Singapore’s AI Adoption Is Ahead of Its Leadership

New research from the FranklinCovey Institute puts a number on a pattern many Singapore organisations will recognise from their own AI rollouts: 87 percent of leaders treat disruption as something to survive, and only 13 percent treat it as a strategic opportunity to build on.

Singapore’s own numbers tell the same story from the ground up, and the pattern holds whether you look at individuals or organisations.

Singapore’s Version of the Gap

Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index ranked Singapore second globally on AI use, with 66 percent of local AI users producing work they couldn’t have produced a year ago. Yet only 24 percent say their leadership is aligned on a strategy for it, below the global average, even as most say adapting quickly feels urgent.

Accenture found the organisational version of the same gap: 46 percent of Singapore technology leaders haven’t redesigned a single job role around the AI their teams already use, even after moving well past the pilot stage. The Straits Times put the national version of it plainly this year: Singapore has an AI strategy, the harder unsolved part is a deployment plan built on trust leaders can point to.

Every one of those studies describes the same gap from a different angle. None of them tell a leader what to actually do about it on Monday morning. That’s the part worth spending time on.

What the Data Doesn’t Show You

A survey can measure whether leadership feels aligned. It can’t tell a manager what to say when someone on their team asks whether AI is coming for their job, and the honest answer is “I don’t know yet, and here’s how we’re going to find out together.” It can’t run the conversation where a role gets redesigned with the person who holds it, rather than announced to them after the fact.

FranklinCovey’s own research puts the mechanism plainly: 94 percent of CEOs and CHROs name AI as the top skill they need in their leaders, yet only 35 percent feel they’ve actually prepared those leaders for it. Technology raises the performance baseline. Only leaders, through trust, judgment, collaboration and execution, raise the ceiling above it. That is not a slogan. It’s a description of where the value comes from: organisations that deliberately design how humans and AI work together report 2.5 times better financial results than those that don’t, and the difference sits entirely in how the leader manages the handover, not in which model they’ve licensed.

Dr Patrick Leddin, FranklinCovey Senior Advisor for Culture and Leadership, names what separates the 13 percent from everyone else:

“Disruption isn’t an enemy.”

Not because they’re more optimistic. Because, in practice, they tend to do three specific things differently:

• They name what they don’t know yet, instead of presenting a finished roadmap that doesn’t exist.
• They redesign roles with the people who hold them, not for them, and not after the decision is already made.
• They keep judging performance on what people can actually control while the ground underneath the role is still moving.

None of that requires better AI. It requires leadership capable of building trust deliberately, under pressure, the same way any other capability gets built: through practice, not instinct.

What This Actually Looks Like

Singapore’s government has made a version of this bet at national scale. Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s Budget 2026 commitment to “no jobless growth” isn’t a hope; it’s a decision to actively shape an outcome instead of waiting to find out what AI does to the labour market by default. Individual leaders are being asked to make the same kind of decision, just at the scale of one team instead of one economy.

FranklinCovey’s own model for that kind of decision is STEER, and it maps closely onto the exact gap Singapore’s data keeps surfacing.

Set the game plan. Before a single role gets redesigned, the leader’s job is to state, specifically, what the organisation is trying to be able to do that it can’t do today, and by when. “We’re adopting AI” isn’t a game plan. “By next quarter, our client-facing teams will spend less time on first-draft work and more time on the judgment calls that actually need a person” is. Vague direction is what forces teams to guess, and guessing is where trust erodes fastest.

Translate the work. A game plan at the strategy level means little until it’s translated into what changes for the person actually doing the job, which is the step most Singapore organisations are skipping. Accenture found 46 percent of technology leaders haven’t touched a single role definition despite deploying the technology behind it. Translating the work means sitting down with the people whose roles are changing, before the redesign is finalised, not after it’s been decided for them.

Establish trust and guardrails. This is two things, and leaders often manage one while neglecting the other. Trust means naming what’s uncertain out loud instead of projecting a confidence that isn’t real yet: “we haven’t fully mapped this out, and here’s how we’re going to find out together” builds more credibility over time than a polished roadmap that quietly falls apart in month two. That kind of trust isn’t a soft add-on to deployment, it’s the currency that makes deployment work in the first place. Guardrails are the other half: being explicit about where AI output needs a human sign-off, what decisions stay with people no matter how capable the model gets, and what happens when something goes wrong. A deployment plan without both isn’t a deployment plan. It’s a rollout with no way to catch what it misses.

Equip every level. Senior leaders get the offsites and the headline strategy briefings. Middle managers and individual contributors, the people actually running the redesigned processes day to day, are usually last in line for real capability-building, if they get any at all. Equipping every level means the manager three layers down gets the same clarity and skill-building the CHRO got, not a watered-down summary passed along secondhand. A game plan that only the top team understands isn’t equipping anyone; it’s briefing them.

Run disciplined execution. None of the above survives a single town hall announcement. It survives a cadence: revisiting the game plan as circumstances change, checking whether the translated work still matches what’s actually happening on the ground, and treating the capability to lead through disruption as a skill to practise and improve, the way a team practises any other skill, rather than something a leader either has or doesn’t. That’s harder to sustain than a rollout, and it won’t show up on an adoption dashboard next quarter. It shows up eighteen months from now, in whether your best people stayed through the transition or quietly left for an organisation that gave them a real hand in shaping it. Adoption metrics measure whether people used the tool. They don’t measure whether people trusted the way the change happened around them, and that second thing is what determines whether the first one sticks.

Where Are You on STEER?

Every leader reading this already knows, roughly, where their organisation actually sits. Is your game plan specific enough for a team to act on, or is “we’re adopting AI” still doing the work of a strategy? Has that plan been translated into what changes for the person doing the job, or is the role redesign still sitting in a slide deck? Have you built enough trust that your team would tell you the truth about how this is landing, with guardrails clear enough that no one’s guessing where the human sign-off sits? Is the capability-building actually reaching the manager three layers down, or stopping at the leadership offsite? And is any of it running on a cadence, or was it a town hall six months ago that nobody’s revisited since?

Most leaders can answer one or two of those with real confidence and go quiet on the rest. That’s not a failure. It’s just where the actual work starts, and it’s rarely the AI capability that’s missing. Working through STEER stage by stage, starting wherever an organisation is honestly at, is what we do with leadership teams across Singapore. Strategy gives an organisation a plan. Leadership, applied this deliberately, is what gives that plan its human edge.