Singapore’s ‘Sandwiched’ Professionals Face a New Challenge as AI Reshapes Jobs.
As retrenchments rise amid restructuring, professionals in Singapore’s information, communications and media sectors face growing pressure from AI. We look at which roles are changing, the tools reshaping work and the skills workers need to stay relevant.
TL;DR
● Singapore added jobs in 2026, but retrenchments are also rising as companies restructure and invest in AI.
● AI is increasingly automating parts of professional work, particularly in tech, media and communications roles.
● The workers adapting best are those using AI to enhance productivity while focusing on judgement, problem-solving and stakeholder management.
● Key tools worth learning include GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, ChatGPT, Canva AI, Adobe Firefly and CapCut AI.
● In the AI era, long-term employability will depend less on protecting a specific job and more on continuously adapting to new technologies and ways of working.
Singapore's economy keeps adding jobs
Total employment grew by 10,700 in the second quarter of 2026, up from 9,400 in the first, marking the 19th straight quarter of growth since the end of 2021. On paper, that is a labour market still holding steady.
Yet for many professionals working in information, communications and media (ICM), the mood feels markedly different from the headline figures.
Retrenchments rose to 4,500 in the second quarter of 2026, up from 3,830 in the previous quarter. According to the Ministry of Manpower's advance estimates in the same report, the increase was concentrated in outward-oriented sectors, particularly Information & Communications, and was largely driven by business restructuring rather than an economy-wide downturn.¹2
This creates a paradox that many PMETs recognise immediately. Jobs are being created, but confidence in job security feels fragile. Organisations continue hiring in some areas while reducing headcount in others. AI investments are accelerating while concerns about job security are growing.
For professionals in Singapore's ICM sector, the question is no longer whether AI will affect their careers. It is how quickly changes will arrive and whether these professionals will be ready when they do.
The “sandwiched middle”
NTUC Assistant Secretary-General Patrick Tay has described PMETs as a "sandwiched" group.²
They are often expected to perform at executive levels, manage teams, oversee projects and deliver strategic outcomes. Yet, many lack the decision-making authority of senior leadership. At the same time, they do not always enjoy the same collective protections traditionally available to rank-and-file workers.
As restructuring accelerates across industries, this middle group increasingly finds itself exposed to pressures from both directions.
The concern is particularly acute in sectors where AI can automate significant portions of knowledge work, including software development, content creation, marketing, research, administration and project management.
AI - A help or a threat?
Ask around a Singapore tech team or newsroom this year, and the answer usually comes in two halves. AI has quietly made part of their jobs easier. It has also made people wonder how much of their jobs will be left.
A senior manager in branded services, who spoke to Mothership this year under the name Shannon, said AI now handles her deadline tracking, one less thing to hold in her head through a busy week. But the same tools have crept into the part of her job she once thought was safest, reviewing and rewriting content. "AI is already so good at grammar checks, rewriting, and reviewing content," she said. "It feels like more and more of what I do can be automated." Her worry has since widened. If AI gets good enough to summarise discussions and track action items, what is left of the coordinating work that fills most of her day?
Others land somewhere more hopeful. A manager referred to as Daniel gave every member of his team a ChatGPT Pro subscription and said it visibly lifted the quality of their reports. "My staff no longer have any excuse that they do not know how to do a piece of work," he said, adding that it freed him to spend more time developing their critical thinking instead of chasing down basic research.³
As Mr Tay noted in Parliament, AI remains a double-edged sword. For many workers, it can feel like both an opportunity and a threat.⁴
Why AI is different and what makes workers resilient in the AI era
Technology has always changed jobs.
The difference with generative AI is that it is not primarily targeting manual labour or repetitive physical tasks. Instead, it is affecting work traditionally associated with knowledge workers, such as research and analysis, writing and editing, and documentation and reporting.
Many of these activities sit at the core of modern PMET work.
The professionals adapting most successfully are not necessarily the most technical. Instead, they are often the individuals who combine AI tools with strong domain expertise, critical thinking and business judgement.
