Ong Ye Kung: Singapore Must Be Deliberate, Not Just Driven, on AI

For months, the conversation around artificial intelligence in Singapore has been dominated by investment numbers, company expansions, and the relentless march of new tools. But at NCS Impact 2026 earlier this month, Minister for Health and Coordinating Minister for Social Policies Ong Ye Kung stepped back from the metrics to ask a more fundamental question: where should AI actually fit into Singapore's society, and where should it not?

Speaking from a speech he emphasised was written without generative AI — "crafted with love, but with a bit of help from machines" — Ong laid out a framework for AI adoption that is deliberately sector-specific, human-centric, and resistant to the hype cycle. He rejected the notion that commercial momentum alone should dictate how the technology is deployed, particularly in safety-critical and trust-dependent environments like healthcare.

"We cannot charge ahead, driven solely by commercial considerations, even as recursive AI systems gain self-reinforcing intelligence, agency, and influence," Ong said. "Otherwise, I can't help but feel the machines just seem wiser than their makers."

The minister categorised AI's impact on jobs into three buckets: industries that will grow regardless (finance, energy, semiconductor manufacturing, healthcare); sectors where jobs hold but productivity can be improved (education, construction, hospitality, small and medium enterprises); and routine tasks facing genuine substitution (data collation, report preparation, driving). For each category, the government's response is different — from active labour market policies and SkillsFuture retraining through the newly formed Skills and Workforce Development Agency (SWDA), to regulatory guardrails in safety-critical contexts.

In healthcare specifically, Ong outlined a use-case approach that starts with clinical problems, not AI capabilities. "AI in healthcare should never be like the proverbial hammer looking for nails," he said. MOH has decided that for mammogram scans, AI can substitute one of two human readers — but not both — to maintain clinical skills and ensure human judgement remains central to patient care. The ministry is also developing SIMFONI, the Singapore Medical Foundation AI Model, which will be trained on local clinical guidelines and patient data, producing AI companions contextualised to Singapore's population rather than relying on models trained abroad.

Why it matters for Singapore: Ong's speech arrives against a backdrop of uneven AI adoption across the economy — the inaugural MOM report found that 71.5% of firms have yet to adopt AI, and only 3.8% have integrated it into core processes. That gap between ambition and reality makes the minister's call for deliberate deployment particularly timely. Rather than a land grab for AI use cases, Singapore's approach is becoming one of careful calibration: identifying where AI genuinely moves the needle, preserving human roles where trust and empathy are irreplaceable, and building the infrastructure — integrated health IT systems, national data frameworks, locally trained models — to support meaningful adoption. It is a characteristically Singaporean response to a global technological shift: methodical, pragmatic, and resistant to shortcuts.