Only 1 in 10 Singapore Firms Have Redesigned Work Around AI, ServiceNow Finds

Singapore's AI headlines keep getting more impressive — agentic AI use has more than doubled in a year and AI budgets are climbing at triple-digit rates. But a new ServiceNow survey suggests the adoption numbers are flattering the underlying reality: only one in 10 Singapore enterprises has actually redesigned its work processes so that AI can carry tasks across an entire workflow.

The Enterprise AI Maturity Index, based on responses from 200 senior leaders in Singapore as part of a 19-country study of 4,500 executives, found 51% of companies now use agentic AI — up from 22% in 2025. Yet about a third of respondents say AI is mainly helping employees with day-to-day work, and 18% report no meaningful progress with advanced AI at all. "Adoption and transformation are not the same thing," said CK Tan, ServiceNow's Asia-Pacific and Japan innovation officer.

The gap between spending and structural change is stark. Singapore respondents said AI budgets had risen 108% from a year earlier and now eat up 15.4% of IT spending, with another 83% increase expected next year. Singapore's overall AI maturity score did climb to 53 out of 100 from 34 in 2025 — above the global average of 51 — with the country ahead of peers on replacing legacy systems, managing AI risk and preparing workers. Its weaker spot was embedding AI into daily operations, which is exactly where companies decide which tasks stay human, which get automated, and how work passes between the two.

The report's practical illustration is Standard Chartered, which walked through its staff-onboarding process to find where human judgment was essential and where technology could take over, then reshaped roles and workflows around that. The bank expects the effort to cut the time hiring managers spend on onboarding by 35% and lift productivity across its HR teams by roughly 20%. It is a reminder that the payoff from AI tends to come not from layering tools onto existing habits, but from reorganising how work actually moves.

Why it matters for Singapore: As the government pushes enterprises toward deeper AI adoption through national strategy and capability programmes, this survey flags the real bottleneck — not access to models but redesign of work itself. For Singaporean companies, the message is that the competitive edge comes from rethinking processes, not just buying more AI. With budgets already growing quickly, the question becomes whether firms invest that money in incremental automation or in the harder work of restructuring operations, which is where the survey suggests the durable gains lie.