phase of AI will be shaped not only by competition between technologies. It will increasingly be shaped by competition between capability systems.

Can a country bring together technology, talent, engineering, data and domain expertise? Can companies redesign themselves around new capabilities? Can workers keep learning as the technology changes? And can technological progress be translated into productivity, better services and better lives?

Singapore will never win on scale alone. Our opportunity is different. We should become exceptionally good at turning frontier technology into trusted, useful and scalable applications.

The second reason this Center matters is our people. We often talk about skills and training when discussing the future workforce. Training matters. But much of the capability we will need in the AI era cannot be developed in classrooms alone. Capability is built by doing.

Good engineers become better engineers by solving difficult engineering problems.

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   By building systems that must work in the real world.

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   By dealing with scale.

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   By debugging what does not work.

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   By making difficult technical judgements when there is no perfect answer.

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   And by learning from people who know more than they do - before eventually teaching others.

So, when companies anchor substantive engineering and product-development work in Singapore, the benefit goes beyond the number of jobs created. The deeper benefit is that expertise compounds here.

A young engineer gets to work on difficult problems. Over time, they develop deeper technical judgement. They lead larger projects. They mentor others. Perhaps, they build the next product or the next company.

That is how an ecosystem deepens.

This is also why Government cannot think about workforce development separately from enterprise transformation. When technology and jobs are changing quickly, employers, technology companies, education institutions and Government need to work much more closely together.

We need to understand how work is changing. Identify the capabilities people will need. And create opportunities for those capabilities to be developed through practice.

The TIP Alliance PLUS is one example of this approach where the Singapore government partners industry closely. I am very glad that Google is part of this. The objective is not simply to train people for a fixed set of jobs. It is to build a workforce that can keep learning and adapting as the jobs themselves change.

We therefore value partners like Google - not only for the technology they bring to Singapore. We value you for the capabilities you help build around that technology.

I would also like to touch on another point on why this launch matters.

As AI takes over more routine work, we should also pay attention to how expertise itself is formed. Some friction in work is wasteful and should disappear. But some friction is formative. It is where people practise, make mistakes, exercise judgement and build experience.

So as organisations automate more tasks, we should not only ask, "What can AI do?" but also: "If AI removes this task, where will the next generation learn the judgement that used to come from doing it?"

The goal should therefore not simply be more capable AI. It should be more capable people working with more capable AI.

Wearing my other hat in the healthcare ministry, healthcare is a very good example of this.

The opportunity is not simply to give every clinician an AI assistant. The bigger opportunity is to rethink how care is delivered - how information flows, how patients at greater risk are identified earlier, how care teams coordinate, and how clinicians spend less time on administrative work and more time exercising judgement and caring for patients.

And increasingly, as AI becomes more agentic, the unit of transformation shifts from the task to the workflow, and eventually to the entire care journey.

But none of this happens simply because a better model becomes available. It requires engineers working alongside domain experts, trusted data and interoperability, integration into existing systems, careful evaluation of whether the technology actually improves outcomes, and strong governance, security and accountability.

In other words, the real challenge is not simply building capable AI. It is building a capable system around AI.

The same principle applies across the economy and in different sectors.

The real value of AI does not come from inserting a model into an existing system. It comes from redesigning the system around what people and AI can now do together.

That is also the approach we are taking through Singapore's National AI Missions. We are bringing together technology, talent and domain expertise to tackle important challenges in financial services, healthcare, connectivity and advanced manufacturing.

But transformation cannot stop with a few national projects or large enterprises. We want more companies to move from pilots to deployment, and beyond that, from deploying individual AI tools to redesigning workflows and organisations around AI.

This is where proximity matters. When engineers sit closer to customers and real operational problems, they see constraints that are difficult to understand from afar. They learn faster. They iterate faster. And companies gain access not merely to technology, but to the engineering capability needed to make that technology work in practice.

That is the opportunity I hope the Singapore Engineering Center will help unlock, not just in Singapore, but in the region.

Not technology looking for a use case. But businesses and institutions bringing forward problems that matter - and engineers, domain experts and workers solving them together.

Ladies and gentlemen, AI will continue to advance rapidly. Models will become more powerful. Agents will become more capable. And technologies that seem extraordinary today will become increasingly commonplace tomorrow.

For Singapore, our enduring advantage cannot therefore come simply from possessing the latest technology. It must come from our ability to absorb, adapt and apply new technology continuously.

That means anchoring advanced capabilities here. Building deep expertise in our people. And diffusing those capabilities across our companies and institutions.

That is how we turn technological progress into lasting economic and societal advantage.

And that is why today's launch is an important step for Google and for Singapore.

The value of an Engineering Center should ultimately not be measured only by the size of the Center. It should also be measured by the capabilities it creates around it - in our engineers, our companies, our institutions, and our wider economy.

As AI becomes more capable, our task is not simply to build more capable machines. It is to build more capable people, more capable organisations and a more capable society.

That is the Singapore we want to build. And we look forward to working with Google to do so.

Congratulations once again on the launch of the Singapore Engineering Center.

Thank you.