For example, a marketer who can generate campaign ideas using ChatGPT may be useful. But a marketer who can evaluate those ideas, understand customer behaviour and decide which strategy aligns with business objectives is significantly harder to replace.
Increasingly, while AI is automating execution, human value is shifting toward judgement, context, communication and decision-making.
The tools people actually reach for
What tech professionals are using
For software developers and engineers, GitHub Copilot remains the most widely adopted AI coding assistant in enterprise environments.⁵ However, the AI coding space is becoming more competitive, and developers are increasingly moving toward multi-tool usage rather than relying on a single platform. A 2025 Stack Overflow survey found that over 84% of developers are using or planning to use software tools or platforms, and of those developers, 54% use 6+ tools to assist in their coding.⁶
Cursor, an AI-native code editor built on VS Code, is gaining traction among startups and indie developers for its tightly integrated “AI-first” workflow. Claude Code, built on Anthropic’s models, is increasingly used for complex reasoning, debugging, and multi-file refactoring, where deeper context is required. Replit continues to grow as a rapid prototyping and learning platform, with AI features that significantly reduce time-to-first-working-prototype.
Across these tools, a clear pattern of developers switching between tools depending on the task they need to execute is now emerging.
The key takeaway is that no single tool is becoming dominant across all use cases. As adoption data shows, AI tool adoption is moving away from single-platform dependency toward a more fragmented, diverse ecosystem of specialised assistants.⁷
What media professionals are using
The media and creative industries are experiencing a similar shift, with generative AI adoption accelerating across global and regional workflows. According to a study by McKinsey back in 2023, the assessment was that up to 60-70% of marketing and content production tasks can be partially automated using current generative AI tools, particularly in drafting, ideation and asset creation.⁸
ChatGPT has evolved into an essential everyday resource for creative ideation, research, and initial drafting within many media and content teams. OpenAI stated that its platform reached nearly 1 billion weekly active users worldwide by the middle of 2026⁹, expanding on its 2024 footprint when it was utilised by 11% of professionals for creative brainstorming and 30% for corporate tasks, showcasing its thorough adaptation into mainstream business procedures.¹⁰
Canva remains widely used because it allows non-designers to create professional-looking content quickly, and the company reported surpassing 260 million monthly active users in 2025, driven largely by enterprise and small business adoption.¹¹
Adobe Firefly is increasingly preferred for commercial work due to its emphasis on licensed training data and intellectual property considerations, with Adobe noting strong enterprise uptake as firms prioritise “commercially safe” generative assets.
CapCut has become a dominant platform for short-form video production, particularly for TikTok and Instagram content, with Sensor Tower data consistently ranking it among the top global video editing apps by downloads in 2025.¹²
While these platforms began as traditional productivity tools, they have rapidly evolved into AI-integrated hubs. They are driving adoption not by replacing traditional workflows, but by embedding generative capabilities directly into the tools professionals already use. By providing commercially safe generative assets (such as Adobe Firefly) or workflow-integrated design automation (such as Canva AI), these platforms have made Gen AI accessible and operationally safe for enterprise teams who might otherwise be hesitant to adopt raw AI models.
Other commonly used tools include:
● Otter AI for transcription and meeting notes, which has 35 million users a year in 2025
● ElevenLabs for voice generation, which has seen rapid adoption in media localisation and audiobook production
● Midjourney for image generation, which has been widely cited as one of the most-used AI image tools in creative communities
What these tools share is not the ability to replace creativity entirely.
Rather than fully replacing human creativity, these tools streamline routine tasks and shorten production timelines. Adobe reported that 93% of creators find creative AI enables faster content output, while 87% credit it with accelerating their audience and business growth in its 2026 Creator’s Toolkit report.¹³
Career resilience in the AI era
For professionals wondering where to focus their efforts, career resilience increasingly comes down to a mix of individual capabilities and system-level support.
