Salesforce to invest US$1 billion in Singapore over five years

• Investment supports Singapore’s National AI Strategy 2.0
• The investment will enable Singapore enterprises to build limitless digital workforces

Salesforce has announced plans to invest US$1 billion (RM4.4 billion) in Singapore over the next five years, reaffirming its commitment to accelerating the nation’s digital transformation and Agentforce adoption. In a statement, the company highlighted Singapore as an important growth market as businesses increasingly embrace Agentforce to unlock new opportunities. This investment underscores Salesforce’s support for Singapore’s National AI Strategy 2.0 and the nation’s vision as a global AI innovation hub.

Spurred by a US$6 trillion (RM27 trillion) digital labour market, thousands of customers worldwide are investing in Agentforce, Salesforce’s digital labour platform to build and deploy agents that can reason, decide, act, and drive meaningful outcomes 24/7. Singapore has been grappling with a slowing labour force growth rate, driven by an ageing population and declining birth rates. Agentforce offers Singapore a chance to rapidly expand its workforce across key service and public sector roles.

This investment will help Singaporean enterprises build limitless digital workforces, uniting humans with trusted autonomous Agentforce agents to unlock new levels of productivity, innovation, and growth. As Agentforce adoption accelerates, it has the potential to drive significant impact across Singapore’s industries, startups, and public sector.

Jermaine Loy, managing director of the Singapore Economic Development Board, said: “Singapore welcomes Salesforce’s investment, which will boost our ongoing efforts to build a vibrant hub for AI innovation and adoption across our economy. Salesforce’s initiatives in AI research and workforce development will strengthen our ecosystem by catalysing innovation for key industries and corporates based in Singapore.”

“We are in an incredible new era of digital labour where every business will be transformed by autonomous agents that augment human work, revolutionising productivity and enabling every company to scale without limits,” said Marc Benioff (pic), chair and CEO of Salesforce. He added that Singapore is at the forefront of this shift, and as the largest provider of digital labour through its Agentforce platform, Salesforce is thrilled to expand its work with the business community and its long-time partners in the region to drive innovation, productivity, and growth.

Salesforce has been investing in Singapore for nearly two decades, building a thriving customer base and partner ecosystem in the region. Its customers include industry leaders such as Singapore Airlines, Grab, M1, FairPrice Group, Ocean Network Express, and PRISM+, who use Salesforce AI technologies to drive efficiency, enhance customer experiences, and unlock new revenue streams.

Singapore plays a crucial role in driving Agentforce innovation for Salesforce. In 2019, the company expanded its AI Research team internationally, choosing Singapore as its first overseas AI Research hub. Since then, the hub has significantly contributed to the global development of AI for the industry. This includes the development of industry-leading models such as multimodal language-vision foundation models and time-series foundation models (Moirai). The AI Research hub has also contributed to product innovations such as AIOps Agents, which help Salesforce achieve the highest levels of site availability, and in-house code LLMs that assist customers in optimising their code for performance. Their work has resulted in the publication of over 100 research papers and patents.

This continued investment will not only drive Agentforce innovation through the research hub but also support Salesforce’s expanding customer base in the region.

Notably, Singapore Airlines and Salesforce recently announced that the airline is integrating Agentforce, Einstein in Service Cloud, and Data Cloud into its customer case management system to deliver more consistent and personalised service. Additionally, the two companies plan to co-develop AI solutions for airlines at the Salesforce AI Research hub in Singapore, aiming to deliver greater value and new benefits to the industry.