A personal initiative of Laurence Liew · Author of AI-First Nation
AI-First Nation takes you inside AI Singapore’s programmes, from 100 Experiments and the AI Apprenticeship Programme to AI Makerspace, LearnAI and AIRI, and turns them into a blueprint for building an AI-ready organisation.
The track record
AIFN Insights
New essays roughly every week: what worked, what broke, and what it means for organisations building AI readiness.
The AIAP Field Guide now ends at forward deployed engineer — the right ending for the guide, the wrong first target for most people. My estimate: one in ten, perhaps one in twenty AI roles will be FDE roles. The other nineteen are AI engineer roles. We need both.
AI For Everyone rebuilt as a static, signup-free, tracking-free course with a Try-it on your own work in every lesson and the AIRI readiness thread end to end.
Agents got ID cards in 2026, from Microsoft Entra to a government card in Beijing. The documentation says identity designed to be created, tracked and traced to a named human owner
OpenAI ran a three-day FDE bootcamp with AI Singapore. What a forward deployed engineer does, why the AIAP graduate is already close to one, and the three gaps I will name.
Nine years of national AI programmes, distilled into one free website. Why ai4sme.org exists, what is on it, and why it had to launch now.
AI For Everyone taught 300,000 professionals. AI has since left the workplace, so I rebuilt the explanation around one hawker stall, for ages 8 to 80.
While updating the aifirstnation.org website I rewatched the short film Google Cloud made about AI Singapore in 2023, and decided to write the AIAP story down properly: the model, why it changed from 2+7 to 3+6 months, the new AIAP for Industry, and what it has produced.
An open standard that nobody can run is not a standard. It is a document. I have spent a long time learning the difference, and airihub.io, which I am launching today, is what I have learned put into practice. Start with the framework.
Most AI training treats a hospital director the same as a factory supervisor. That is why it does not stick. I have watched this play out for years, across more than a thousand organisations. A company decides its people need to be “AI ready.” It buys a course, or builds one.
