NCS is reskilling its way to 300 forward-deployed AI engineers
NCS has opened an AI Mission Centre in Singapore and set a number on it: grow its Intelligentisation Forward-Deployed Engineers from about 100 to more than 300 within two years. Some will be new hires. Many will be people already inside the business, reskilled into the role.
Forward-deployed is the important word. These are domain experts who sit with client teams and get AI into production, vendor-agnostic, rather than engineers who build in a back room and throw it over the fence. Tripling that bench is a bet that the scarce skill is not model building. It is the person who can stand in a client's operation and work out where the thing actually goes.
The rest of the people plan is layered. Every employee gets AI fluency training covering prompting, responsible AI and working with agents. More than 2,000 AI practitioners are being upskilled to build and ship production agentic solutions. Software engineering roles are being redesigned so business analysis, development and testing sit together in smaller AI-enabled teams. Graduates come in through bond-free work-study pathways called Nucleus, Fusion and Ignite.
Alongside the centre came three partnerships, with Changi Airport Group, the Institute of Mental Health and Life3 Biotech, which give the new engineers somewhere real to point their work.
What I like here is that the roles are being redesigned at the same time as the training. Most organisations do it the other way around. They run fluency sessions, then wonder why nothing changes, because the job description still assumes the old workflow. Merging analysis, build and test into one team is a structural decision. The training then has somewhere to land.
The part to watch is the reskilling share of that 300. Hiring forward-deployed talent is expensive and slow in Singapore right now. Growing it from inside depends on whether existing staff get real client time while they learn, not just modules.
If you are working out how to build that kind of applied capability across a team, our AI Training programs are built around real work rather than tool tours.
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