What Singapore's SMEs told us at SME Digitalisation Day 2026.

Last Friday, Trusted Hub had a booth at SME Digitalisation Day at ITE. Over forty ready-to-deploy solutions were on show, some from companies like ours, others from ITE's own student and staff projects, live demos ran all day, and hundreds of business owners walked the floor asking the same honest question in different words. What can this actually do for me.

We set up our booth around one idea: the full stack, from data to knowledge to action. Not a single tool solving a single problem, but the whole chain, digitisation, enrichment, and agentic workflow, working together the way it does inside our own operations. People described what they actually deal with day to day, and watched something get built for their exact situation in front of them. That is the part that stayed with us after the event ended.

01What the grassroots actually told us

Acting Minister Jasmin Lau opened the day with a number worth repeating. SMEs make up 99 percent of Singapore's enterprises and employ over 70 percent of our workforce. That is not a statistic sitting in a policy paper somewhere. That is the aunty running a wholesale supplies business we spoke to at 10am, the one-man logistics operator who came by after lunch, the SME association leader who spent twenty minutes at our booth asking increasingly specific questions about data ownership.

We talked to people across the entire spectrum that morning. Trade association leaders thinking about their whole membership. Micro SMEs running lean on a skeleton crew. Single-man business owners who are, quite literally, every department in their own company at once. Almost everyone converged on the same underlying fear. Minister Lau put it plainly in her address: most SME owners operate without an in-house IT or technology team, margins are tight, teams are small, and manpower is hard to find. Digital transformation can feel like something you get to only after everything more urgent is already done.

Minister Lau's challenge to the room was simple. Ask yourself what one thing in your day feels the most painful, or takes the most time. That is exactly the starting point our Trusted ActionVerse platform is built around, a guided conversation that takes "I don't know where to start" and turns it into a working prototype without a consultant, a dev team, or months of waiting. We watched that exact moment happen at our booth more than once. Someone would arrive with no clear ask, describe the mess their WhatsApp-based order tracking had become, and leave with a workflow already sketched out in front of them.

02A nation that has never waited to be handed anything

The government's own commitment matches the scale of the challenge. The National AI Impact Programme aims to bring 10,000 enterprises into AI adoption. There is a target to make 100,000 workers AI-bilingual. ITE and ASME are launching a Group-Based Upgrading programme so SMEs do not have to walk this path alone, learning alongside thirty-nine others in the same cohort, facing the same fears together. This is what a country mobilising looks like when it takes a challenge seriously.

We recognise that instinct because it is the same one Singapore has run on since long before any of us were born. This is a nation with no natural resources of its own. No oil, no minerals, no vast hinterland to draw from. What we have always had is a fierce, stubborn insistence on building our own capability rather than waiting for someone else to hand it to us. From a fishing village with nothing to trade but its own resourcefulness, to a nation that manufactures its own water and guards its own reserves, and now, increasingly, has to decide whether it will build its own AI or simply rent someone else's.

"We have never had abundant resources. What we have always had is the will to build what we need ourselves."

That is not a metaphor we reach for lightly. It is the reason Trusted Hub exists, and it is the resolve Friday's conversations only deepened. There has never been a more urgent moment to make sure Singapore's AI capabilities remain sovereign, independent, and genuinely ours. Not because foreign AI providers are hostile, but because a nation's intelligence infrastructure, like its water and its reserves, is not something wise to leave in someone else's hands indefinitely.

03Why this matters more with National Day a few days away

Every SME we spoke to on Friday is, in its own small way, doing exactly what this country has always done. Starting with limited resources, refusing to be intimidated by a bigger competitor's head start, and finding a way to build something that lasts. Minister Lau said it herself: our people remain at the centre of everything, and our workers must have the confidence to try. That confidence is not abstract. It is a business owner deciding to spend a Friday morning at an exhibition hall instead of behind their counter, because they believe their business is worth investing an hour in.

We came away from Friday with a longer list of problems to solve and a shorter list of excuses for not solving them. That feels like the right way to walk into National Day this year. Not with certainty that everything is already sovereign and secure, but with the same resolve every generation before us has carried, that whatever Singapore needs next, we would rather build it ourselves.