The Challenge
When people picture the workforce that benefits from Generative AI, they usually picture white-collar knowledge workers in tech, finance, or consulting. Leong Siew Weng Engineering, a steel engineering firm operating out of Tuas, is exactly the kind of company that gets left out of that picture. Their teams include site supervisors, project engineers, and operations staff who often work from 7am to 9 or 10pm, with much of their time absorbed by repetitive admin: building slides for client reporting, compiling daily site reports, and chasing information across spreadsheets and email threads.
The leadership team recognised that AI had the potential to lighten that load, but generic, classroom-style AI training would not land with a workforce whose day-to-day reality looks nothing like a tech office. They needed a partner who could meet their people where they were, both literally (delivered at their premises in Tuas, with hybrid access for staff who could not be in the room) and practically (anchored in the exact workflows their teams run every day).
Why Heicoders Academy
The engagement started the way many of our best partnerships do, through word of mouth. A member of Leong Siew Weng Engineering's management team had previously attended one of our public Generative AI courses, came away impressed, and championed bringing us in to run a customised version for the wider company. That first-hand experience of our teaching style and content quality gave the leadership team the confidence to commit to a company-wide rollout.
From there, two things sealed the fit. Our instructors are active practitioners rather than full-time trainers, so they could speak credibly about how AI is actually being used across industries today. And our team was willing to throw out the standard curriculum and rebuild the workshop around the specific questions the company's staff were already asking, from automating site reports to drafting client decks with AI agents. The ability to customise the GA100 curriculum, run the programme on-site in Tuas, and support a hybrid audience of over 100 participants made us the right fit for a workforce that does not look like a typical training cohort.
The Solution
We designed and delivered a two-day Generative AI workshop on-site at Leong Siew Weng Engineering's office in Tuas, with over 100 staff joining across the two days. A portion of the participants attended in person while the majority dialled in virtually, giving everyone from project engineers to site supervisors access to the same content without disrupting site operations.
The curriculum was tailored to the workflows the team raised as priorities:
- Prompt Engineering Fundamentals: How to write prompts that produce usable outputs the first time, with examples drawn from steel engineering reporting rather than generic office scenarios.
- Automating Client Reporting with AI Agents: A hands-on segment on using AI agents like Manus AI to build slide decks for client reporting, replacing hours of manual formatting with a guided workflow.
- Daily Site Report Automation: Practical techniques for turning raw site notes, photos, and observations into structured daily reports with minimal manual rework.
- Working Smarter with Everyday AI Tools: Patterns for using ChatGPT, Copilot, and similar tools to draft emails, summarise long documents, and shortcut repetitive admin tasks.
- Responsible Use in an Operational Setting: What to be careful about when feeding company or client information into AI tools, and how to keep humans in the loop on anything that touches safety or compliance.
The workshop was led by our instructor team, with Kong Yu Ning, Co-Founder of Heicoders Academy, on the ground across both days to engage directly with participants and tailor live examples to the questions raised in the room.
Results
The most telling moment of the engagement was not a slide or an exercise, it was a site supervisor who walked up during a break to ask how he could get more out of the AI tools he was already using on his own. By day two, the dominant question in the room had shifted from "what is AI?" to "how do we apply this in our work?" Participants we spoke to left with a concrete realisation: a meaningful chunk of their mundane, repetitive work, especially building slides and writing reports, can in fact be automated.
For a workforce that routinely works 14-hour days, that realisation matters. It means time clawed back from formatting and admin, and the start of a path toward better work-life balance in an industry where it has historically been hard to find.
What's Next
Following the strong reception, we are in conversations with Leong Siew Weng Engineering about deeper follow-up engagements, including more advanced sessions for staff who want to build their own AI-assisted workflows for site reporting and client deliverables. The longer-term goal is straightforward: keep helping their teams shave hours off the repetitive work, so the people who keep the business running can finish their day at a reasonable hour.
