Singapore’s digital economy grew to S$144.1 billion in 2025, accounting for 19.3 per cent of gross domestic product, as enterprise artificial intelligence adoption accelerated and more workers reported using AI tools on the job, according to the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s Singapore Digital Economy Report released on Monday.
What the numbers say
The digital sector expanded from S$136.5 billion and 18.8 per cent of GDP in 2024, outpacing broader economic growth in a year when global trade and interest rates still weighed on exporters. IMDA highlighted AI as a practical adoption story rather than a laboratory experiment: 23.5 per cent of enterprises deployed AI in 2025, up from 14.7 per cent in 2024. Among larger firms with 200 or more employees, adoption reached 23.4 per cent, closing the gap with mid-sized businesses that often move faster on software trials.
Worker surveys cited in the report show 86 per cent of employees using AI at work in 2026, compared with 78 per cent in 2025—a jump that includes copilots embedded in office suites and customer-service bots, not just data-science teams. IMDA said it will expand TechSkills Accelerator under the National AI Impact Programme to train more tech and non-tech staff, acknowledging that adoption without skills produces shadow IT risk.
Why it matters outside Silicon Valley
For Singapore households, digital GDP is not an abstract trophy. It shows up in PayNow volumes, government digital services, cybersecurity hiring and the export of fintech stacks across ASEAN. Demand for AI, data and cybersecurity roles ranked among the fastest-growing tech occupations in 2025, which feeds back into wages and foreign-worker policy debates. When IMDA chief executive Ng Cher Pong says enterprises and workers are “embracing new solutions,” regulators are also watching whether model deployments meet MAS’s fairness and resilience guidelines.
The report lands weeks after the Monetary Authority committed S$220 million to its Financial Sector Technology and Innovation 4.0 scheme, including AI Pathfinder grants for banks adopting registry-listed tools. Public-sector adoption—tax filing chatbots, immigration appointment routing—will be the next proof point after private-sector percentages look flattering.
Limits of the headline
Adoption rates do not measure productivity gains or error rates. A firm can deploy a chatbot and still fail to retrain staff whose tasks shift. GDP share can rise if digital services inflate prices while physical sectors stagnate. Investors should cross-check the report against listed tech services names on the Catalist and STI, and against cloud capex from global hyperscalers building capacity in Singapore. Monday’s release is a confidence marker: the city-state’s digital layer is thicker than ever, and AI is now a boardroom metric, not a pilot programme hidden in innovation labs.