OpenAI and Enterprise Singapore are partnering to deliver three free virtual workshops across October and November, designed to help local small and medium-sized enterprises alongside micro-entrepreneurs apply ChatGPT to sales, marketing, customer engagement and broader business operations. Organised under the title Put AI to Work, the sessions form part of Enterprise Singapore’s Driving Entrepreneurship with AI series. OpenAI’s technical success team will steer the training through practical demonstrations, interactive exercises and dedicated question-and-answer segments, enabling attendees to test ChatGPT on genuine operational challenges drawn directly from their own commercial ventures.
The initiative also sits within the broader OpenAI for Singapore programme. Through this framework, the company has pledged to broaden public access to artificial intelligence while helping individuals and commercial enterprises acquire the skills required to navigate its tools.
Workshops progress from individual tasks to repeatable processes
The curriculum follows a progressive structure that shifts participants from single operational tasks towards scalable business routines. In the inaugural session, Meet your AI Team, business owners will explore research, financial analysis, sales preparation and customer engagement, starting by constructing a workflow around an active company task. The second session, Create demand, focuses on identifying commercial opportunities, preparing outreach communications, generating marketing content, structuring digital campaigns and enhancing customer dialogues. Concluding the series, Scale what works examines multi-step procedures, instructing participants on how to structure connected workflows, deploy an agent for more intricate assignments and refine successful processes so they remain functional well after the programme concludes.
Across the full three-part series, core subject matter encompasses sales intelligence, customer outreach, content creation, digital marketing campaigns, customer service and client retention. Attendees will simultaneously be introduced to specialised platform tools, including ChatGPT Work, Image Generation and related features.
OpenAI also intends to incorporate GPT-6 Astra into the practical sessions. According to the company, this latest model is built to manage more complex, multi-step assignments, ranging from customer research and business data analysis to the production of diverse marketing assets. Discussing the rollout, Jon Sugihara, Head of AI Success Engineering for APAC at OpenAI, noted that while many small firms have already adopted tools like ChatGPT, they are still discovering how to use them to maximum effect. He highlighted that the workshops are designed to help owners take an existing business task, learn by working directly with the software and leave with a functional workflow that can be continuously refined.
AI use among Singapore SMEs has increased
This educational push arrives alongside a marked rise in local technological uptake. Figures from the Infocomm Media Development Authority, cited by OpenAI, indicate that AI adoption among Singapore SMEs increased from 4.2% in 2023 to 14.5% in 2024, during a period when the digital economy contributed 18.6% of national gross domestic product. Furthermore, internal OpenAI statistics from July 2026 establish Singapore among the world’s foremost markets for weekly ChatGPT engagement on a per-capita basis, with nearly half of classified consumer messages relating to employment.
The training initiative seeks to turn such widespread day-to-day engagement into formalised operational routines, reflecting real-world examples highlighted by OpenAI such as Happy Life, a family-run neighbourhood retailer located at Kampung Admiralty. Faced with migrating to a fresh point-of-sale system, shop operator Lin Enqi turned to ChatGPT to categorise more than 8,000 retail products and format the accompanying data. While she calculated that processing the inventory manually would have demanded more than five days, the software allowed her to complete the entire overhaul within two. Her participation in a separate ChatGPT workshop subsequently prompted her to explore how the tool could support wider customer outreach and improve her assessment of marketing performance.
Geoffrey Yeo, Assistant Managing Director for Capabilities, Product and Policy at Enterprise Singapore, emphasised the economic intent behind expanding local competencies. He said, “Through this strategic collaboration with OpenAI, EnterpriseSG aims to deepen AI capabilities and adoption across our local business ecosystem. The workshops are designed to equip our enterprises, especially small businesses, with practical AI tools and frameworks to improve productivity, drive efficiencies and unlock growth in an increasingly AI-driven economy.”
The three virtual sessions are open to micro-entrepreneurs and SMEs from any industry, with no technical expertise or coding background needed to participate. While the workshops will run across October and November 2026 with additional logistical details to follow, prospective participants must submit their registration of interest by 22 September.
