Speech by Guest-Of-Honour Minister for Education & Minister-In-Charge of Social Services Integration, Mr Desmond Lee at NUS120 Distinguished Speaker Series

Mr Hsieh Fu Hua, Chairman of the NUS Board of Trustees
Professor Tan Eng Chye, President of the National University of Singapore
Professor Yaacob Ibrahim
Colleagues, Students
Ladies and gentlemen

1. Good morning. Thank you for having me here today. And to NUS: congratulations on your 120th anniversary.

2. For the past 120 years, NUS has continued to reinvent itself to meet Singapore's evolving needs. You started as a small medical school with 23 students, serving a young and growing community. Over the decades, you have grown into a research-intensive, globally connected institution that offers a distinctive educational experience, drives innovation and stands among the leading universities in Asia and the world.

3. As a proud alumnus, I have very fond memories of my own years as a student studying law at NUS, and living in Temasek Hall. Back then, we took notes in lecture halls and tutorial rooms by hand, and then when NUS rolled out the programme to get as many students as possible on laptops. That was 1998, I matriculated a year earlier – 1997. Many of us then started using laptops. This is a far cry from today, where students have technology and powerful tools at your fingertips.

4. NUS has always progressed with the times. Today, we stand at another important turning point. As we all know, Artificial Intelligence is not just another wave of change that will crest and pass.

1. It is reshaping how we learn, work, create, and collaborate.
2. AI in society and in economy is raising profound questions about what it means to think, to contribute, and to be human.
3. The question before us is not whether AI will change the future, but whether we will be ready to shape that future ourselves.

5. This applies to all of us – whether we are students or working adults. Because the workplaces of the future will require us to work alongside such technology, apply it with wisdom and ethics, and use it to create value in ways that are distinctly human. Those who develop these capabilities will thrive.

6. For Singapore, the stakes are equally high. We have never competed on size, price or natural resources. We are competitive because of the strength and quality of our people. If we want to remain a nation that creates opportunities, attracts investment, and solves hard problems, our graduates must be confident, capable, and responsible in how they engage with AI and technology.

7. This is why our Institutes of Higher Learning must rise to the occasion once again and evolve to equip our graduates for an AI-transformed world. They must strengthen the human qualities that matter most: curiosity, critical thinking, and adaptability. Today, these qualities matter more than ever. And it's interesting, right? That something artificial provokes our quest to be ever more human.

Launch of the Ihl Baseline AI Competencies Frameworks

8. At the Straits Times Education Forum last month, I shared that we would be establishing the Committee for AI in Higher Education, and this Committee will support the work of the National AI Council chaired by PM Lawrence Wong. Operating alongside the Tripartite Jobs Council which focuses on supporting workers and businesses, our Committee will bring IHLs together as a sector to empower students. Together, these structures seek to help Singapore coordinate and navigate transformation together, to translate our national AI ambition into ground action.

9. Our IHLs have already been doing significant work. Each has developed its own AI strategy, experimented with new pedagogies, and asked hard questions about how best to prepare students for an AI-pervasive world. But good ideas and good experiments should not stay within the walls of any single institution. The insights and best practices developed by our IHLs should be brought together, so that we can compete not as individual institutions, but as Team Singapore. Every one of our institutions and students has capabilities and strengths and when pulled together, they allow us to become more than the sum of our individual parts, and compete together on the world stage.

10. So I am glad to share that we are taking the next step in our IHLs' transformation to meet the needs of the AI age. Our Autonomous Universities, Polytechnics and ITE have come together to develop Baseline AI Competency Frameworks across their respective sectors – one framework for the Autonomous Universities, and one framework for the Polytechnics and ITE.

1. What will these baseline competency frameworks seek to achieve?
2. They will establish a common baseline across our IHLs, so that every student in Singapore – regardless of which institution they attend — receives a consistent and strong foundation in AI competencies.
3. We are designing this as a deliberate step-up from the AI exposure students will receive in our secondary schools and junior colleges. This seek to ensure a coherent as well as cumulative learning journey from school, through the IHLs, and into the workforce.

11. Built around MOE's "Four Learns" that MOE has developed, the frameworks will ensure that every IHL student has the opportunity to develop a range of skills, including:

1. understanding what AI can and cannot do, should and should not do;
2. learning with AI in ways that deepen understanding rather than replace thinking;
3. using AI to analyse problems, generate insights, and create better solutions; and
4. critically evaluating AI, including its ethical, social, and legal implications.

12. These are not just technical skills. They are the habits of mind we want every IHL student to carry with them beyond graduation.

