How a session in Singapore is put together
Every keynote is tailored after a briefing call, and the larger engagements start before the day rather than on it: a diagnostic of the client's own people, so the room hears its own evidence rather than somebody else's. What the room leaves with is written down.
What that has looked like: a survey of fifty of a client's own people run BEFORE the session, to find where judgement had already been handed to tools they had built themselves, read back to the executive team in their own words, then a workshop in which they named four or five of their own processes and rebuilt them; and a division of a very large company permitted exactly one AI tool, which after the constraint was examined moved to a multi-tool sandbox with different functions choosing different models, then repeated across further divisions.
Six of the seven engagements published on this site produced further work after the session rather than at it. The seven are set out in full at case studies, each with a line saying what it does not show.
How to read these examples. They are published to show how the work is put together, not as a client list for Singapore. Most engagements are covered by confidentiality and are described without naming anyone; where a client is named anywhere on this site, it is with their agreement.
Why Singapore is different
IMDA's Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI, version 1.0 of 22 January 2026, section 2.4.3, reads: as agents take over entry level tasks, which typically serve as the training ground for new staff, this could lead to loss of basic operational knowledge for the users. Organisations should identify core capabilities of each job and provide sufficient training and work exposure so that users retain foundational skills.
A few pages earlier it warns of the potential loss of trade craft. It names automation bias as the tendency to over-trust a system that has performed reliably in the past. It requires that overseers be trained to identify failure modes. And it requires that the effectiveness of the oversight itself be audited, which almost no organisation anywhere does.
It is also honest about its own limit. The executive summary concedes that continuous human oversight over all agent workflows becomes impractical at scale, which is the concession most governance documents avoid making.
Two qualifications belong with any use of it. It is guidance rather than statute. And it states a risk and a duty to train without setting any threshold for what counts as retaining core skills, or any test of whether the training worked. That gap is where a board session in Singapore usually starts.
The twenty months before it
Singapore published a Model AI Governance Framework for Generative AI on 30 May 2024. Both published versions were read and searched at source. They contain zero occurrences of human oversight, human-in-the-loop, over-reliance, automation bias or deskilling. Human oversight is not among its nine dimensions.
Twenty months later the same issuing body built a pillar around oversight and added deskilling to it. For a Singapore audience that is the most useful single slide in the deck, because it dates the moment the problem became visible to their own regulator.
What Singapore measures
The Ministry of Manpower reported in June 2026 that 28.5 per cent of firms had adopted AI, rising to 74.1 per cent in information and communications, 57.5 per cent in professional services and 56.4 per cent in financial and insurance services.
The more useful pair sits underneath. Only 6.2 per cent of firms reported AI-related reductions in headcount or hiring, against 18.9 per cent reporting redesign of job functions. The ministry's own conclusion was that AI is having a greater impact on job redesign and work processes than on broad-based job displacement.
Redesign running roughly three times ahead of displacement is a useful corrective to forecasting that treats job losses as the headline. It is also not reassuring on its own, because redesign decides which repetitions survive, and a survey counting headcount cannot tell you which ones went. That is the question at the missed reps.
Practical
Boards, executive committees, regional headquarters, financial and professional services, and corporate and association conferences. Delivery is in English. Keynotes run 40 to 90 minutes, with workshop and board-session formats. Rahim travels from London, and where travel is not practical the same session is delivered online. He can travel to the region or deliver virtually across all time zones.
Three keynotes, all versions of one argument. Drift versus Design is the signature talk for boards and executive teams. We Are Superheroes covers the seven human skills that grow more valuable as the tools spread. WTH, What the Human is a live judgement test for boards, run in the room, December to March only. Full descriptions are at keynotes.
Quoting IMDA back to the room
IMDA's January 2026 framework, after twenty months of work, names the apprenticeship problem: when agents do the junior work, juniors still need somewhere to learn judgement. I founded EtonX, later acquired by Eton College, and I have addressed Kaplan's leadership, so learning is my home ground. Your organisation leaves with a plan for how judgement gets built in its teams, with the regulator's words as the brief.
