Empowering Singapore's Small Businesses with GenAI Workforce Training Guide - Insights From ZDNet

Empowering Singapore’s Small Businesses with GenAI Workforce Training Guide - Insights From ZDNet

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A handbook has been released to help Singapore businesses navigate their adoption of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and acquire the necessary skillsets to support such initiatives.

Dubbed Generative AI for the Tech Workforce, the resource guide aims to assist local organizations, including small and midsize businesses (SMBs), looking to integrate the technology into their environment, said SGTech. The guide also will aid these companies in acquiring the skillsets and retraining to facilitate the transition, said the local technology trade association, which has more than 1,000 corporate members, including MNCs, SMBs, and startups.

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The resource guide was developed alongside SkillsFuture Singapore and AI Singapore, which are government agencies tasked with developing the country’s skills development programs and AI capabilities, respectively.

SGTech is a skills development partner under Singapore’s National AI Strategy 2.0, where it is “responsible for articulating job roles and skills requirements” across both technology and non-technology sectors to support GenAI.

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Put together based on inputs from 30 companies, the resource guide highlights three enterprise use cases for GenAI as well as the GenAI employee profiles and skillsets needed, including GenAI developers and solution providers.

One case study, for example, looks at how a global organization in the raw materials industry developed a system to ingest and classify documents across different departments in a bid to improve productivity. “The ability to incorporate information from all users meant everybody in the company was involved in training the model, not just the tech team. This accelerated the rate at which the large language model could learn, hence, delivering greater benefits to the company,” the SGTech guide noted.

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It added that applying GenAI here enabled the company to more quickly extract data and better focus on other activities, such as generating and acting on the data insights.

The resource guide also outlines three levels of GenAI tech talent profiles and the technical expertise required for each. For instance, GenAI solution providers are tasked with tapping the relevant large language models to fit specific use cases, while “power users” leverage GenAI for specialized tasks that require a greater understanding of prompt design and domain-specific knowledge.

Benjamin Mah, SGTech’s co-chair of talent steering committee, said: “The future of work relies on the flexibility of individuals and organizations to adopt technological advancements. This publication serves as a guide, directing professionals and enterprises toward a future where skills development seamlessly aligns with technological innovation.”

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Singapore last week released a draft governance framework on GenAI to address emerging issues, including incident reporting and content provenance. The draft document encompasses proposals from a discussion paper published last June, which identified six risks associated with GenAI, including hallucinations, copyright challenges , and embedded biases , and a framework on how these can be addressed.

The proposed GenAI governance framework also draws insights from previous initiatives, including a catalog on how to assess the safety of GenAI models and testing conducted via an evaluation sandbox .