82% of Singapore Firms Have Rolled Back AI Customer Agents, Sinch Study Finds

Singapore leads the Asia-Pacific region in deploying AI customer communication agents, yet 82 percent of enterprises here have already rolled back or shut down at least one such deployment, according to a new report from communications platform Sinch. The rollback rate is eight percentage points above the global average, painting a picture of a market that moves fast but also fails forward.

The study, which surveyed 2,527 senior decision-makers across 10 countries, found that 72 percent of Singapore enterprises have AI agents in production — the highest rate in APAC. But governance has not kept pace. Only 27 percent of Singapore firms report having fully mature guardrails in place, the lowest share in the region and eight points below the global average. The most common consequence of failure was support team overload, cited by 44 percent of Singapore respondents.

Wendy Johnstone, Sinch's EVP for APAC, characterised Singapore's approach as deliberate rather than hesitant: local business leaders are channeling resources toward reliability over rapid expansion. Yet she also warned that the real risk across APAC is not moving too slowly, but scaling on infrastructure unable to keep up. Only 7 percent of Singapore firms said their current communications provider fully meets their needs, while 91 percent are actively evaluating alternatives.

Why it matters for Singapore: The Sinch data exposes a gap between Singapore's ambitions as an AI-first economy and the operational reality on the ground. High deployment rates alongside high rollback rates suggest that enterprises are treating AI agents as experiments rather than engineered products. As AI customer agents become front-line interfaces for banking, healthcare, and government services, getting the governance and infrastructure right is becoming a competitive necessity, not just a compliance checkbox.