At a closed-door session with Singapore CEOs in October, Microsoft’s chief of commercial business Judson Althoff was asked whether he could predict how much a company would spend on AI tokens this year; he said he could not, but could help determine the “right amount” of tokens for a given workflow, recounting the exchange in an interview with The Business Times. Althoff said Singapore firms will pay a “certain premium” but that “there is a precision element to operations and culture here that does not tolerate waste,” adding there is “a very low tolerance for inefficiency.” He said that in 2025 questions revolved around AI experimentation, while this year queries focused more on measuring financial returns, though companies worldwide, including in Singapore, are in the “very, very early phases” of seeing financial gains from AI. Microsoft’s Global AI Diffusion report recorded Singapore’s AI usage rate at 64.3 per cent in the second quarter of 2026, against a global average of 18.8 per cent, and a separate Microsoft report noted 17 per cent of firms in the Republic are classified as frontier firms, against 10 per cent globally. Microsoft recently announced it will expand its presence in the city-state through a US$5.5 billion investment lasting from 2025 to 2029; Althoff said Microsoft has three data centres operating in the country and is in talks to expand its digital infrastructure footprint.