Singapore's AI Upskilling Push Must Reach Frontline Workers, Experts Warn
Source: HRM Asia
As Singapore races to equip its workforce for an AI-driven economy, a significant gap is emerging: the frontline workers in logistics, operations, and manual roles are being left behind. Rachel Chen of J&T Express Singapore argues that while knowledge workers are rapidly adopting AI for.
As Singapore races to equip its workforce for an AI-driven economy, a significant gap is emerging: the frontline workers in logistics, operations, and manual roles are being left behind. Rachel Chen of J&T Express Singapore argues that while knowledge workers are rapidly adopting AI for drafting, analysis, and summarisation, the conversation has largely ignored the operational employees who will need a fundamentally different kind of AI fluency.
BCG's AI at Work 2025 report found that roughly half of frontline employees are regular AI users, yet only one in three say they have received adequate training. Employee confidence in AI jumps from 15% to 55% when leaders actively champion adoption, but only about one in four frontline workers report receiving that visible support. For a logistics employee, AI fluency means something very different from better prompting — it means reading system recommendations under time pressure and knowing when human judgment should override an automated decision.
The scale of the challenge is enormous. J&T Express's South-East Asia network processed over 7.66 billion parcels in 2025 alone — a 67.8% year-on-year surge — across 413 automated sorting machines. Around 55% of logistics roles are expected to be displaced or substantially redesigned as Industry 4.0 technologies take hold. Singapore's updated National AI Strategy, released in May 2026, explicitly includes logistics among the sectors targeted through catalytic AI projects, and from the second half of 2026, Singaporeans enrolling in selected SkillsFuture AI courses will receive six months of free access to premium AI tools.
Why it matters for Singapore: The success of Singapore's AI transformation will ultimately be measured not by how many knowledge workers use Copilot, but by whether the frontline workforce — the warehouse operators, delivery drivers, and service staff who make up a significant share of the economy — are brought along. Without targeted upskilling that redefines job roles around judgment and exception management rather than routine tasks, the AI divide could deepen existing workforce inequalities.