A story-led community evening on what AI changed in the work of ten practitioners across telecoms, banking, healthcare, academia, industrial AI and documentary film — and what it did not.
On 27 July 2026 at the Singtel Academy, CFTE, Global Women in AI and Singtel put ten practitioners on one stage to describe what AI changed in their actual work, and what it did not.
The speakers came from a telco, a bank, a hospital, a university, an industrial AI startup and a documentary studio. They disagreed on plenty. They converged on one thing: the constraint is no longer the technology.
More than 160 people were in the room. Every talk has since been written up and the articles are collected below alongside the quotes that framed the evening.
The clearest results came from defined tasks close to a real user need, where AI released capacity without removing human judgement.
AI added to a process built around manual checks and legacy systems produces little. The end to end workflow has to be mapped first.
Colleague facing assistance and autonomous customer facing action were treated as different categories, with review and escalation retained for high impact decisions.
Token, licence, compute and assurance costs may decide which use cases survive at scale, so feasibility demonstrations are no longer enough.
Once systems plan and act, ownership, permissions, auditability, incentive alignment and resilience matter as much as model performance.
The strongest cross cutting finding. Professionals lack practical understanding of what AI can do, where it fails and how to redesign work around it.
Singtel 8G Academy, Level 2, 8 George Street, Singapore 049144