Singapore Post (SingPost) and Google Cloud, on Dec 12, entered into a strategic collaboration to accelerate SingPost’s digital transformation journey.
The multi-year partnership will leverage Google Cloud’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools to help SingPost’s employees boost their productivity, streamline repetitive tasks and foster seamless collaboration with external partners and customers.
“SingPost is no stranger to embracing innovative technologies, from data analytics to warehouse automation, to meet the evolving needs of our customers. This, coupled with strategic investment in high-growth markets, has resulted in international logistics generating 86% of the group’s revenue – a key milestone in our ongoing transformation into a technology-driven logistics enterprise,” says Noel Singgih, SingPost’s group chief information officer (CIO).
“Our positive engagement with Google Cloud to develop an AI solution—through their joint AI Trailblazers initiative with the Singapore government—gave us the confidence to embark on the next step of this journey with them as our strategic cloud services provider. Google Cloud’s industry leadership in responsible AI, sustainable technology innovation, and cybersecurity will be core tenets in establishing SingPost as a trusted and customer-centric logistics leader in the Asia Pacific region,” he adds.
SingPost has successfully migrated its IT workloads from its on-premises data centres to Google Cloud. It is also in the process of harmonising and consolidating its technology stack. According to the group, the move has yielded cost savings of 30% in its IT operations. It has also enabled it to take advantage of Google Cloud's AI-optimised infrastructure, purpose-built to handle complex AI workloads while ensuring cost-efficiency, scalability, and sustainability.
To bolster security, SingPost is deploying Google Cloud’s BeyondCorp Enterprise platform, enforcing zero-trust security principles like multi-factor authentication and device verification. This ensures that only authorized staff can access proprietary company information.
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SingPost’s participation in the AI Trailblazers initiative has already borne fruit with the development of an AI solution prototype to streamline its e-commerce logistics operations such as removing the need to manually re-enter partner and supplier information from trade documents.
Utilising Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, foundation models and Document AI, SingPost’s AI solution transforms unstructured data from trade documents into a searchable repository. It comes with a generative AI-powered chat interface that understands natural language queries and provides accurate and relevant information.
In collaboration with Google Cloud, SingPost will scale the use of its solution, optimizing supply chain orchestration across its logistics network and facilitating faster deliveries. Additionally, SingPost is leveraging Vertex AI to explore solutions for additional use cases, including automating internal legal document reviews and enhancing customer care interactions.
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“We are pleased that the AI Trailblazers initiative has assisted SingPost in building a generative AI solution that will increase productivity. This is in line with Singapore’s efforts in establishing ourselves as a thriving hub for AI innovation by encouraging more experimentation and rapid prototyping. We look forward to more Singapore-based companies creating impactful gen AI applications from this initiative,” says Philbert Gomez, vice president and head, Digital Industry Singapore (DISG).
Using gen AI tools for everyday tasks
Through its partnership with Google Cloud, SingPost will be using Google Workspace’s Duet AI to help its employees write, visualize, organize, and connect more meaningfully. This way, SingPost’s employees will be able to craft memos, presentation decks, marketing copy, and so on with Duet AI’s embedding of generative AI into Google’s suite of applications that include Gmail, Drive, Docs, Slides and Sheets.
SingPost is also deploying Duet AI in AppSheet, which lets anyone build applications for streamlining work tasks by describing their idea using natural language, all without writing a single line of code. This could include applications for frontline service management, inventory management, delivery route optimization, and more, with IT administrators setting governance parameters for how these applications can be created and consumed.
“By investing in AI development and collaborator platforms with built-in privacy, control, security, and compliance capabilities, SingPost is empowering every employee—regardless of their role or function—to identify and capitalise on new opportunities for work optimization. This serves as a strong example of how a large enterprise can move swiftly to extract diverse benefits from gen AI adoption. We look forward to continuing to support SingPost’s deployment of enterprise-grade AI solutions, accelerating the company’s time-to-value and reinforcing its leadership in delivering innovative and trusted e-commerce logistics services at scale,” says Mark Micallef, managing director, Southeast Asia, Google Cloud.
