Silos deepen when AI lacks top-down mandate, executives warn

Senior executives from four sectors agree: AI deployed without context makes silos worse.

Deploying artificial intelligence without cross-functional context and a top-down mandate is deepening organisational silos rather than breaking them down, senior executives warned.

At the Singapore Business Review Technology Enterprise Summit, executives from Grab, Standard Chartered, SBS Transit and Singapore General Hospital reached a sharp consensus: without the right governance and leadership, AI makes organisational silos worse, not better.

Hazel Chen, group business development director at Grab, put it plainly. “AI does not solve any organisational silos,” she said. “It will continue to exist, especially as the organisation grows. It could make it worse too if used in the wrong way without the right context.”

She drew on a recent example from within Grab. A senior data scientist, rather than asking the business development team a straightforward question about data rights in a partnership contract, fed the entire document into an internal AI platform. The tool returned a close to 10-page clause-by-clause analysis, but had no knowledge of the negotiation history or the business trade-offs her team had already worked through.

Chen and her legal counsel ended up spending more time responding to the report than the original question would have taken to answer.

“Context, context matters,” Chen said. “Who feeds the context? We are the ones feeding the context.”

Tanja Petrovic, global head of structured credit sales and origination at Standard Chartered, said the gap shows up structurally whenever AI speeds up one team but the handoff between teams remains broken. A structuring team cutting processing time by 50% does not mean a deal closes any faster.

“Teams sometimes might not speak to each other for whichever reason,” she said. “The horizontal implementation of AI is going to be the key.”

“You really need senior management to own the product and to own the project and break the silos. Have the authority to go cross desk and cross silos. That’s the only way it’s going to work,” Petrovic said.

Shaun Liew, vice president and head of customer experience and commercial at SBS Transit, was the most direct. “My sense is that actually AI worsens the silos; it alienates on its own,” he said. “We just have to be back to the human side of the house.”

A/Prof. Adam Chee, director of the AI development office at Singapore General Hospital, said the more fundamental issue is that most organisations are treating symptoms rather than causes. 

“You think that we are solving 10,000 problems, but [we are] solving 10,000 symptoms of three problems,” he said.

All four panelists converged on the same prescription: a top-down mandate is non-negotiable. 

Chen said Grab’s most effective AI push came when the company’s CEO and founder directed the entire organisation to spend two months on AI-related projects, scoped to individual functions and tracked with regular reporting.

“It only worked because someone with the power came top down, and everyone knew this is serious,” she said. “AI itself will not solve for organisational silos.”