Latest initiative accelerates development of enterprise-grade AI while supporting national skills growth.
Singapore — March 13, 2026 — SAP Labs today announced that it will partner with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) to hire and train AI scientists and Machine Learning engineers, deepening its role as a global engineering hub for enterprise artificial intelligence and reaffirming its support for Singapore’s AI ambitions. SAP Labs East Asia Singapore has already been contributing to SAP global AI innovation including its first set of enterprise AI agents embedded within SAP’s core cloud applications.
The announcement was made today at SAP d-com Singapore 2026, the company’s local annual developer conference, with Guest-of-Honor Mr. Tan Kiat How, Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Digital Development and Information and Ministry of Health, in attendance.
Through IMDA’s TechSkills Accelerator (TeSA) initiative, SAP Labs East Asia Singapore (formerly known as SAP Labs Singapore) will hire and train 50 graduates and mid-career professionals over the next three years to work on high-priority development tracks spanning generative AI, model orchestration and enterprise AI agents. Trainees undergoing this 12-month structured training and mentorship programme, will also have the opportunity for rotations or short-term placements at other SAP Labs in countries such as Germany, United States, and India.
This announcement comes as SAP Labs East Asia Singapore surpasses a major milestone in its growth journey. Since committing in 2023 to expand its local AI talent pool, the Singapore team has tripled in size by growing to almost 400 engineers. Today, more than 90% of its AI workforce comprises local hires from universities including the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU).
Manik Saha, Managing Director, SAP Labs East Asia, added, “Our expanded AI investment in Singapore is a cornerstone of SAP’s global strategy to accelerate enterprise AI innovation. Since 2023 we have committed to fostering AI talent and career opportunities, and have continued to invest in building one of SAP’s most important AI talent hubs. Today, our teams in Singapore are developing foundational generative, agentic, and multimodal AI capabilities that are being embedded across SAP’s core solutions worldwide. These investments, combined with Singapore’s deep talent pipeline and strong national AI agenda, enable us to build mission critical AI systems at scale and position Singapore as a strategic engine for SAP’s long-term AI product roadmap.”
Made in Singapore AI agents delivering global business impact
Launched in 2022 in partnership with the Economic Development Board (EDB), SAP Labs East Asia Singapore has filed close to 160 patents for AI innovations developed locally, including 57 in the past three years alone.
The SAP Business AI product engineering team, which is part of SAP Labs East Asia Singapore, is leading the development and delivery of numerous AI capabilities.
Examples include:
- Numerous Joule scenarios for SAP S/4HANA, Intelligent Spend and Business Networks (ISBN) and SAP SuccessFactors to fast track the execution of various information retrieval, navigational and information extraction business processes.
- Various embedded Generative AI capabilities in SAP SuccessFactors to achieve productivity gains for employees, such as compensation insights generation, goals generation, or career insights generation.
- New capabilities for Document AI, including Document Information Extraction, Instant Learning, support for shipping documents, delivery notes, new languages and file types.
Unlike consumer AI tools, these agents are engineered for mission-critical environments, integrating natively into SAP systems to ensure reliability, security and compliance at enterprise scale. More than 34,000 customers globally already rely on SAP Business AI capabilities embedded across SAP’s cloud portfolio.
SAP Labs East Asia Singapore is committed to ongoing collaboration with national workforce development initiatives and partnerships with local universities. In March 2025, SAP also announced a collaboration with NUS under the Industrial Postgraduate Programme (IPP), supported by EDB, to hire and complete training of nine researchers from local universities, in the Lab’s AI team in Singapore, by end of 2030. To date, three researchers have already been onboarded.
With its expanded engineering base and growing patent portfolio, SAP Labs East Asia Singapore will continue to serve as one of the company’s AI talent development hubs, nurturing next-generation talents that will serve as the company’s driving force towards a future of relevant, reliable, and responsible AI.
