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Josephine Teo’s Case for AI That Improves People’s Lives
Josephine Teo said AI should be judged by whether it improves lives, not by how impressive a model is. Singapore’s wider approach includes safeguards developed alongside adoption, Southeast Asian language models and digital resources shared with other countries.
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Key takeaways
- Josephine Teo said AI should be judged by whether it improves lives, not by how impressive a model is.
- Singapore’s wider approach includes safeguards developed alongside adoption, Southeast Asian language models and digital resources shared with other countries.
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openai.comCreate a landscape editorial hero image for this Studio Global article: How did Singapore’s Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo, speaking at Digital@UNGA during her Sept 21–24, 2026, US. Article summary: Teo’s central message was that AI innovation should be judged by whether it improves people’s lives—not by how powerful its models become—and that sustained adoption depends on public trust. [2][3] The available evidence. Topic tags: general, general web, user generated. Style: premium digital editorial illustration, source-backed research mood, clean composition, high detail, modern web publication hero. Use reference image context only for broad subject, composition, and topical grounding; do not copy the exact image. Avoid: logos, brand marks, copyrighted characters, real person likenesses, fake screenshots, UI text, readable text, watermarks, charts with fa
Singapore’s Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo framed AI around three priorities at Digital@UNGA in New York on 21 September 2026: impact, trust and inclusion. Her test for innovation was whether the technology improves people’s lives, rather than how impressive its models are. 20
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Measure what AI does for people
Singapore’s public service offers examples of that approach in practice. Almost 70% of public officers regularly use AI tools to analyse information and prepare drafts, according to coverage of Teo’s remarks. AI is also used to identify anomalies across millions of cargo shipments and help combat scams. Officers remain accountable for final decisions—a distinction between using AI to support work and handing decisions over to it. 17
Those applications point to a more useful question than whether a model is powerful: does it help public officers work effectively and improve services for citizens? 18
Build trust as adoption grows
Teo argued that people must be able to trust AI if they are to keep relying on it as its use spreads. 27 In separate remarks days before Digital@UNGA, she said Singapore would develop safeguards alongside adoption, drawing a comparison with the layers of safety standards that support confidence in aviation.
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Scams illustrate why that matters. Teo has warned that AI can make scam messages more persuasive and personalised, even as the technology is also used to fight such crimes. 29
17 On this view, safeguards are not separate from innovation: they help make sustained use possible.
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Make AI useful beyond dominant languages and markets
Inclusion also means building for local needs. Teo has described SEA-LION, a family of models focused on Southeast Asian languages, as a deliberate alternative to treating model size as the primary goal. AI Singapore has also introduced Project ATLAS as a global open-data platform and showcased tools for voice pipelines and multilingual evaluation. These are examples of Singapore’s broader AI work, not details established here as announcements from the Digital@UNGA speech. 35
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Singapore shares digital frameworks, playbooks, open-source tools and capacity-building offerings through the Singapore Digital Gateway. The platform was launched in 2025, so it should not be mistaken for an initiative unveiled during Teo’s September 2026 appearance. 6
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The connecting principle is practical access: AI has greater public value when people can use it confidently, in their own contexts, and with clear human responsibility for consequential decisions. 17
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Josephine Teo said AI should be judged by whether it improves lives, not by how impressive a model is.
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Josephine Teo said AI should be judged by whether it improves lives, not by how impressive a model is. Singapore’s wider approach includes safeguards developed alongside adoption, Southeast Asian language models and digital resources shared with other countries.