NCS targets more than 300 AI deployment engineers with new centre
The Singapore initiative includes partnerships covering airport surveillance, hospital patient identification and biomanufacturing.
NCS plans to increase its team of specialist AI deployment engineers from 100 to more than 300 within two years, supporting its newly launched AI Mission Centre in Singapore. The company said it would recruit externally and retrain employees to reach that target.
The centre is designed to support organisations as they shift from experimental AI projects to wider operational deployment. NCS calls its specialists Intelligentisation Forward-Deployed Engineers, or iFDEs. They work inside customer teams, contributing industry knowledge and expertise that is independent of any particular technology vendor.
Alongside the launch, NCS announced three memorandums of understanding to develop AI applications with partners:
- Changi Airport Group: Apply advanced AI to improve and scale iFerret, a runway monitoring system jointly developed to detect foreign object debris. Testing will take place in operating airport environments before global deployment.
- Institute of Mental Health: Jointly explore digital care solutions, starting with Bio-ID, which uses facial recognition to identify patients. The institute will test it in hospital wards and help refine the technology.
- Life3 Biotech: Combine AI with advanced bioprocessing to optimise biomanufacturing, with the aim of making micro-organism production more efficient, scalable and sustainable.
NCS said the centre would use its Sunshine.AI technology to help customers select problems to address, reshape workflows and trial systems during live operations. It also intends to develop reusable products from deployments that prove successful.
The company said its training efforts span its 15,000 employees, with advanced instruction for over 2,000 AI practitioners. It also offers bond-free work-study routes for graduates from universities, polytechnics and ITE.
