The Challenge: Applying AI Across a Diversified Trading Business, Within Clear Governance Boundaries
When Sumitomo Corporation Asia & Oceania looked to build practical AI capability across its Singapore teams, it chose a private, customised run of GA100: Generative AI for Automation and Productivity, Heicoders Academy’s flagship programme. GA100 is a hands-on programme covering how AI can be integrated into existing workflows, automation pipelines, and broader digital transformation efforts. For Sumitomo, the foundational lessons were contextualised to Microsoft Copilot, the company’s approved AI environment, and the three training days were spread out once a week to fit around business operations. The result was a cohort of 21 participants from more than 15 departments, trained in-person at Sumitomo’s Singapore office.
Sumitomo Corporation Asia & Oceania operates across a wide range of businesses, from chemicals and tubular products to logistics, treasury, accounting and risk management. Teams across these functions handle a heavy load of recurring work every week, including reconciliations across multiple systems, SAP-based reporting, tax and accounting tasks, market and risk intelligence, and day-to-day administration. Leaders saw that generative AI could help, but interest in AI needed to be matched by practical, applied capability.
The organisation also works within clear governance boundaries. Microsoft Copilot is the company-promoted and approved AI tool, and any training had to respect strict rules on company, customer and personal data. Sumitomo needed a programme that would teach participants to use AI confidently on the tool they already had, while still giving them hands-on exposure to agentic AI and automation in a safe, controlled way.
Scheduling mattered too. With participants ranging from support staff to General Managers, three consecutive days away from the business was not practical, so the programme needed to fit around weekly operations.
Why Heicoders Academy: A Programme Proven From Within
Heicoders Academy was already known to Sumitomo. Members of the team had attended GA100 public runs and had first-hand experience of the programme’s practical, hands-on approach. As more colleagues signed up, Sumitomo chose to bring the programme in-house as a private run rather than build a separate programme from scratch, giving a full cohort a shared learning experience.
From the first conversation, Heicoders focused on fitting the delivery to Sumitomo’s environment. The foundational lessons on generative AI and prompt engineering were contextualised to Microsoft Copilot, the training days were spread once a week across three weeks, and a programme outline and tool list were prepared for Sumitomo’s IT team to review ahead of the run. As an SSG-accredited programme, GA100 also kept the run eligible for SkillsFuture funding while preserving the full curriculum, including the automation lessons.
Heicoders Academy is Singapore's leading AI-First Skills Accelerator, with over 30,000 learners trained, 4,000+ five-star reviews, and 300+ corporate clients including Changi Airport Group, DBS Bank, Standard Chartered, Sembcorp, Unilever, Marriott International, and Temasek Trust.
The Solution: A Private, Customised GA100 Run for Sumitomo Corporation Asia & Oceania
Heicoders Academy delivered a private run of GA100 exclusively for Sumitomo Corporation Asia & Oceania on 6, 13 and 27 October 2026, held in-person at Sumitomo’s office at Frasers Tower for a cohort of 21 participants. The cohort spanned more than 15 departments, including Corporate Services, Risk Management, Logistics Management, Treasury, Accounting and Tax, Human Resources, the DX Center and several trading divisions, with seniority ranging from support staff and professionals to Deputy General Managers and General Managers.
Microsoft Copilot anchored the foundational lessons, and exercises were shaped around use cases shared by the participants themselves, such as reconciling data across multiple systems, extracting SAP data into Excel reports, summarising risk and market intelligence, and streamlining repetitive administrative and email tasks. To respect Sumitomo’s data governance, all hands-on work with external tools used training-provided data only, with no company, customer or personal data involved. The curriculum progressed deliberately across five core areas:
- Generative AI Basics and Prompt Engineering: How Large Language Models work, key AI tools (ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini), advanced prompting techniques including chain-of-thought and few-shot prompting, and AI-powered media creation.
- Advanced Workflows and AI Agents: Hands-on lab using Manus AI to build and deploy multi-step automated workflows across 9 real-world business scenarios, including email automation, data analysis, wide research, spreadsheet automation, and slide generation.
- Agentic Workflow Automation with n8n: Building powerful automated pipelines by connecting multiple applications and services to automate common business processes such as data extraction and report generation.
- RAG for Business Data: Learning how to combine AI with the organisation’s internal data to create reliable, factual knowledge bases and secure private AI systems.
- MCP and Managing AI Risk: Applying frameworks for safe, compliant, and ethical AI use in an enterprise setting, culminating in a hands-on Capstone Project where participants applied their full suite of newly acquired skills.
Around the curriculum, Heicoders Academy provided end to end wraparound support, from enrolment and registration onto its Student eLearn portal, to handling the government funding administration on behalf of the organisation, coordinating with Sumitomo’s IT team on tool access, and supporting eligible participants through the WSQ assessment component. This allowed the Sumitomo team to focus entirely on the learning experience while the operational details were managed for them.
Results: A Cross-Functional Cohort Ready to Apply AI to Real Work
The engagement brought together 21 colleagues from across Sumitomo’s businesses and functions for the complete programme, giving them a shared, hands-on grounding in applied and agentic AI. Because the exercises were built around the use cases participants brought with them, the learning connected directly to the reconciliation, reporting, research and administrative work they handle every week.
Participants worked directly with the tools throughout, building and testing their own workflows rather than simply watching demonstrations. By the end of the run, the cohort had moved from understanding what generative AI can do to actively applying it within Sumitomo’s approved Copilot environment, with a clear sense of where automation can save time across their teams.
What’s Next: Extending AI Capability Across the Organisation
With a cross-functional cohort now trained, including senior leaders from several divisions, Sumitomo Corporation Asia & Oceania has a strong foundation of AI champions across its business. Heicoders Academy looks forward to continuing to support Sumitomo as it extends practical AI capability across its teams.
The Sumitomo run reflects how Heicoders Academy partners with enterprise organisations on AI transformation: fitting the learning around the organisation’s approved tools and governance, keeping it practical and hands-on, and grounding every exercise in the work people actually do.
