Salesforce to invest $1B in Singapore to boost adoption of AI

Salesforce plans to invest $1 billion in Singapore over the next five years as it seeks to fuel the adoption of its AI agent development platform, Agentforce.

Salesforce claimed that Agentforce can help alleviate Singapore’s ongoing labor issues and augment the country’s workforce and enterprises by creating “digital workforces” that combine humans with autonomous AI agents.

The initiative follows a recent $500 million commitment in Saudi Arabia and another $500 million investment in Argentina by the cloud software giant to expand its AI and cloud services, including Agentforce.

The company has been investing in Singapore for nearly two decades, and set up its first overseas AI Research hub in the country in 2019. Its customers in the country include Singapore Airlines, Grab, M1, FairPrice Group and Ocean Network Express.

The CRM giant separately also said it has signed a deal with Singapore Airlines to integrate Agentforce; Salesforce’s AI layer, Einstein, in Service Cloud; and Data Cloud into the airline’s customer case management system. The companies also plan to develop AI solutions for airlines at Salesforce’s AI Research hub.

Salesforce has been doubling down on AI for a while now. The company is reportedly reducing its workforce by over 1,000 employees while hiring about 2,000 people to sell new AI products.

Other U.S. tech giants have been investing heavily in Southeast Asia as well. Last May, Amazon Web Services said it would invest a fresh $9 billion over the next five years in Singapore to grow its cloud infrastructure and services. And Microsoft last year said it would invest $2.2 billion in Malaysia and $1.7 billion in Indonesia over the next four years.