13. Our IHLs are already refreshing their curriculum to bring these skillsets and competencies to life. For example:

1. All Year 1 ITE students undergo a learning module on AI Prompt Engineering, where they are taught how to craft appropriate questions to obtain relevant responses from AI systems.
2. While NTU is using AI to personalise learning, as well as to teach and deploy AI agents to solve real-world problems, across 40% of its undergraduate courses. It will also have a mandatory course, Science and Technology for Humanity, which will emphasise the responsible use of AI.

14. Some of our students have also taken the initiative to stretch and challenge themselves with AI.

1. Let me introduce you to Dylan Pon, a Year One Business Economics & Political Science student from NUS. He is one of many who has taken it upon himself to weave AI meaningfully into his studies — not to cut corners, but to go further in learning. Let's play a video.
2. [Video plays]
3. Dylan's approach is a good one: using AI not as a shortcut, but as a tool to make him and his classmates think harder and doing more.

15. Even as we integrate AI into our curriculum, pedagogy must drive how we apply technology to education, and not the other way round. We must be clear that AI must never replace deep, human learning in our schools and Institutes of Higher Learning. As NUS President Professor Tan Eng Chye rightly pointed out in his commentary in the Straits Times on Monday, this struggle of learning – researching, questioning and grappling – is a fundamental part of learning and education. So even though AI can shortcut or short-circuit this process, with quick answers and access to information, our approach must be clear. We must continue to ensure that our students are given opportunities to experience such learning struggles. Ultimately, our graduates should not just be competent and confident users of AI which are tools, powerful tools, but people who can lead it, steer it, and question it.

16. Our IHLs will infuse these baseline competencies I mentioned earlier into compulsory modules for all incoming students from AY2027. Students already enrolled in our IHLs will also have opportunities to build these abilities through enhancements to their existing curriculum. The Workgroups will continue developing these frameworks in close consultation with industry sectors, ensuring they remain current and grounded in the realities of the workplace and this is very important.

Developing Domain-Specific AI Competencies

17. Building a common baseline is only the beginning. The future will belong to professionals who not only have the confidence to use such tools across common tasks, but also the mastery to combine and apply both AI and their deep knowledge meaningfully within their own discipline.

18. We must also help those already in the workforce to harness such tools effectively. Continuous upskilling and lifelong learning is not a one-off effort. It is a career-long commitment, and one that our IHLs must support.

19. That is why, from AY2027, all IHL students, including adult CET learners, will be given opportunities to develop AI competencies within their own domain or discipline, as part of their full qualification programmes. Let me use an example to illustrate this:

1. Let's look at students in the Product Design and Innovation module at NUS's College of Design and Engineering. They are taught to use AI tools the same way the industry does — for productivity gains across the entire design process.
2. For example, when defining problem statements, they consult Large Language Models like ChatGPT to sharpen and refine their thinking.
3. When brainstorming, tools like Miro help them rapidly generate ideas and organise them according to clear themes.
4. And when they prototype their products, tools like Figma Make allow them to turn written descriptions into prototypes without having to build everything from scratch.
5. Even as students are using these AI tools, they are still taught the fundamentals: deep disciplinary knowledge and design judgement. This allows them to apply such domain knowledge when using AI to create and critically evaluate output, refining or rejecting those that fall short of user needs or design objectives.

20. Our IHLs will continue to work closely with industry representatives to understand the economy's evolving needs, and continually adjust their offerings to help prepare students to be work-ready.

1. Through our IHLs' Advisory Committees and Boards, and Sector Coordinating Teams (SCTs), industry experts are at the table, they give direct feedback on what the workforce needs and where it is headed.

21. Similarly, our overall approach to AI, and our baseline AI competencies, will need to remain dynamic and agile, and be regularly refreshed, as AI tools and applications advance as well. So even as our IHLs coordinate more tightly and set a common baseline, each institution must continue to develop its own approaches suited to its students' and courses' contexts, and pilot new methods of teaching and learning, that may serve as pathfinders for the broader sector in time to come. So continually piloting, remembering the broad frame, sharing knowledge with one another, competing as Team Singapore, looking out always for our students, adult learners, and then calibrating, assessing, adjusting along the way.

Closing

22. Ultimately, shaping the future of education is about shaping the future of our society. No framework or policy can do that alone.

1. It takes institutions that evolve, educators who pass on the love for learning, and industry partners who invest in our next generation.
2. When these ingredients come together, we create an environment where students can try, adapt, and grow with confidence. That is the environment we are seeking to build.

23. To the students here today, my message is simple: do not fear AI, but do not follow it blindly. Learn how it works. Test it. Challenge it. Use it to stretch our imagination, deepen our learning, problem solve, and to do good. Always apply our judgement, wisdom, and critical thinking. And be discerning.

24. NUS began 120 years ago to serve the needs of that time. I am confident that you, together with our other IHLs, will continue to rise to the needs of the next era. And I am equally confident that our students will not just adapt to an AI-transformed and disruptive world, but help define it. Thank you.