The technology is the easy part. Transformation stalls on the people.

By now, AI adoption is rarely the thing holding an organisation back. In McKinsey’s State of AI in 2025, published last November, 88% of organisations said they were using AI in at least one part of the business – up from 78% a year earlier. What is striking is what that near-ubiquity has delivered. Only 39% reported any impact on enterprise-wide earnings, and for most, it was less than 5%. Nearly everyone is using AI. Few can yet point to it on the bottom line.

The organisations that can are telling. McKinsey singles out a small group of “high performers” – roughly 6% of respondents – that trace a meaningful share of earnings to AI, and what sets them apart is less the tools than the way they work: they redesign how work gets done and invest in their people, rather than bolting AI onto existing processes. The pattern recurs elsewhere. In the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, 63% of employers named skills gaps as the single biggest barrier to transforming their business, ahead of cost, culture or regulation, with close to two in five core skills expected to change by 2030.

The pattern holds closer to home. Speaking at the Ministry of Manpower’s (MOM) Committee of Supply debate in March, Minister for Manpower Dr Tan See Leng pointed to another study by McKinsey, the Economic Development Board and Tech in Asia which found that about three in five organisations in South-East Asia had yet to see meaningful financial gains from AI – held back, once again, by thin internal expertise and low take-up among employees. The lessons across all three are the same. Buying the technology is the straightforward part. Rewiring the workforce around it is not.

Funding the hard part

That is the gap the Enterprise Workforce Transformation Package (EWTP) is built to close. First announced at the previous year’s Committee of Supply, it is designed to precisely support the side of transformation the research keeps flagging as difficult: the jobs, the skills and the people. Its premise mirrors the diagnosis. When an organisation changes its model, its roles change with it – so the support for the organisation and the support for its workforce ought to sit in the same place.

That instinct to join up what has long been handled separately has also reshaped the institutions behind the package. SkillsFuture Singapore and Workforce Singapore have merged into a single statutory board, Skills and Workforce Development Agency (SWDA), under the MOM and jointly overseen with the Ministry of Education. It folds skills training and employment facilitation into one engine – and, for employers, into one point of contact for hiring, training and workforce transformation, with sharper labour market insight intended to narrow mismatches and shorten time-to-hire.

What EWTP offers

Within that structure, the EWTP rests on three forms of support. First, a consolidated grant, the SkillsFuture Workforce Development Grant, will progressively pull funding into a single channel so organisations are not left piecing together separate schemes. The second support is a redesigned SkillsFuture Enterprise Credit that will give organisations a fresh wallet of credit to offset out-of-pocket costs. Third, the centrepiece is the Workforce Development Grant (Job Redesign+), or WDG (JR+) – which began rolling out in March 2026.

WDG (JR+) replaces an earlier job-redesign scheme that provides support for organisations to redesign jobs and improve efficiencies, but it operates at a markedly larger scale, raising the cap on support from S$30,000 per company to S$150,000. That fivefold increase is meant to let organisations redesign roles and build capability in a sustained way rather than tinker at the edges – bringing in consultants to rethink work, developing HR teams and line managers so that change outlasts a single project, and adopting workforce technology that helps surface skills gaps.

For all the detail in the funding rules, the design principle is simpler: give organisations one place to begin. The Singapore Business Federation (SBF) and the Singapore National Employers Federation (SNEF) serve as anchor programme partners, with their business advisors acting s a single point of entry – diagnosing where an organisation’s enterprise and workforce gaps lie, steering it to the relevant support, and staying involved through implementation. AI runs through the package by design. Echoing the research, the intent is for it to augment employees: through WDG (JR+), organisations can bring in consultants to gauge their AI readiness, identify where it fits, and redesign roles around it, with pre-packaged AI solutions expected to follow.

Kenneth Wong, Director, Enterprise Workforce Transformation Division, SWDA, said, “The support we are offering goes beyond practical assistance – it is designed to facilitate what we believe transformation truly requires. Organisations can now align their workforce strategies tighter with their broader business ambitions. The EWTP brings that alignment within reach. When an organisation can afford to bring in the right expertise, retrain its people meaningfully, and adopt the tools that surface hidden capability, it is better positioned to compete, grow and lead.”

The test ahead

None of this unfolds in a frictionless environment. Employees continue to flag rising costs, and the SNEF, while backing the EWTP, has been candid about the pressures organisations face in an uncertain climate. Government support, as the ministry put it during the debate, is meant to be a catalyst rather than a substitute for the productivity gains organisations must drive themselves. And the research that defines the problem also sets the test: money alone has not moved most organisations to AI maturity and grants alone will not either. What decides the outcome is whether organisations use the help to do the harder work the studies keep pointing to – redesigning how people and technology work together. That is the part no package can do for them.

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