SINGAPORE, March 12, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - US cloud software giant Salesforce said Wednesday it planned to invest $1.0 billion in Singapore over the next five years to boost the use of artificial intelligence agents (AI) in the workforce.

The island state has been increasingly turning to technology to solve its workforce problem as it struggles to deal with a declining birthrate and an ageing population.

The investment aims to accelerate the adoption in Singapore and the region of Agentforce, which enables businesses to create and manage AI agents designed to independently perform tasks such as sales, customer service and marketing.

Unlike chatbots that follow a preset script, AI agents are more advanced as they can think, decide and take action and complete tasks such as booking appointments or processing requests.

"We are in an incredible new era of digital labour where every business will be transformed by autonomous agents that augment the work of humans, revolutionising productivity and enabling every company to scale without limits," Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff said in a statement.

"Singapore is at the forefront of this shift, and as the world's largest provider of digital labour through our Agentforce platform, Salesforce is thrilled to expand our work with the business community and our longtime partners in the region to drive innovation, productivity and growth."

In an interview with CNBC, Benioff said Salesforce had been in Singapore for the past 25 years and described it as the hub of Southeast Asia.

"We're investing another billion dollars in our operations here and we don't just do sales and marketing. We also do extremely advanced artificial intelligence development," he added.

"We have dozens of... the very best AI engineers in the world here in our Singapore research centre."

Salesforce noted that Singapore "has been dealing with a slowing growth rate of the labour force, contributed by an ageing population and declining birth rates".

In a separate joint announcement, Salesforce and Singapore Airlines said the carrier would use Agentforce to "streamline its customer service operations".