Lumıary
Company reportedLive since 2023Added Oct 2026

Government of Singapore (Open Government Products, GovTech)

Singapore's Pair gives public officers a secure AI assistant, now near 100,000 monthly users

Open Government Products, a unit of Singapore's GovTech, built Pair, a secure ChatGPT-style assistant for public officers, in 2023. Its own report card for the second quarter of 2026 shows 98,527 active monthly users and an average of 81 minutes saved per task.

Raise productivitySupport employees

Key figures

Copied exactly from the sources. Copy any figure with its citation.

98,527

Active monthly users of Pair in Q2 2026 (Open Government Products report card)1

81

minutes

Average time saved per task in Q2 2026, as reported by Open Government Products1

About 50,000

Public officers who regularly use Pair, about a third of all public officers (Minister Josephine Teo, May 2025)3

What it took

CostDevelopment cost shown as $450,220 on a chart headed "Pair's spending and estimated savings monthly"; the currency is not stated1
TeamNot disclosed
TimelineCreated during OGP's hackathon in 20231

The problem

Large language models (AI systems that write and analyse text) can make government work more efficient, but the tools must be safe and fit the needs of the public service. Open Government Products (OGP), a unit of the Government Technology Agency (GovTech), set out to give every public officer AI tools safely.

What they built

Pair is a secure, government version of a ChatGPT-style chatbot, created during an OGP hackathon in 2023. Officers use it for writing, analysis and coding. They can also build shared assistants for repeat tasks, run batch jobs over thousands of inputs and draft documents from templates in government style. OGP says the model providers cannot see conversations on Pair and that it is safe for classified data.

How they did it

OGP built Pair in-house rather than buying a commercial plan. It says this lowers cost, meets government security standards and gives officers access to the full range of model features without tier restrictions. Its update log shows regular upgrades of the underlying model: Claude Sonnet 3.5 in 2024 and early 2025, Claude Sonnet 4 in the third quarter of 2025, and Sonnet 4.6 in 2026. Shipped features include assistant sharing, image reading and batch processing.

Results

OGP's report card for the second quarter of 2026 lists 98,527 active monthly users and an average of 81 minutes saved per task. In May 2025 the Straits Times reported the minister saying that about 50,000 officers, around a third of all public officers, used Pair regularly. OGP also lists a development cost of $450,220 on a chart headed monthly spending and estimated savings, and says it saves the government 123 minutes for every $1 spent. These are the unit's own estimates.

Lessons for your project

  1. Build for your own security rules. OGP says the model providers cannot see Pair chats and that it is cleared for classified data, which let it reach staff that commercial tools could not.

  2. Let teams build their own assistants. Pair lets officers set up shareable assistants for repeat tasks, such as report review at the Building and Construction Authority and surgical antibiotic guidelines at Singapore General Hospital.

  3. Publish a public report card. OGP posts users and average time saved on an open page, which lets leaders see adoption instead of guessing.

  4. Keep the model swappable. Pair's update log shows the underlying model changed several times since 2023, from Azure OpenAI and Google PaLM integrations to successive Claude Sonnet versions, so the product did not depend on one model release.

Caveats

  • All headline numbers are Open Government Products' own. The Straits Times report on 50,000 regular users relays what the minister and the ministry said, not an audit, so the evidence level is company-reported.
  • The report card page is a live page with no publication date. Its Q2 2026 figures are labelled by quarter only, so the case publishedDate is the newest dated source (the Straits Times, published 9 May 2025).
  • The page also shows an estimated cost saving of $28.9 million and says each $1 spent saves 123 minutes. These are OGP's estimates and are not used as results here. The $450,220 development cost has no stated currency, and the page does not say what period monthly covers.
  • The updates page names the model as Sonnet 4.6 from the first quarter of 2026, after Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Sonnet 3.5 in earlier quarters. Early versions of Pair used Azure OpenAI and Google PaLM integrations, and Pair Intern moved to GPT-4-turbo in late 2023.
  • The report card gives only the year 2023 for the start, so the deployment date is the year only.
  • Counts of users differ by source and date: GovTech reported about 55,000 officers using Pair, half of them active, in October 2024, and the ministry said about 100,000 used it in May 2025, as relayed by the Straits Times.
  • The Straits Times page prints published 9 May 2025 and updated 12 May 2025; the publication date is used.

Sources

  1. Pair

    Open Government Products (report cards) · Undated · Company blog · reports.open.gov.sg

  2. Pair

    Open Government Products (report cards, updates page) · Undated · Company blog · reports.open.gov.sg

  3. More public officers in Singapore use government chatbot to enhance productivity

    The Straits Times · 2025-05-09 · News · straitstimes.com

Summarized in our own words from the sources above. Spotted an error? See corrections.

Related cases