WHEN I was younger, I was fascinated by the idea of building on the restaurant chain that was created and run by my parents.
I never did get the chance, however, as I was just 14 when they decided to sell the business and retire.
Today, I live that dream vicariously through the many small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) owners whom I work with. Many are second-generation leaders who have taken over businesses built by their parents.
They generally fall into two groups: heirs and refounders. Heirs inherit systems and preserve them. Refounders preserve the purpose of the business while reinventing how value is created.
Over time, refounders tend to outperform heirs. Today, artificial intelligence has given them the most powerful set of tools any generation of business owners has ever had.
Singapore is betting big on this shift. The recent Economic Strategy Review (ESR) laid out 32 recommendations to keep Singapore competitive as AI and geopolitical shifts reshape the global economy.
Among them was a recommendation to position Singapore as a trusted hub for AI solutions. If SMEs want to survive, they cannot simply be passive adopters. They need to become examples of what AI-powered businesses look like, and refounders can lead the way.
Why so many businesses struggle with AI
The Singapore Business Federation’s National Business Survey 2025 indicated that four in five businesses are already engaged in digital transformation, and half plan to prioritise AI initiatives in the coming year.
And yet, many still cite uncertainty over where to begin, a lack of in-house expertise, and difficulty demonstrating return on investment as major barriers to adoption.
The problem was never access. The tools are available to everyone. The real challenge is knowing where AI belongs inside a business, and most owners aim it at the wrong target.
Every company does three things – create value, coordinate people and resources, and serves customers.
AI automates the coordination and the administrative work that keeps a company moving. Leads get qualified automatically. Quotations generate without anyone copying data between spreadsheets. Supplier invoices flow straight into the accounts.
This is real, and worth having. The ESR explicitly calls for AI that complements rather than replaces workers. When done right, leveraging AI tools gives your team the capacity to do more.
A caterer that we work with has freed its sales representatives from paperwork so they spend more time with customers at their important events such as weddings.
But automating coordination is the beginning, not the destination. What an owner does with that newly freed capacity is what separates an heir from a refounder.
Productivity alone is a ceiling, and Singapore cannot automate its way to growth. New growth comes from new products, new services and new business models – and that is precisely where refounders have the edge. They understand their industries deeply enough to see opportunities outsiders miss.
What refounding looks like
Moses Soh left his career in the public sector to help run his mother’s education chain, Mind Stretcher, and to help her retire.
Rather than digitise what already existed, he built an AI personal tutor called cher.ai. This tutor helps students taking their Primary School Leaving Examination to practise English, designed in consultation with master teachers who have decades of classroom experience. The tutor has since helped thousands of students improve at a low cost.
We have witnessed refounders in action across different sectors. One tea retailer we know is experimenting with AI-powered recommendations and personalised blends tailored to individual palates.
Childcare operators are using AI to design customised activities for different developmental needs. Engineering companies are leveraging AI to quickly understand technical drawings to service their customers.
That is where the largest opportunities sit, and they are open precisely to the people who already know the industry from the inside. It is easier than you think, and the barriers to start have never been lower.
Recently, our business development intern, who had no previous software engineering experience, used AI tools to customise our solutions for a customer in just two days.
At a recent AI workshop we conducted, one second-generation business owner said he was already building solutions for his family’s furniture business with Claude Code before we had even finished the demonstration.
When owners build things themselves, they develop a sharper instinct for where AI can create value.
They learn which products deserve investment and which processes deserve reinvention. Once they are ready to scale those ideas, there are grants and support programmes available to help them.
But before any of that can happen, someone needs to want to take over.
One of our customers, Ryan Lim, had no plans to step into Yat Guan, his family’s pallet manufacturing business that was founded nearly a century ago in 1931, and has operations across Singapore and Malaysia.
When his father was diagnosed with a terminal illness, Lim gave up his teaching career to take the load off his father’s mind and spend those final months together as a family.
After his father died, Lim stayed on. Not because he inherited a business, but because he saw an opportunity to build something new from what had been left behind.
Singapore’s next generation of business owners face a rare opportunity. They have the foundations their parents spent decades creating, and now the tools to take them further than ever before. The question is not whether AI will change their industry, but whether this next generation will lead that change.
The writer is CEO and co-founder of Voltade, a company that customises AI solutions for Singapore SMEs.