AI can draft your reply. It can't inherit your recipe

The laptop is still open at 11pm. Dinner is over, the house has gone quiet, and the work chat is still moving.

Somewhere between the slides, the spreadsheet and the quiet fear that the next software update will swallow half your job, another headline about AI appears.

The feeling is real. So is the knot in the stomach.

But Singapore should be careful about drawing the wrong lesson from AI anxiety. Panic is too expensive. Denial is too comfortable. The wiser move is to build a backup plan around the human work that still carries trust, taste, hands and memory.

That work may be closer than you think.

The fear is ahead of the facts

The official data does not show a clean story of machines sweeping people out of offices. It shows something messier, and in some ways more uncomfortable: work is being redesigned faster than many workers can make sense of it.

In MOM’s Labour Market Report, First Quarter 2026, 28.5% of firms had adopted AI. Only 6.2% reported AI-related cuts to headcount or hiring.

For many people, AI is not yet the retrenchment letter. It is the new tool in the workflow, the changed job scope, the meeting where the team is told, in some form, to do more with less.

MOM was careful in its fourth-quarter 2025 report: it found no broad-based displacement of PMETs by AI, but said transitions are taking longer for some groups. That, it added, “might explain why public anxiety is running ahead of objective labour market indicators.”

Anxiety can run ahead of the data and still be telling you something useful. A smoke alarm can be oversensitive and still make you check the kitchen.

The International Labour Organization found that Singapore has the highest share of workers in ASEAN with more than minimal exposure to generative AI: 42.2% of total employment, based on Singapore data for 2023. Exposure does not mean replacement. It means many workers will have to explain, again and again, what they can do that a tool cannot.

That is a tiring thing to prove when you are already tired.

The caution is not cowardice

It is too easy to tell people: just start something on the side.

The people who say that often forget the emotional cost. To start a home business is to let strangers judge your cake, your handwriting, your lesson style, your pricing, your taste. It is to post a photo and wonder whether anyone will like it. It is to tell relatives you are trying, and then fear they will ask how it is going.

There are practical risks too. If you are employed, it is worth checking what your employer allows before taking on outside work. If you rely on public support schemes, check the rules instead of assuming they will catch every situation. MOM has said that people who were previously self-employed, including owners of sole proprietorships or partnerships who have ceased their businesses, are not eligible for the SkillsFuture Jobseeker Support scheme.

And the labour market is not frictionless. In MOM’s second-quarter 2026 report, the share of retrenched residents back at work within six months fell from 60.7% in the first quarter to 54.9% in the second quarter of 2026.

That is why a backup plan should not begin with a dramatic resignation letter. It can begin with one tray, one class, one repair, one small batch, one customer outside the family WhatsApp group.

Most people here are not reckless. They should not become reckless just because AI makes them nervous. But caution has a way of hardening into paralysis, especially when the thing you are protecting is also the thing you are quietly proud of.

The skills that still carry a person

AI can summarise a meeting. It can draft a caption. It can produce a cheerful reply to a customer asking whether collection is possible on Friday.

It cannot inherit your grandmother’s kueh recipe and know which part she never wrote down. It cannot notice that a Primary 3 child is not lazy, just frightened of being wrong. It cannot feel dough under the palm, steady a nervous bride before a manicure, or remember that a regular always asks for less sweet.

Singapore has many people sitting on this kind of value. A retiree who can mend, bake, teach or coach. A mother who has perfected a festive recipe over years of family orders. A young office worker who makes bento boxes so neat that colleagues keep asking. A tutor whose real gift is not the worksheet, but the calm.

These are skills, even if we have been trained to call them hobbies. Some came through family, some through work, some through years of caring for others. If AI makes the white-collar world feel less secure, one response is to take these human skills more seriously: as assets worth testing, gently and honestly.

The rules allow more room than many people assume, though nobody should confuse small-scale with no boundaries.

HDB says flat owners may carry out small-scale home-based business activities without HDB’s approval, subject to conditions such as no non-resident employees, signs or posters. URA says residents of private homes may also run small-scale home-based businesses without approval.

For food, the line is also clearer than many assume. SFA says home-based food businesses currently do not need a licence, though there are limits, including no catering, no selling to SFA-licensed outlets or temporary fairs, and no ready-to-eat raw seafood. ACRA says a home business trading under a brand name, rather than your full NRIC name, must be registered.

None of this removes the fear. It only lowers the mystery.

A small bridge is still a bridge

There is a respectable argument against turning every anxiety into a side hustle. Some people need rest more than another responsibility. Some should focus on training, job search or family. Some will try and stop. There should be no shame in that.

But for those who have been quietly carrying a craft, there is dignity in a small test. Sell to five neighbours. Teach one weekend slot. Put up one page. Learn whether the price makes sense. Let the market answer gently before life forces an answer harshly.

Technology should help with the awkward parts: the order-taking, the payment details, the weekly posts, the customer questions that arrive while dinner is on the stove. The craft still belongs to the person. If you want that kind of bridge, Homegrown is around when you are ready.

AI may change the office faster than we like. It still cannot do the brave part for you: letting people see what your hands, your taste and your years have been carrying all along.

Sources