SAP to train more than 3,000 Singapore residents in business AI

Over the next three years, SAP plans to equip more than 3,000 Singapore Citizens and Permanent Residents with role-based business artificial intelligence skills. Unveiled on 5 August at the SAP NOW AI Tour Southeast Asia 2026, the newly launched AI-Bilingual Workforce Programme focuses on embedding AI capabilities into core functional areas, including finance, procurement, human resources, supply chain, and manufacturing.

Alongside this upskilling scheme, the technology vendor will conduct two years of dedicated industry workshops designed to guide organisations through identifying viable AI applications, evaluating their practicality, and crafting concrete deployment plans.

These combined efforts directly bolster Singapore’s National AI Impact Programme. Over that same three-year window, the national initiative seeks to build a talent pool of 100,000 AI-bilingual professionals while encouraging 10,000 enterprises to deepen their adoption of artificial intelligence.

Training linked to business roles

Under SAP’s framework, an AI-bilingual professional is defined as an individual who integrates deep expertise in a specific business function with the hands-on AI competencies required to refine daily workflows. Trainees will start by building foundational knowledge across AI principles, ethical considerations, prompt engineering, and SAP Business AI. From there, the curriculum shifts toward specialised operational applications, exploring how intelligence tools can enhance financial planning, sourcing, workforce management, logistics, and production operations.

Delivered alongside SAP partners, the instruction blends structured classroom sessions with continuous online learning. Enrollees will receive 12 months of access to the SAP learning platform, granting them training resources, cloud-based practice environments, ongoing support, and formal certification examinations.

This initiative expands upon SAP Skills University, which originally launched in Singapore in 2018. SAP reports that roughly 2,400 participants across more than 70 organisations have completed courses through the programme since its inception.

“Singapore’s AI ambitions depend on both people and enterprises being able to move confidently from experimentation to impact,” said Eileen Chua, Managing Director, SAP Singapore. “Through our AI-Bilingual Workforce Program, SAP is bringing together workforce skills, industry expertise and practical adoption support. This will help professionals apply AI in the functions they know best, while giving enterprises a clearer route to identify, deploy and scale AI use cases that deliver measurable value.”

Workshops will cover four sectors

To accelerate practical implementation, SAP’s Sector-Focused Business AI Workshops will cater to four key industries, namely advanced manufacturing, financial services, connectivity and logistics, and healthcare. During these sessions, SAP Business AI specialists and partner consultants will collaborate directly with client business and technology teams. Together, they will map potential artificial intelligence applications, evaluate technical feasibility, and construct detailed adoption roadmaps by leveraging SAP’s embedded AI and Autonomous Enterprise features.

Ultimately, the initiative aims to help businesses pinpoint target AI projects that address genuine operational friction, ensuring these solutions are fully prepared for integration into live business processes.

Fixed-scope packages for smaller businesses

Small and medium-sized enterprises can also access ready-to-launch software offerings delivered through SAP partners, complete with fixed pricing structures and defined project scopes.

The enterprise resource planning offering, known as the ERP Package, pairs an AI-ready cloud infrastructure with SAP Business AI across finance, procurement, sales, supply chain, and operational functions. In parallel, a dedicated HCM Package unites SAP SuccessFactors, payroll services, and SAP Joule AI to support human resources, payroll, and employee services. This human capital management solution relies on a managed delivery model designed to offer clients greater predictability throughout implementation.

Both offerings adhere to standardised delivery methods grounded in SAP Best Practices, an approach the company expects will minimise setup complexity and accelerate overall deployment schedules.

These new schemes build upon SAP’s long-standing investments within Singapore. The enterprise software firm established Southeast Asia’s first SAP Labs in the nation in 2022, followed by the opening of Asia’s first innovation centre for experience management in 2023. Further deepening its regional presence, SAP pledged S$12 million in 2024 to scale its Digital Innovation Accelerator and create specialised business AI tools for advanced manufacturing, financial services, along with travel and logistics.