Salesforce, the American cloud-based software company, has on Wednesday announced plans to invest $1 billion in Singapore over the next five years, to accelerate the nation’s digital transformation and Agentforce adoption.

Salesforce said in a statement that Singapore is an important growth market for Salesforce as businesses increasingly embrace Agentforce to unlock new opportunities.

It added that this investment underscores the firm’s support for Singapore’s National AI Strategy 2.0 and the nation’s vision as a driver of global AI innovation.

It is noted that spurred by a $6 trillion digital labor market, thousands of customers around the world are investing in Agentforce, the firm’s digital labor platform, to build and deploy agents that can reason, decide, act, and drive meaningful outcomes 24/7‌.

Singapore has been dealing with a slowing growth rate of the labor force, contributed by an aging population and declining birth rates.

Agentforce delivers Singapore an opportunity to rapidly expand its labor force in many key service and public sector roles.

This investment will help support Singapore enterprises as they build limitless digital workforces, bringing humans together with trusted autonomous Agentforce agents to unlock new levels of productivity, innovation, and growth.

As Agentforce adoption accelerates, it has the potential to drive significant impact‌ ‌across Singapore’s industries, startups, and the public sector‌, said the statement.

“Singapore welcomes Salesforce’s investment, which will boost our ongoing efforts to build a vibrant hub for artificial intelligence (AI) innovation and adoption across our economy,

“Salesforce’s initiatives in AI research and workforce development will strengthen our ecosystem by catalysing innovation for key industries and corporates based in Singapore,” said Jermaine Loy, Managing Director of the Singapore Economic Development Board.

Meanwhile, Marc Benioff, Chair and Chief Executive Officer of Salesforce, said they are in an incredible new era of digital labor where every business will be transformed by autonomous agents that augment the work of humans, revolutionizing productivity and enabling every company to scale without limit.

“Singapore is at the forefront of this shift, and as the world’s largest provider of digital labor through our Agentforce platform, Salesforce is thrilled to expand our work with the business community and our longtime partners in the region to drive innovation, productivity and growth,” he added.

It is noted that Salesforce has been investing in Singapore for nearly two decades and has established a thriving customer base and partner ecosystem in the region.

Singapore also plays a crucial role in driving Agentforce innovation for Salesforce.

In 2019, Salesforce expanded its AI Research team internationally, choosing Singapore as its first overseas AI Research hub location.

Since then, the hub has significantly contributed to the global development of AI for the industry.

This includes development of industry leading models such as multimodal language-vision foundation models (BLIP), and time-series foundation models (Moirai).

The AI Research hub has contributed to product innovations such as AIOps Agents that help Salesforce achieve highest levels of site availability and in-house code large language models (LLMs) for helping customers optimize their code for performance.

This continued investment will not only drive Agentforce innovation through the research hub but also support Salesforce’s expanding customer base in the region, said the statement.

Salesforce is also expanding its services on Hyperforce, the firm’s next-generation platform architecture, in Singapore to provide data residency for data cloud, Agentforce, and unified marketing applications (UMA) by next month.

This will help Singapore businesses to capitalize on Salesforce’s Agentforce and data offerings while adhering to local data residency regulations, an imperative for regional and global organizations in regulated industries such as the government, financial services or telecommunications.

The firm is also refreshing its Singapore office with a new space to enable customers to transform their workforce with digital labor.

The space will include Agentforce activations space and a demo pod to provide hands-on experience building and deploying autonomous AI agents through Agentforce.

The new space will also be used for upskilling initiatives for the ecosystem of partners and the community.

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