The Challenge: AI Literacy at the Leadership Level
The Temasek Trust Amplifier programme supports early-to-growth stage social enterprises and impact-driven startups across Asia. As AI reshapes how businesses operate, the programme recognised a growing need to equip its portfolio founders and senior leaders with not just awareness, but genuine, actionable AI capability.
Founders and C-suite operators face a distinct challenge compared to large enterprise teams. They must move fast, stay lean, and make high-stakes decisions on AI adoption with limited resources. Generic AI training built for general audiences does not serve this group. What was needed was a session designed specifically for experienced operators who already understand business fundamentals and are ready to evaluate where AI creates the most leverage in their own organisations.
Temasek Trust sought a training partner who could deliver a high-impact, demonstration-driven workshop calibrated to the experience and expectations of a leadership audience — without technical prerequisites and with immediate practical takeaways.
Why Heicoders Academy: Trusted by the Temasek Ecosystem
Heicoders Academy's selection for this engagement was grounded in an established track record within the Temasek ecosystem. Having previously delivered a 3-day organisation-wide AI Learning Week for Temasek Trust staff — and separately for Stewardship Asia Centre, a Temasek-affiliated non-profit — Heicoders had already demonstrated its ability to deliver structured, contextualised, and high-quality AI training to audiences ranging from entry-level staff to senior leadership.
What further distinguished Heicoders Academy was its position as Singapore's exclusive Manus AI education partner, enabling live demonstrations of cutting-edge agentic AI tools applied directly to real startup and business workflows. For a founder audience, this credibility and currency of content was critical.
The Solution: A 3-Hour Executive AI Leadership Workshop
Heicoders Academy designed and delivered a customised 3-hour Executive AI Leadership Workshop tailored specifically for the Amplifier cohort on 20 May 2026. The session was facilitated by Kong Yu Ning, Co-Founder of Heicoders Academy, and structured as a progressive, demonstration-driven journey from strategic AI foundations to live agentic AI application.
The workshop covered five key areas:
- Introduction to Generative AI (20 mins): How Large Language Models work, how they power tools like ChatGPT and Copilot, and an AI maturity and readiness framework for organisations. Calibrated to the context of founder-led and venture-backed companies.
- From LLMs to AI Agents (20 mins): The distinction between AI as a tool versus AI as a system. What makes AI "agentic", the three types of AI agents, and why agentic AI is the next evolution for startup operations and founder-level decision-making.
- Hands-on Prompt Engineering (40 mins): Practical techniques including chain-of-thought prompting, few-shot prompting, role assignment, and structured output generation, all applied through startup and venture-relevant scenarios such as investor communications, business development research, and operational documentation.
- Live Agentic AI Demonstrations with Manus AI (50 mins): Live showcase of agentic workflows applicable to founder workflows, covering automated research synthesis, slide generation, data analysis, email automation, and competitive intelligence. Participants saw exactly how AI agents could replace repetitive high-effort tasks across their businesses.
- AI Governance and Risk Management (20 mins): Practical frameworks for safe, compliant, and responsible AI use in an enterprise context, including how to direct teams toward adoption and how to avoid the most common pitfalls in early AI deployment.
Results: Strategic Clarity and Practical AI Readiness
The workshop was received with strong engagement throughout. The Amplifier founders and C-suite participants, representing a diverse range of industry verticals and company stages, responded positively to the practitioner-led, demonstration-driven format, which respected their experience level and delivered content they could immediately evaluate against their own business contexts.
By the end of the session, participants had moved from general AI awareness to a structured, operational understanding of where and how to deploy AI across their organisations. The live agentic AI demonstrations with Manus AI were particularly well received, giving participants direct exposure to tools and workflows they could direct their teams to begin using immediately.
The workshop reflected a deliberate design philosophy: AI training for leaders should not start from scratch. It should meet experienced operators where they are and give them the strategic lens to make better decisions about AI adoption, team direction, and competitive positioning.
What's Next: Deepening AI Capability Across the Amplifier Network
The Amplifier workshop reflects a broader pattern emerging across the Temasek ecosystem: a recognition that AI capability at the leadership level is a strategic priority, not just a staff training initiative. With Amplifier founders now equipped with a practical framework for evaluating and deploying AI across their organisations, the groundwork has been laid for deeper capability-building at the team level.
Heicoders Academy remains a committed partner to Temasek Trust and its portfolio companies, ready to support further upskilling across individual organisations within the Amplifier network as they move from strategic clarity to organisation-wide AI adoption.
