Singapore Ranks Sixth Globally in AI Hiring Strength, Leads in Talent Concentration

Singapore punches well above its weight class when it comes to AI talent. A new global study from Employer of Record platform Teamed puts the city-state sixth worldwide in AI hiring strength — ahead of countries with much larger populations — and second only to Israel in the concentration of AI professionals within its workforce. The numbers confirm what anyone watching Singapore's tech ecosystem already suspects: the country has built a remarkably dense cluster of AI expertise for a market of under six million people.

The AI Talent Score ranks Singapore at 8.34 out of 10, trailing the United States (9.18), India (9.03), Canada (8.89), the United Kingdom (8.85), and Israel (8.43). The score aggregates six indicators: AI startup investment, generative AI investment, a relative AI hiring index, AI job postings, AI talent concentration, and AI patents. On talent concentration specifically — the share of AI professionals in the overall workforce — Singapore scored 1.95, second globally behind only Israel's 2.27.

The findings arrive at a moment when AI hiring has become a global headache. Companies everywhere are struggling to find specialised talent locally, and the competition for the people who can build and deploy AI systems has intensified dramatically over the past eighteen months. Tom Price-Daniel, co-founder of Teamed, pointed out that international hiring widens the pool but introduces its own complexity around payroll, tax, and benefits compliance across jurisdictions.

For Singapore, the ranking reflects years of deliberate policy work. Programmes like SkillsFuture, the National AI Strategy's talent development track, university AI research centres at NUS and NTU, and initiatives by AI Singapore have all contributed to building a pipeline that now produces measurable density. The challenge ahead is maintaining that lead as other markets wake up to the same talent urgency and as global demand for AI professionals shows no sign of easing.

Why it matters for Singapore: Talent density is a self-reinforcing advantage. The more AI professionals cluster in Singapore, the more attractive the country becomes for companies building AI teams — and the more valuable the ecosystem becomes for everyone in it. But the same ranking that celebrates Singapore's strength also signals vulnerability: with AI talent so concentrated, any shift in global hiring patterns or remote-work dynamics could have outsized effects on the local market. The playbook now is to deepen the pipeline, not just celebrate the numbers.