US cloud software giant Salesforce said Wednesday ( Mar 12 ) it planned to invest US$ 1 billion in Singapore over the next five years to boost the use of artificial intelligence agents ( AI ) in the workforce.
The island condition has been extremely turning to technology to solve its labor problem as it struggles to deal with a declining fertility and an ageing population.
The funding aims to promote the implementation in Singapore and the area of Agentforce, which enables businesses to create and maintain AI agents designed to individually do tasks such as sales, customer service and marketing.
Unlike bots that follow a prescribed text, AI agents are more sophisticated as they can suppose, decide and take actions and finish tasks such as booking appointments or digesting requests.
” We are in an amazing new era of digital labour where every business will be transformed by autonomous officials that augment the work of mankind, revolutionising performance and enabling every organization to scale without parameters”, Salesforce main executive Marc Benioff said in a statement.
” Singapore is at the forefront of this shift, and as the world’s largest provider of digital labour through our Agentforce platform, Amazon is thrilled to expand our labor with the business area and our longtime colleagues in the region to drive development, production and development”.
In an interview with CNBC, Benioff said Salesforce had been in Singapore for the past 25 years and described it as the hub of Southeast Asia.
” We’re investing another billion dollars in our operations here and we don’t just do sales and marketing. We also do extremely advanced artificial intelligence development”, he added.
” We have dozens of… the very best AI engineers in the world here in our Singapore research centre”.
Salesforce noted that Singapore “has been dealing with a slowing growth rate of the labour force, contributed by an ageing population and declining birth rates”.
In a separate joint announcement, Salesforce and Singapore Airlines said the carrier would use Agentforce to” streamline its customer service operations”.