Salesforce invests $1 bil in SG, collaborates with Singapore Airlines | News

Salesforce is deepening its ties with Singapore with a planned $1 billion investment into the city state over the next five years to accelerate its digital transformation. The focus of the investment is in part to hasten the adoption of Agentforce, Salesforce’s autonomous and customisable AI agent solution, which is expected to play a key role in the service and public sector, particularly relevant at a time of slow pace of growth in the labour force, an aging population and declining birth rates.  

Jermaine Loy, MD 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. Salesforce’s initiatives in AI research and workforce development will strengthen our ecosystem by catalysing innovation for key industries and corporates based in Singapore.”

In addition, the CRM company announced a collaboration with national carrier Singapore Airlines (SIA) which will cover AI-powered customer service applications as well as solutions geared at the airlines industry. SIA will use Agentforce to streamline its customer service operations. Salesforce’s Einstein generative AI capabilities will help SIA summarise a customer’s previous interactions with the airline, reducing response times and resulting in more efficient and proactive service. Human representatives at SIA will thus be able to focus to a greater extent on enhanced and personalised attention in each interaction with the airline’s customers. 

Goh Choon Phong, CEO at Singapore Airlines highlighted the national carrier’s adoption of generative AI powered solutions and said, “We have been developing over 250 use cases over the last 18 months and implementing around 50 initiatives across our end-to-end operations.”

SIA and Salesforce also plan to co-develop AI solutions for the wider airlines industry at the Salesforce AI Research hub in Singapore.

 Salesforce has a long history of investments in Singapore and counts Grab, FairPrice Group, M1 and Prism+ among its collaborators. Having data residency within Singapore for its solutions will help Salesforce adhere to local regulations, an imperative for regional and global organisations in regulated industries such as the government, financial services or telecommunications. 

Salesforce recently expanded its partnership with Google around building and deploying AI solutions for customer service.