Over the weekend, Singaporean Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan said he personally built a customized AI-powered diplomatic assistant to help manage the cognitive demands of global diplomacy.
He used readily available tools, including Anthropic’s Claude, Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) WhatsApp integrations and even an aging Raspberry Pi.
Singapore FM’s AI Agent Aims To Transform Diplomacy
Speaking at a conference, Balakrishnan described how his self-built second brain was designed to streamline the intense workflow of modern diplomacy, where he may visit 12 countries in a month and meet hundreds of officials while processing vast amounts of geopolitical, historical and personal information.
“My personal agent first came to life almost exactly three months ago,” Balakrishnan said, explaining that security concerns pushed him away from broader consumer AI setups toward a more personalized, containerized system.
His AI stack includes Claude for drafting speeches and policy briefs, WhatsApp for communication, Whisper for voice interactions, local memory databases for personalized recall and Obsidian for knowledge management.
‘You Cannot Govern A Technology You Have Only Been Briefed On,’ FM
Balakrishnan framed his project as both a productivity experiment and a policy lesson, arguing that leaders must directly engage with emerging technologies rather than rely solely on briefings.
“You cannot govern a technology that you have only been briefed on,” the foreign minister stated.
The veteran politician and former eye surgeon noted that AI’s greatest societal value will come not just from frontier model developers, but from everyday professionals deploying these tools to enhance their own work.
AI Democratization And Personal Deployment
Balakrishnan said the barriers to building advanced personal AI systems have “collapsed,” allowing even non-engineers to assemble sophisticated assistants with existing software and hardware.
“All this stuff … is running off a Raspberry Pi,” he said, underscoring the accessibility of modern AI infrastructure.
For Singapore, he argued, the national opportunity may lie less in leading frontier AI model development and more in deploying AI effectively at scale across society.
AI Agents Are Rapidly Transforming Software Development
Previously, Andrej Karpathy, former Tesla AI lead and ex-OpenAI researcher, said that the fast emergence of AI agents has fundamentally changed software development, with even leading experts working to keep pace with what’s coming next.
Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also reportedly developing a personal AI agent designed to speed up his access to information by reducing reliance on traditional internal layers of staff and communication.
Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google is reportedly working on a personal AI agent for its Gemini app that can carry out tasks on behalf of users. The company is also testing an internal AI agent known as “Remy.”
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
Photo Courtesy: Gints Ivuskans on Shutterstock.com
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