apidays Singapore on 15-16 April 2025 shared new innovations and best practices on the theme “Where APIs meet AI: Building tomorrow's intelligent ecosystems”.
In his keynote: “Redefining Work -- How AI Agents are Changing the Way We Work”, Sau Sheong CHANG, Chief Technology Officer and Deputy Chief Executive at GovTech, shared how AI is shifting from a support tool to an autonomous collaborator. In an engaging mix of high level strategy and “roll up your sleeves” hands-on, he demonstrated how AI agents streamline workflows using N8N and Crew AI.
The second keynote on “Top Technology Trends Impacting API Development, 2025” was presented by Manjunath Bhat, VP analyst and Gartner Fellow, Software Engineering Practice at Gartner. Manjunath described how organisations’ adoption of AI follows stages: from enhancing individual productivity with AI assistants, to improving team workflows using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), to transforming business models by automating entire functions. He highlighted that the security risks demand strong governance controls, the benefits of vibe coding may be offset by an increase in technical debt, and that we should aim to solve previously unsolved problems rather than just improving productivity.
Continuing the AI theme, the Generation AI tracks explored the mechanics of AI Agents, the role of APIs in enabling them, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) , and the need for governance to ensure trustable AI. Industry-specific use cases included healthcare, banking and infrastructure.
Shameek Kundu, Executive Director, AI Verify at IMDA, shared how trust remains a barrier to AI adoption, making APIs and governance essential for AI reliability. AI Verify Foundation’s mission is to ensure transparency, accountability, and compliance, promoting AI governance, particularly in high-stakes industries such as healthcare, finance, and law. Shameek outlined the Four Pillars of AI Trust – Responsible AI design, deployment safeguards, pre-launch evaluation, and continuous monitoring.
Sutowo Wong, Director, Health Analytics Division at Ministry of Health Singapore (MOH), shared how data drives health services, infrastructure and manpower planning. He outlined the key drivers of healthcare cost: Population growth and ageing, changes in consumption level due to disease or consumer preferences, inflation and increases in unit cost of healthcare due to new technology and drugs. Sutowo went on to describe how MOH applies machine learning techniques to identify gaps and design tailored health interventions for each segment of the population. And he outlined MOH’s programme evaluation framework has been integrated into their policy and resourcing cycle to identify programmes that offer real value for money.
Aki Ranin, deep tech & AI investor, 2x founder and published author, explained exactly what AI agents are, and how they have evolved from machine learning to agent-to-agent communication. He explored Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Facebooks A2A frameworks.
Other notable AI presentations included:
- “The API Playbook for AI”, by Shin Wee CHUANG, Founder & CEO at pand.ai
- "Serving RAGs to Empower Relationship Managers in Banking”, by Enguerran Dallet, Executive Director, Data Science, Group Data Office and Sherbelle Seah, Data Scientist, AI Lab at OCBC
- "Leading Digital Health Transformation in Singapore”, by Matthew Chua, Assistant Professor, Biomedical Informatics at National University of Singapore
- "AI Landfall at Keppel”, by Audrey Ong, Director Transformation & Innovation at Keppel Group
- "Taming AI: The Challenges of Setting Guardrails for Trustable AI” by Koo Ping Shung, AI Trust & Community Advisor at AIMX Network
Why do professionals come to apidays Singapore? In the words of one of our speakers, Jakub “Kuba” Rusicka:
“Why I love apidays in particular:
- Because it's all about content, no sales pitches
- Safe environment to share both successes and failures
- And learn from each other and upskill together through open conversation”