Singapore's Accountant-General's Department is teaching 4,000 finance officers AI judgement
Public finance is one of the few places where a confident wrong answer from an AI tool can turn into a governance problem very quickly. So it is worth noticing how Singapore's Accountant-General's Department has framed its AI training: not as a productivity drive, but as a question of professional judgement.
The department has renewed a three-year memorandum of understanding with the Institute of Singapore Chartered Accountants, widening the partnership to cover AI, sustainability, assurance and financial governance. Under it, AGD is supporting its public finance and internal audit workforce of about 4,000 officers to build AI and digital skills, including through ISCA's AI Fluency Programme. More than 400 officers have already enrolled, and the program is being extended progressively across the Public Service.
The training covers practical applications, responsible use of AI and, in the department's words, the professional judgement needed to work effectively with AI-generated information. The aim is a common foundation across public finance teams. Alongside it, public agencies are being brought into AGD's Accredited Training Organisation network so officers can get practical experience and mentorship inside their own agencies. Twenty-seven agencies have joined so far.
Esther Wee, Accountant-General and Chief of Government Finance, tied it to trust. As technology changes how finance work is done, she said, sustaining public trust will require officers to strengthen their professional judgement and build new capabilities to take on new responsibilities. ISCA president Lee Boon Teck was more direct about the limits: AI can help finance professionals work faster and analyse information better, "but it cannot replace the professional judgement, ethical responsibility and accountability that are central to our profession."
Four hundred enrolled out of 4,000 is a start, not a finish, and the progressive rollout will matter more than the signing. The useful design choice here is pairing classroom fluency with mentorship inside agencies, which is where officers will meet the messy cases that a course cannot simulate. Judgement about AI output is learned on real files, with someone experienced checking the reasoning.
That is the kind of capability our Critical Thinking workshops are designed to build: knowing when a tool should inform a decision and when a person still has to make it.
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