State of AI in Singapore vs. Switzerland: Singapore’s sprint and what comes next

According to adesso's GenAI Impact Report 2026, Swiss companies are still building their first AI strategies, while Singapore has turned generative AI into a national project with government-backed compute, a National AI Council chaired by the Prime Minister, and three-quarters of businesses already planning to deploy autonomous AI agents. Looking at Switzerland side by side with Singapore offers a useful mirror for where Singapore stands today and what the next phase of AI adoption will demand.

Singapore has spent the last two years turning GenAI from pilot projects into national infrastructure. Switzerland, by contrast, is progressing through a slower, company-by-company journey. For AI and digital leaders in Singapore, this contrast shows both how far the local ecosystem has come and where the harder work still lies.

In Switzerland, AI adoption has been steady but cautious. The share of companies rating themselves well or very well prepared for GenAI rose from 31 percent to 39 percent over the past year, according to adesso's GenAI Impact Report Switzerland. That is real progress, but it is still early-stage maturity.

Singapore's public sector chose a different path. Budget 2026 established a National AI Council chaired by Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, backed by:

• S$1 billion in AI-related research funding over five years
• A dedicated Enterprise Compute Initiative that gives SMEs subsidised access to AI infrastructure

On the corporate side, adoption among larger Singaporean enterprises has climbed past 60 percent, and more than 70 international companies have opened AI Centres of Excellence in the city-state.

In short, Singapore is pursuing a coordinated, top-down push where AI is treated as critical national infrastructure. Switzerland, with its more decentralised, federal and corporate structure, does not have an equivalent. For organisations in Singapore, this top-down momentum is a clear advantage, but it also raises expectations about how quickly strategy and governance need to mature.

adesso's data for Switzerland shows a pattern that will look familiar even in Singapore: enthusiasm for GenAI, followed by slower movement on strategy.

In Switzerland, 67 percent of managers say GenAI is a major opportunity for their business model, and three in four report saving at least an hour a week thanks to the technology. Yet only 50 percent of Swiss companies have developed an actual AI strategy, and a quarter of those still focus mainly on classic AI rather than GenAI. Productivity gains are real, but long-term direction is less clear.

Based on my market observations, Singapore is ahead of many markets, including Switzerland, but most organisations here are still in the "productivity and pilot" phase rather than the "business model and process transformation" phase.

If you are leading AI initiatives in Singapore, that is the frontier: moving from AI that makes existing processes faster to AI that reshapes how the organisation fundamentally works and creates value.

At adesso, we talk about the Agentic Era. This is a phase where AI moves beyond assisting humans to acting as autonomous software agents that can take decisions and execute tasks within defined boundaries. These agents orchestrate workflows, systems and data with far less manual intervention.

Here, the contrast between Switzerland and Singapore is sharp:

• In Switzerland, just 11 percent of companies use AI agents productively today, while 39 percent are still evaluating potential use cases.
• In Singapore, 72 percent of businesses plan to deploy agentic AI across multiple operational areas within two years, up from just 15 percent today.

For Singapore, this is not a distant future scenario. It is a near-term shift in how organisations will run operations, serve customers and manage risk.

Yet the governance picture is far less mature:

• Only 14 percent of Singapore leaders describe their agentic AI governance as mature, even below the 21 percent global average.

The signal is clear: Singapore is preparing to scale agentic AI faster than most markets, but governance and control frameworks are still catching up.

If you are looking ahead to agentic AI in your organisation, three questions become critical:

1. Scope: Where will autonomous agents operate, and where will you insist on human decision points?

2. Boundaries: What rules, constraints and escalation paths will govern agent behaviour?

3. Accountability: How will you audit, explain and own the decisions these agents make?

Switzerland's slower move towards agentic AI buys more time to work through these questions. Singapore's speed makes them urgent.

There is one area where Singapore and Switzerland converge strongly: sovereignty and control over AI infrastructure.

In Switzerland, adesso's research found that:

• 59 percent of companies prefer GenAI applications "made in Europe"
• 75 percent support stronger regulation of AI tools like ChatGPT

The driver is a mix of European data protection sensibilities and a desire for digital sovereignty: control over where data is processed and which providers run critical infrastructure.

Singapore's picture is similar, but framed through its own sovereign AI ambitions:

• 77 percent of Singapore businesses say data residency and in-region compute are important to their strategic planning
• 57 percent are concerned about over-reliance on foreign AI technology

For organisations in Singapore, this raises a practical challenge:

How do we combine world-class AI capabilities with sovereign infrastructure, trusted data control and resilience against geopolitical shocks? Europe's push for digital sovereignty and "made in Europe" AI is one response. Singapore's approach, building national AI infrastructure and emphasising in-region compute, is another. The comparison highlights that sovereignty is no longer a purely government issue; it is a core strategic concern for boards, CIOs and AI leaders.

Singapore has the momentum. The question now is how you turn it into durable advantage.

If you are working on your AI roadmap in Singapore, make it concrete: move beyond “AI for efficiency” into genuine process and business model change, define where and how autonomous agents will operate in the next two years, and ensure your data and infrastructure choices reflect sovereignty and resilience, not just technical capability.

At adesso, we work with organisations to make exactly these decisions and turn GenAI and agentic AI into production-grade, sovereign solutions. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us.