SJ Group showcases smart city solution at AWS’s new innovation hub in Singapore

Smart incident management solution at the hub to spark digital transformation ideas for industry in APAC and Japan.

The Asia Pacific region is rapidly developing and implementing smart city initiatives, driven by urbanisation and the need for sustainable growth. According to Grand View Research, the Asia Pacific smart cities market size was estimated at US$223b in 2023 and is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 29.2% from 2024 to 2030.

Cities across the region generate petabytes of data daily, yet much of this data remains siloed, resulting in missed efficiencies. SJ Group (SJ) estimates that by 2028, maintenance costs in Singapore will rise between 15% and 20% for commercial buildings. Security, cleaning, utilities, and water will be the top four cost items. The window to maximise productivity gains in building operations is narrowing.

To address these issues and challenge the traditional approach, SJ and AWS collaborated on a smart city solution that helps facility managers, building owners, and municipal town planners respond to emergencies. A prototype is now featured at AWS's new Innovation Hub in its Singapore HQ. This technology is scalable, applying agentic AI to manage other urban management systems at the city or precinct level in real time.

Smart city advisory enabled by SJ’s security, facilities management

The SJ x AWS Agentic Dynamic Response Orchestration platform at the Innovation Hub is an smart city solution for city planners and building owners constantly anticipating and preparing for emergency incidents at a city or precinct level, with the ability to scale to mega global hubs. The prototype was developed through on-the-ground research, including focus group interviews, live traffic data, and on-site asset insights, leveraging SJ’s facility management and security consulting capabilities.  ADRO is a live testbed of how urban intelligence systems can power dynamic, resilient cities across APAC and beyond.

A future-ready testbed for urban operations

ADRO transcribes and summarises live emergency calls, prioritises responses with AI assistance, and deploys emergency vehicles guided by real-time geospatial dashboards. Crucially, it learns and improves continuously through post-incident analytics. 

As part of their integration into the AWS Innovation Hub, SJ co-designed a two-day workshop with SJ Innovation at Amazon Web Services (AWS) – bringing together their domain experts, technologists and designers to explore new ways of working and co-create the next generation of smart city solutions.

“Emergency response is just the beginning,” said Teo Say Leng, Executive Director, Digital Technology at SJ. “With AWS, we’ve built a scalable solution that can support thousands of urban operations—from crowd management, environmental alerts to real-time asset tracking anchored in Singapore, the region’s Smart Nation pioneer.”

SJ and AWS worked together to integrate data from disparate systems into a secure, chatbot-enabled digital twin environment of the city. In this particular use case, ADRO uses real-time traffic, environmental, and infrastructure data to power predictive insights, and orchestrate responses, all within a single command view.

Continuous partnership
SJ will continue to innovate with AWS to adapt ADRO for wider smart city deployments across Asia Pacific, in tandem with the evolving needs of city planner partners. With over 10,000 smart city initiatives in progress and a projected US$15b smart city operations market by 2028, this collaboration positions ADRO as a pillar for building greater urban resilience, responsiveness, and citizen trust across the Asia Pacific.

“Powered by AWS, our scalable solution drives labour efficiency, boosts productivity and nurtures future tech talent across thousands of urban operations,” commented Teo, who was part of the panel “Partners Force Multiplying Innovation” at the launch.