AI agents think. Robots do. People lead.

For Temasek’s Chief Digital Officer Mark Lim, success in leveraging agentic artificial intelligence (AI) means every employee, from top executives to junior clerks, will be proficient in building and managing AI bots.

He was speaking in the panel Customer success stories at UiPath Agentic Automation Summit in Singapore on July 8, alongside StarHub’s Vice President Solutions (Head of Solutions), Quinny Lei.

The panel was moderated by Colin Png, Vice President, APJ Marketing, UiPath.

The main takeaway from the panel was that as agentic AI rapidly advances, the key to unlocking its full potential lies in developing a workforce that is highly skilled in managing bots and establishing robust AI governance frameworks.

Both Lim and StarHub’s Lei resonated with the core message that human element is not diminished - but elevated in the new era of automation.

Human as the orchestrator

“Think of the future as managing bots instead of paperwork,” said StarHub’s Lei, adding that the workforce of tomorrow would need the skill of managing bots across various functions, rather than specialising in just one.

UiPath Maestro, for example, embeds an orchestration layer that moves automated, scattered projects into a unified, end-to-end platform.

Speaking at a separate keynote, The Future of Business: Robotic and Yiannis Broustas, Vice President, Product Marketing, UiPath illustrated how the platform brings together robots, agents, and humans.

“You are still the leader in this process. You handle the exceptions; you're designing the process, you're orchestrating the process,” he said.

Temasek’s Lim underscored the need for organisations to build a robust framework for auditing, observability, and orchestration.

As an organisation scales its use of bots and AI agents, it becomes essential to maintain accountability and visibility over the processes and outputs generated by these technologies, he added.

In the context of the public sector, Lim Khian Ghee, Sales Director at UiPath had previously highlighted on GovInsider where public officers could work alongside AI agents.

“By blending public servants’ empathy, judgment, and civic mission with the precision and efficiency of agentic automation, governments can transform service delivery, create new public value, and address complex societal challenges,” he said.

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Change management more about regulating the use of AI

Given the prevalence of AI use among employees, Temasek’s Lim pointed out that the biggest challenge in change management is not so much about encouraging adoption — but rather navigating the balance between empowering and safeguarding its use.

Organisations also tend to operate with stricter internal controls compared to commercial platforms, even those that comply with EU regulations, he shared.

As a result, employees might not even reveal that they use these platforms. The important thing to tackle then becomes how leaders could educate employees to use AI in a way that does not put their organisations at risk.

For many organisations, the priority risks included preventing data leaks and ensuring responsible AI use.

Trust and governance

From analytics, generative AI (GenAI) to now agentic AI, the advancement in AI is moving from reactive to proactive, said StarHub’s Lei.

As organisations incrementally adopt more advanced AI tools, new opportunities will emerge to strengthen the organisation’s guardrails and trust frameworks around AI use, said StarHub’s Lei.

Temasek’s Lim seconded the importance of a trust framework. In his organisation, the framework emerged from a multistakeholder collaboration involving legal, regulatory, and cyber teams.

“The trust framework becomes very critical to determine what are the use cases, how AI will perform and behave, and extract the highest value that we can get,” he explained.

Lei also stressed the importance of aligning AI initiatives with clear returns on investment (ROIs).

For StarHub, she saw particular value in using AI agents to enhance customer experience and refine customer personas, ultimately leading to the development of more customised offerings.