SAP Labs, under Germany-headquartered tech giant SAP, will collaborate with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) of Singapore to hire and train artificial intelligence (AI) scientists and machine learning engineers, expanding its role as an engineering hub for enterprise AI and supporting Singapore’s AI development plans.

The announcement was made on Friday at SAP d-com Singapore 2026, the company’s annual developer conference in Singapore. The event was attended by Senior Minister of State Tan Kiat How from the Ministry of Digital Development and Information and the Ministry of Health.

Under IMDA’s TechSkills Accelerator (TeSA) initiative, SAP Labs East Asia Singapore, formerly known as SAP Labs Singapore, will hire and train 50 graduates and mid-career professionals over the next three years. Participants will work on development areas including generative AI, model orchestration and enterprise AI agents. The trainees will take part in a 12-month training and mentorship program and may also undertake rotations or short-term placements at SAP Labs locations in Germany, the United States, and India.

The program comes as SAP Labs East Asia Singapore reaches a milestone in its expansion. Since committing in 2023 to grow its AI talent pool, the Singapore team has increased to nearly 400 engineers, tripling in size. More than 90  percent of its AI workforce consists of local hires, including graduates from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU).

SAP Labs East Asia Singapore has also contributed to the development of enterprise AI technologies within SAP’s global cloud applications, including AI agents embedded in core systems. Launched in 2022 in partnership with the Economic Development Board (EDB), the lab has filed close to 160 patents for AI innovations developed in Singapore, including 57 over the past three years.

The SAP Business AI product engineering team, based at SAP Labs East Asia Singapore, is involved in developing AI capabilities for SAP applications. These include scenarios for SAP S/4HANA, Intelligent Spend and Business Networks (ISBN), and SAP SuccessFactors to support information retrieval, navigation, and data extraction processes.

Other developments include generative AI features within SAP SuccessFactors aimed at improving employee productivity, such as generating compensation insights and career insights. The team has also introduced capabilities for Document AI, including document information extraction, instant learning features, and support for additional document types, languages, and file formats.

SAP stated that these AI systems are designed for enterprise environments and integrated directly into SAP platforms to meet reliability, security, and compliance requirements. More than 34,000 customers worldwide use SAP Business AI capabilities embedded across the company’s cloud portfolio.

SAP Labs East Asia Singapore also continues to collaborate with workforce development programs and universities. In March 2025, SAP announced a partnership with the National University of Singapore under the Industrial Postgraduate Program (IPP), supported by the Economic Development Board. The initiative aims to recruit and train nine researchers from local universities for the lab’s AI team by 2030, with three researchers already onboarded.

The Singapore lab will continue to serve as one of SAP’s AI development hubs, focusing on talent development and AI research.

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