Nearly half of Singapore leaders back GenAI after staff use

The bottom-up push is driven by staff motivations to “look smarter and more professional.”

Nearly half of Singapore business leaders (47%) say they invested in generative AI because employees were already using it on a bring-your-own-software (BYOS) basis—higher than the US (43%), UK (39%) and France (32%), according to ABBYY.

In a release, ABBYY said the bottom-up push is driven by staff motivations to “look smarter and more professional” (56%) and to reduce workload and support creativity (63%).

Leaders report that 92% of employees are seeing positive results. On a wish list for improvements, 18% of Singaporean workers want GenAI to admit when it doesn’t know an answer—higher than the UK (15%) and Germany (13%).

The survey also found widespread “shadow AI”: over a fifth of respondents globally report unmanaged use, with 26% of Singapore business leaders saying GenAI is only being used because employees bring their own tools—more than the US (22%), UK (12%), France (19%), Germany (21%) and Australia (17%). 
Execution remains a sticking point. Four in ten (40%) Singapore leaders say training GenAI models was harder than expected, and the same share found integration into business processes difficult; 30% cite high costs, 28% governance gaps and 25% hallucinations.

To improve outcomes, leaders say they are pairing GenAI with complementary technologies: 41% are using AI agents, 42% Process Intelligence, 47% Document AI and 34% retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

When GenAI is combined with process and document AI, 99% of Singaporean businesses report better results, including more consistent outputs (53%), smoother workflow integration (52%), greater cost efficiency/savings (49%), higher user trust (47%) and more accurate, reliable results (46%).

Budgets are rising accordingly: 99% of respondents plan to increase GenAI spending; 21% expect a 6–10% uplift and 11% plan increases of 50%+, ABBYY said.