Josephine Teo

Josephine Teo is Singapore’s Minister for Digital Development and Information and Minister-in-charge of Cybersecurity & Smart Nation Group. Her AI policy work includes launching the AI Verify Foundation’s Global AI Assurance Pilot in February 2025 and promoting training for both specialist practitioners and workers using AI in their existing professions.[3][4][5]

At the SCS Tech3 Forum on 20 August 2026, Teo argued that Singapore should build on existing strengths rather than compete by outspending larger countries. She described initial National AI Missions focused on advanced manufacturing, finance, healthcare and connectivity, linking those choices to maintaining economic relevance and good jobs.[5]

That approach followed an earlier strategy refresh. In her Latent Space interview published on 19 October 2024, Teo credited RAISE participants—primarily Singaporeans working in the United States—with sharpening priorities and encouraging greater ambition before the December 2023 refresh. She described its purpose as “AI for the public good, for Singapore and the world”: applications developed and scaled in Singapore could also contribute elsewhere.[1]

Teo explained the collective decision to rename the Ministry of Communications and Information around digital development through an emphasis on technology’s effects on society and communities. Her account connected economic development with social cohesion, government service delivery and digital security, including whether people of different ages and backgrounds could benefit from technology.[1]

In 2024, Teo distinguished AI creators, practitioners such as data scientists and machine learning engineers, and a broad base of users. By February 2026, she said this framework had evolved: “The AI talent ecosystem is much richer than that.” She used Changi Airport’s interconnected terminals and specialist workforce, including horticultural experts, to explain why integration and domain expertise matter alongside individual technical capabilities. She applied the analogy to interactions among AI-transformed industries.[1][6]

In her 7 March 2025 parliamentary speech, Teo reiterated an ambition to expand the AI practitioner pool from under 5,000 to 15,000 in about five years. She estimated that it had grown by nearly 25% in the preceding year or so. She announced more company-led training under IMDA’s TechSkills Accelerator and plans to explore expanding the AI Apprenticeship Programme with AI Singapore.[4]

Teo illustrated access to AI careers through her conversation with Seow Yuxin, who studied business and began her career in regional e-commerce operations. After seeing her husband and brother-in-law undertake the AI Apprenticeship Programme, Yuxin enrolled and subsequently moved into a role delivering AI and data-driven solutions. Teo presented her transition as an example of entering the field without a STEM background.[4]

Teo distinguishes widespread AI literacy from universal coding education or specialist engineering. In 2024, she left the question of whether everyone should learn coding unresolved. In August 2026, she advocated AI bilingualism, combining professional knowledge with AI skills, and announced AI fluency programmes with the Singapore Academy of Law and Singapore Corporate Counsel Association. Their respective programmes support practising lawyers and in-house legal professionals through structured training, hands-on learning and peer support.[1][5]

Her enterprise agenda also extends to changing business models. In August 2026, she welcomed PwC as the fourth partner in IMDA’s Digital Leaders Acceleration Bootcamp, alongside BCG, EY-Parthenon and IBM. She cited cold-chain logistics provider Aeris Dynamics, which had developed an AI-enabled fulfilment platform and was exploring commercialising it for other logistics providers, as an example of creating value for a new category of customers.[5]

Teo’s assurance agenda emphasises practical testing. In 2024, she explained that AI Verify’s origins in classical AI left generative AI needing different tools, including red teaming and benchmarking. She launched the Global AI Assurance Pilot in February 2025 to promote generative-model testing practices. In February 2026, she argued that aggregators distributing AI tools should invest in testing and reliability assurance, comparing their responsibility to IKEA’s testing of products that customers assemble themselves.[1][4][6]

In the 2024 interview, Teo argued that government experience using AI would help it design better guardrails. She described broader developer guidelines at that time as largely voluntary, including transparency about data sources and intended uses, and cautioned that regulation without clear desired outcomes could be counterproductive. She separately defended election-specific restrictions on realistic synthetic depictions of things a person had never said or done, arguing that political discourse must rest on facts.[1]

Teo also explained a cloud-first hybrid approach to government infrastructure: suitable workloads could benefit from cloud flexibility and providers’ security architecture, while others would remain on premises. Moving suitable systems to the cloud could concentrate protective resources on a smaller remaining set. She said government AI workloads would be approached similarly and that Singapore’s growing AI activity would require some workloads to be hosted elsewhere, with latency needs helping determine which should remain local.[1]

For public-sector adoption, Teo highlighted officers using retrieval-augmented generation over internal memos. Her example was a newer tax officer finding precedents for an appeal more quickly while still needing to understand why earlier decisions were made. She described this work as early-stage in 2024. In February 2026, she reported more than 1,000 officer-built bots, while acknowledging that their quality varied.[1][6]

Before her digital portfolio, Teo served as Minister for Manpower from May 2018 to May 2021. She has been a member of Parliament since 2006 and previously served in the Prime Minister’s Office and the Finance, Transport, Foreign Affairs and Home Affairs ministries. Her official biography records tripartite consensus during her Manpower tenure on a ten-year roadmap to raise retirement and reemployment ages, and her chairing of the Changi 2036 Steering Committee while Senior Minister of State for Transport.[2]

Her earlier Manpower work supplies context for her interest in technology-assisted career transitions. In 2024, Teo recalled discussions with US recruitment firms about using databases of observed career paths to map possible routes into new work. She stressed that a transition may require intermediate steps. She distinguished that planning capability from retrieving job-transformation guidance, which could describe a possible destination without showing an individual route to it.[1]

Teo’s earlier roles also included Assistant Secretary-General of the National Trades Union Congress and chief executive of Business China. She graduated from the National University of Singapore and obtained a master’s degree in economics from the London School of Economics on an Economic Development Board scholarship.[2]