Rahim pairs keynotes with advisory work on how organisations grow their people, and writes Box of Amazing every week. Keynotes · Advisory · Box of Amazing
The three keynotes a Singapore room can book
Keynotes run 30 to 90 minutes, in person or virtual. A 30-minute main-stage version of each talk is available for conferences, and the full talk runs 45 to 60 minutes. The sector examples change for the room; the argument does not. All three, with the showreel, are at keynotes, and the programme copy is at the speaker pack.
Drift versus Design is built from your room. Your audience answers five anonymous questions beforehand, their answers shape the talk, and afterwards you get a one-page readout with the three decisions to look at first.
Also speaking nearby: Hong Kong · Sydney · Tokyo.
Drift versus Design
Drift versus Design: why most organisations hand their judgement to AI without deciding to, and how to design your way through instead.
IMDA wrote the apprenticeship problem into its agentic AI framework in January 2026. The regulator's words open the session: how will juniors still learn judgement inside a firm?
We Are Superheroes
We Are Superheroes: AI is the suit. The human decides.
Singapore already measures capability. Schools and national conferences get the seven skills linked to those measures, with one question in front of them: what should a young worker practise first?
WTH (What the Human)
WTH (What the Human): a live test of a board's own judgement.
Show a Singapore board the national framework, then ask how its decisions measure up. One two-hour session, with the board's governance choices from the past year as the material.
Where these sessions happen in Singapore, and when they can
One correction that saves a conversation: Sands Expo and the Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre are the same building, not two options.
- Suntec Singapore
- The venue states 10 to 10,000 guests, with up to 36 meeting rooms on level 3, 12,000 square metres of exhibition on level 4, and two level 6 auditoriums totalling 6,850 seats. Note the large hall is a CONVERTIBLE FLAT FLOOR rather than a fixed rake, since it converts to column-free exhibition space, so sightlines are your riser build. Thirty-six subdividable rooms make tracks trivial.
- Marina Bay Sands, Sands Grand Ballroom
- 7,672 square metres and a maximum of 8,000 guests, splitting sixteen ways, with delegates sleeping in the resort. Flat floor. The venue publishes a larger figure on an older factsheet; the live page is the maintained one.
- Fairmont and Swissôtel at Raffles City
- The Fairmont Ballroom is 2,257 square metres with a six metre ceiling, seating 3,000 theatre, inside more than 108,000 square feet of function space and 34 meeting rooms. Pillar-free, and the largest hotel-attached plenary in the city centre. Delegates sleep in the building twice over, since two hotels sit on top of it.
- Shangri-La Singapore, Island Ballroom
- 1,357 square metres, 26.3 by 51.6 metres, with a 7.9 metre ceiling and 1,400 theatre. Flat, but the ceiling is the point: the one hotel room in the city where a full-height screen and a real stage do not feel compromised.
- Capitol Theatre
- 865 seats with a rotational floor system. A single-room venue: it advertises no breakout rooms at all, so it cannot run tracks, and the rake is not stated so do not assume one.
Singapore FinTech Festival runs 18 to 20 November 2026 at Singapore EXPO and Asia Tech x Singapore 26 to 28 May 2027. The Milken Institute Asia Summit is 7 to 9 October 2026, and is contracted to stay in Singapore to 2028 under an agreement with the tourism board.
The finding for October 2026 is a collision rather than a season. Milken on 7 to 9 October, the Formula One weekend on 9 to 11 October, and a third executive summit apparently taking one of the ballrooms above, all inside one square mile. If a date in that window is proposed, check the room and the room block before agreeing to it.
On seasonality more generally, the honest answer is that no official Singapore calendar publishes a crowd-out rule. The September to November preference and the Lunar New Year and school-holiday avoidance are trade convention, widely followed and nowhere written down.
