SAP Labs East Asia Singapore will hire and train 50 graduates and mid-career professionals as artificial intelligence (AI) scientists and machine learning engineers over the next three years through the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s (IMDA) TechSkills Accelerator (TeSA) initiative.
The new hires will work on high-priority development tracks, including generative AI, model orchestration and enterprise AI agents.
They will undergo a 12-month structured training and mentorship programme. Some will also have opportunities for short-term placements at SAP Labs locations in Germany, the United States and India.
The hiring effort comes as SAP Labs East Asia Singapore expands its role in developing AI technologies used across the company’s enterprise software platforms globally.
Since its launch 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.
Much of that work is carried out by the SAP Business AI product engineering team, which develops AI capabilities integrated into SAP’s enterprise software platforms.
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Some of these features support SAP’s AI copilot called Joule, across products such as SAP S/4HANA, Intelligent Spend and Business Networks (ISBN) and SAP SuccessFactors. The tools help automate tasks such as information retrieval, navigation and information extraction across business processes.
More than 34,000 customers globally rely on SAP Business AI capabilities embedded across SAP’s cloud portfolio, according to the company.
The hiring initiative also reflects the rapid growth of SAP Labs East Asia Singapore’s engineering operations.
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Since committing in 2023 to expand its local AI talent pool, the Singapore team has grown to nearly 400 engineers, the company said. More than 90% of its AI workforce are local hires, largely graduates from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU).
“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,” says Manik Saha, managing director of SAP Labs East Asia.
He adds: “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.”
