A new report from HubSpot, the customer platform for scaling businesses, has found that despite an ongoing focus on artificial intelligence (AI) growth and adoption in Singapore, only 27 percent of local organizations have officially implemented AI or AI-enhanced tools to support employees with their work.
HubSpot said in a statement on Wednesday that while organizational-wide adoption of AI may be low, individual use of AI is high, with over half (51 percent) of business leaders in Singapore reportedly using AI for their own work.
This suggests that more employees might also be personally utilizing AI tools.
However, the lack of visibility of AI use across teams has raised concerns for a majority (82 percent) of business leaders.
Collectively, these factors may hinder the ability of Singapore organizations to fully leverage the potential of AI.
“While AI holds considerable potential to positively transform how businesses market to, sell to, and service customers, our research suggests that ongoing gaps between AI strategies and operational realities are impacting how companies use AI,” said Dan Bognar, Vice President and Managing Director, JPAC at HubSpot.
HubSpot’s findings also indicated that business leaders capable of effectively tracking and measuring the impact of AI are much more likely to see tangible business benefits emerge on both company and employee levels.
The research suggested a range of benefits including increased productivity (88 percent) and increased efficiency (76 percent) among employees, with nearly two thirds (61 percent) also reporting higher levels of employee well-being.
From a business standpoint, benefits include increased revenue (75 percent), improved customer satisfaction (75 percent), the ability to generate better leads (60 percent), as well as a reduction of overall costs (46 percent).
In contrast, those without AI measurement systems tend to see much smaller benefits.
They report increased productivity (75 percent) and efficiency (74 percent), improved employee well-being (43 percent), higher revenue (48 percent), better customer satisfaction (48 percent), improved lead generation (44 percent), and reduced costs (31 percent).
However, measuring the impact of AI continues to be a significant challenge.
Close to half of Singapore business leaders surveyed cited a lack of success metrics (49 percent), relevant talent and skill sets (48 percent), and visibility of AI use (45 percent) as the top three obstacles faced when measuring the impact of their AI efforts, which could impact the effectiveness of any measurement tools.
Almost all (97 percent) Singapore business leaders are planning to invest in AI tools over the next 12 months, with the average investment amount being approximately S$32,000 ($23,897).
As AI adoption grows, so will the demand for specialized AI-related roles.
A Head of AI role that steers organizational use of AI is increasingly more commonplace, and the wide range of use cases means this role may be filled by business leaders in traditionally non-tech functions such as sales, customer service, and marketing, said the research.
Meanwhile, nine in ten (90 percent) business leaders in Singapore are expecting their organization to hire more roles to support AI rollout and implementation.
This aligns with research from LinkedIn that identifies Singapore as one of the fastest growing markets for AI talent in Asia Pacific in recent years.
The Singapore government is also spearheading efforts to cultivate a rich pipeline of AI talent, having announced plans to triple the number of local AI practitioners to 15,000.
While three quarters (75 percent) of business leaders surveyed are expecting their organization to employ a Head of AI in the next 12 months, there appears to be a growing recognition of the need to adapt existing workforces for an AI economy.
According to the research, as AI use matures, businesses will begin to identify opportunities for automation, empowering AI to undertake labor intensive tasks while enabling the human workforce to use this new freed capacity to take on more strategic work.
This is likely to have a positive impact on job satisfaction and employee well-being.
Nearly nine in ten (87 percent) Singapore business leaders have plans to restructure their workforce as AI features more frequently in the workplace.
“The best results are derived from a combination of AI capabilities and human ingenuity,” said Bognar.
“The AI era should be viewed as an opportunity for organizations to reskill or upskill their workforce, tapping relevant initiatives such as SkillsFuture Singapore to meet increasing demand for AI skills,
“This is a critical step that empowers employees not only to undertake other strategic tasks, but also to effectively leverage the power of AI to drive better business outcomes,” he added.
Meanwhile, nearly four in ten (38 percent) business leaders in Singapore that use AI to search say they have reduced their use of traditional search engines like Google or Bing to obtain their information.
Beyond this, nearly nine in ten (89 percent) say AI chat models have become their default search function compared to traditional search.
This is only set to increase with more than nine in ten (93 percent) business leaders expecting their use of AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity to increase over the next 12 months.
“In the coming years, AI will become so integrated in how we think of technology that it will no longer be referred to as ‘AI-powered’,
“We are already seeing this happening with search, which is now adapting itself to the evolving needs of users,” Bognar said.