askST Jobs: Your Industry Is Declining Due to AI—Now What?
Source: The Straits Times
Straits Times askST Jobs column explains why feeling secure in an AI-disrupted industry is a dangerous illusion. Experts advise workers to audit their roles, become AI-bilingual, and redesign workflows before disruption arrives.
The question is no longer whether AI will affect your job, but how and when. In the latest askST Jobs column, The Straits Times tackles a question many Singaporean workers are quietly asking: “My job feels secure, but my industry is in decline due to AI. Should I be worried?” The short answer, according to two HR and career experts, is yes—but not for the reasons most people expect.
Arthoven Ng, managing director of Overpowered, warns that the greatest risk isn’t outright replacement by AI—it’s being outstripped by AI-enabled peers who are significantly more productive, reducing the number of people needed to produce the same output. David Leong, chairman of PeopleWorldwide Consulting, puts it bluntly: “There is no safety. Know that the absence of immediate disruption does not mean the absence of future risk.”
The column outlines a three-level framework for assessing AI impact: at the business level (customers may no longer need your service), the workflow level (parts of your job can be redesigned), and the task level (hours of work reduced to a few good prompts). The recommended response is practical—audit your role honestly, identify tasks exposed versus those requiring human judgment, and redesign one real workflow using AI tools.
Both experts emphasise that the goal isn’t to become an “AI prompt collector” but to deepen the specific expertise that makes human judgment valuable in an AI-augmented world. Continuous learning, they argue, should become part of a worker’s professional identity rather than a reactive measure. The workers most at risk are often those who believe they have ample time to react—history shows technological transitions “tend to appear gradual and then become sudden.”
Why it matters for Singapore: With AI salaries climbing up to five times faster than the broader market here, and the government pushing the Economic Strategy Review’s retraining targets for 100,000 workers, this advice isn’t theoretical. Singapore’s workforce is staring down a structural shift that rewards proactive adaptation—and punishes those who mistake temporary comfort for long-term safety. For a city-state that treats human capital as its only natural resource, getting this transition right is existential.