On the individual side, workers are generally better positioned for the AI era if they can:
✓ Use at least one AI tool confidently in their daily work
✓ Evaluate AI-generated outputs critically
✓ Solve business problems rather than simply complete tasks
✓ Communicate effectively with stakeholders
✓ Learn new tools quickly as technology evolves
✓ Demonstrate measurable outcomes and impact
✓ Build professional networks and industry connections
✓ Continuously update skills through structured learning
At the same time, career resilience is not solely an individual responsibility. Singapore’s labour movement is building support structures to help workers adapt to rapid technological change. Initiatives such as NTUC’s AI-Ready SG, Company Training Committees, as well as collectives such as the Tech Talent Assembly (TTAB), the Creative Media and Publishing Union (CMPU) and the Visual, Audio, Creative Content Professionals Association (VICPA) all aim to strengthen workforce readiness.
The Tripartite Jobs Council further brings together employers, unions and government agencies to coordinate transformation efforts across industries.
For workers facing uncertainty, these efforts offer access to networks, guidance and collective support during a period of accelerating change.
Beyond job security
Prime Minister Lawrence Wong put it plainly at this year's May Day Rally.
Jobs will change. Some will disappear. The pace of change will accelerate.¹⁴
In that sense, career resilience is becoming less about protecting a particular job and more about building the capability to thrive across many different ones.
For Singapore's sandwiched middle, mastering this kind of career adaptability may be the defining challenge and opportunity of the AI decade.
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1. Ministry of Manpower, “Labour Market Advance Release, Second Quarter 2026,” 31 Jul 2026, https://www.mom.gov.sg/newsroom/press-releases/2026/0731-labour-market-advance-release-2q-2026.2. Patrick Tay Teck Guan, Speech on the Parliamentary Motion “An Artificial Intelligence (AI) Transition with No Jobless Growth,” NTUC, 6 May 2026, https://www.ntuc.org.sg/uportal/news/Speech-on-An-Artificial-Intelligence-Transition-with-No-Jobless-Growth-By-Patrick-Tay/.3. “Is AI really coming for my job? Or can it make my work easier?” Mothership, Jul 2026, https://mothership.sg/2026/07/ai-your-job/.4. Patrick Tay Teck Guan, Speech on the Parliamentary Motion “An Artificial Intelligence (AI) Transition with No Jobless Growth,” NTUC, 6 May 2026, https://www.ntuc.org.sg/uportal/news/Speech-on-An-Artificial-Intelligence-Transition-with-No-Jobless-Growth-By-Patrick-Tay/.
5. JetBrains, “Which AI Coding Tools Do Developers Actually Use at Work?” Apr 2026, https://blog.jetbrains.com/research/2026/04/which-ai-coding-tools-do-developers-actually-use-at-work/6. 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/.7. “AI Coding Statistics — Adoption, Productivity & Market Metrics,” GetPanto, 2026, https://www.getpanto.ai/blog/ai-coding-assistant-statistics.8. McKinsey & Company, “The Economic Potential of Generative AI: The Next Productivity Frontier,” Jun 2023, https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-economic-potential-of-generative-ai-the-next-productivity-frontier.
9. TechCrunch, “OpenAI’s ChatGPT Now Has 100 Million Weekly Active Users,” 2 Feb 2026, https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/27/chatgpt-reaches-900m-weekly-active-users/.10. OpenAI, “How people are using ChatGPT” 15 Sep 2025, https://openai.com/index/how-people-are-using-chatgpt/.11. Canva, “A transformative year for Canva: 2025 in review” 16 Dec 2025, https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/canva-2025-wrap/.12. Sensor Tower, “Top 5 Photo and Video Apps in South America Q3 2025” 25 Oct 2025, https://sensortower.com/blog/2025-q3-unified-top-5-photo%20and%20video-units-south_am-615c8a30ad269d38a8b6acd0.13. Adobe, “87 Percent of Creators Say Creative AI Is Growing Their Business and Audience, According to Adobe’s 2026 Creators’ Toolkit Report” 16 Jun 2026, https://news.adobe.com/news/2026/06/creators-toolkit-report-2026.14. Prime Minister’s Office Singapore, “PM Lawrence Wong at May Day Rally 2026,” 1 May 2026, https://www.pmo.gov.sg/newsroom/pm-lawrence-wong-at-may-day-rally-2026/.