NCS has launched the NCS AI Mission Centre in Singapore, a hub meant to help public and private organisations move AI projects from trials to full enterprise deployment. The company plans to build a team of more than 300 AI engineers within two years, up from about 100 today.
Key Takeaways
- NCS will grow its forward-deployed AI engineers from 100 to more than 300 within two years.
- Three MOUs cover Changi Airport Group, the Institute of Mental Health and Life3 Biotech.
- Over 2,000 NCS AI practitioners are being upskilled in building production-ready agentic solutions.
What the AI Mission Centre will do
NCS said the centre brings together industry specialists, AI platform teams and what it calls Intelligentisation Forward-Deployed Engineers (iFDEs). These are domain-expert, vendor-agnostic AI specialists who work inside client teams. The workforce will be a mix of reskilled internal staff and new hires.
The centre will help clients pick priority problems, redesign workflows, and test and deploy AI securely in live operations. Successful deployments will then be turned into reusable products that can be scaled across organisations and markets.
It draws on NCS’ Sunshine.AI suite. Sunshine.core is a sovereign-ready foundation for building, running and governing enterprise AI agents, while Sunshine.commanderAI lets robots from different manufacturers work together on real-world tasks. Teams of NCS AI Natives, which the company calls “speedboats”, will also support client projects.
The centre was officiated by Minister for Digital Development and Information Josephine Teo.
“We want Singapore to be a place where the world comes to see AI working at scale,” said NCS CEO Sam Liew. “By growing our current team of 100 iFDEs to more than 300, we are investing in our greatest asset, our people, who can turn technological breakthroughs into everyday progress.”
Three MOUs across transport, healthcare and manufacturing
NCS signed three memorandums of understanding to mark the launch, each tied to a specific use case.
With Changi Airport Group, NCS will add more advanced AI to iFerret, a co-developed runway surveillance system that monitors for foreign object debris. Requirements are developed and tested in real airport conditions before global deployment.
With the Institute of Mental Health, NCS will co-develop digital tools to support patient care and healthcare workers. One of the first is Bio-ID, an AI-powered facial recognition system for patient identification and for flagging safety concerns in inpatient care. IMH will validate it in its wards before wider rollout.
With Life3 Biotech, NCS will build AI tools to optimise biomanufacturing, aiming to improve the efficiency, scalability and sustainability of producing micro-organisms.
Building the AI talent pipeline
Beyond the iFDE hiring target, NCS said all its employees receive AI fluency training, covering prompt engineering, responsible AI and working with AI agents. More than 2,000 AI practitioners are being trained further in building and deploying production-ready agentic solutions.
NCS is also redesigning software engineering roles so that business analysis, development and testing sit within the same AI-enabled teams. For early-career talent, its Nucleus, Fusion and Ignite work-study programmes offer bond-free pathways for university, polytechnic and ITE graduates respectively.
