SingaporePublic sector2023 – ongoingGovTech Singapore (Open Government Products)
Pair AI assistant for public officers
Singapore built its own ChatGPT-style assistant for civil servants, and about 98,500 used it each month by mid-2026
Problem
Singapore's roughly 150,000 public officers wanted to use large language models for drafting, research and summaries, but public tools could not be used with restricted or sensitive government data.
Approach
GovTech's Open Government Products team started Pair at a January 2023 hackathon and built it into a chat assistant on government-issued devices. It runs on the same kind of large language models as ChatGPT and is cleared for data classified up to Restricted and Sensitive Normal. It reached more than 11,000 users in over 100 agencies in its first two months. The team then added custom assistants, document uploads, a search prototype over parliamentary reports, judgments and legislation, and Noms, a tool that drafts meeting minutes in government format.
Results
Takeaway
Building its own service on commercial models let the government approve it for classified data and daily work. Time savings came from the government's dashboard and pilot users, without an independent evaluation.
Categories
- Size
- Large enterprise
- Industry
- Public sector
- Business function
- Internal work and knowledge management
- Innovation type
- Process innovationOrganization and ways of working
- AI technology
- Generative AI
- Adoption
- Built in-house
- Evidence
- Company's own claim
Sources
Source summaries
GovTech describes Pair as an AI assistant for writing, research and idea generation on government devices, usable with data classified as Restricted, Sensitive or Normal. It reports more than 11,000 users across over 100 agencies in the first two months and 4,500-plus weekly active users. Pilot users of Noms said it saved about half the time they spent on meeting minutes.
Open Government Products reports 98,527 monthly active users and an average of 81 minutes saved per task in the second quarter of 2026. It also states a development cost of about $450,000 against estimated savings of $28.9 million, without stating the currency, period or method.
Open Government Products says Pair began as a Word plugin built by five developers at the Hack for Public Good hackathon in January 2023. It reports that by November 2024 the Pair suite had more than 60,000 registered users and 10 million messages exchanged.
HRD Asia reports, citing The Straits Times, that more than half of Singapore's 150,000 public officers use Pair regularly. GovTech is preparing an AI Assistant Desk with a registry of AI agents, output checkers and controls that stop agents from deleting files or emailing outside parties, due for wider rollout later in 2026.
Full details are in the original sources.
