Singapore has been ranked the country where young people are most prepared to use artificial-intelligence tools in work, education and daily life, according to a January 2026 analysis by iSharing that scored more than 120 countries on a weighted mix of connectivity, education and national AI readiness.
The report, titled “Countries with the most AI-Ready Youth,” puts Germany second and Finland third, followed by Estonia, Austria, Denmark, Japan, New Zealand, Israel and Lithuania. The top-10 list skews toward digitally mature economies where widespread internet access coincides with a pipeline of STEM graduates and strong national innovation capacity—inputs that researchers increasingly treat as prerequisites for turning AI enthusiasm into broad-based productivity gains.
A composite score built from six inputs—and a penalty for missing data
iSharing said it constructed an “AI-Ready Youth Score” (0–100) by combining six country-level indicators spanning digital access, education pipeline into STEM, and national AI and innovation readiness. The inputs are:
- ICT rank (2025)
- Individuals using the internet (% of population)
- Tertiary graduates in STEM
- Innovation and economic integration
- Digital infrastructure
- AI preparedness index
Because those measures sit on different scales (percentages, indices, sub-scores), iSharing said it first standardized each metric to a 0–100 range using min–max normalization, then applied a weighted average. Weights were set at 25% for AI preparedness, 20% for ICT rank, 15% each for internet use, STEM graduates and digital infrastructure, and 10% for innovation and economic integration.
To avoid rankings being dominated by sparse datasets, countries were included only if they had at least 3 of 6 metrics available. For missing metrics, iSharing re-normalized weights over the available variables and then applied a completeness penalty: Final Score = Partial Score × (0.95^m), where m is the number of missing metrics.
The leaders: infrastructure-first plus measurable STEM pipelines
On the subset of indicators published with the top-10 table, Singapore posted an ICT rank of 97.7, 94% internet use, and 36.30% of tertiary graduates in STEM, yielding a score of 92.70. Germany scored 91.79 (ICT 89.6; internet use 94%; STEM graduates 20.93%), while Finland scored 90.56 (ICT 98.7; internet use 94%; STEM graduates 18.40%).
The rest of the top 10 follows the same pattern: high internet penetration (Denmark at 100%, New Zealand 96%, Austria 95%) paired with strong ICT rankings (Estonia 98.5, Denmark 97.9, Lithuania 95.3) and mid-to-high STEM graduate shares.
Why the ranking matters now: AI is spreading, but “readiness” is still uneven
The timing is notable because broad AI adoption is accelerating in the enterprise—yet scaling remains constrained by workforce capability, data quality and governance.
Stanford’s 2025 AI Index found 78% of organizations reported using AI in 2024, up from 55% the year before, alongside a sharp jump in reported use of generative AI in at least one business function.
McKinsey’s surveys similarly point to rapid uptake: 65% of respondents said their organizations were regularly using generative AI in early 2024, and that figure rose to 71% in 2025 reporting.
But the same research base highlights bottlenecks that align closely with iSharing’s choice of inputs: skills gaps, limited access to high-quality data, and weak measurement of return on investment can keep AI initiatives stuck in pilots, particularly in the public sector. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 also flags skill gaps as the biggest barrier to business transformation, with a majority of employers citing it as a major constraint through 2030.
In other words, places that already combine deep digital infrastructure with strong technical education pipelines may be better positioned to convert AI availability into sustained usage—especially as AI tools move from novelty to baseline expectation in classrooms and workplaces.
Youth “fluency” as a household adoption accelerator
While the scoring model is framed around national readiness, iSharing also ties the results to consumer technology behaviors—arguing that youth competence can pull households into new tools faster.
“Children growing up in these countries aren’t just comfortable with technology, they’re fluent with it, and it can help their parents a lot,” an iSharing spokesperson said. “An entire generation is being trained to navigate digital and AI tools the way previous generations learned to drive… When a 14-year-old can update the app or set up their own safe zones without help, that contributes a lot to family safety.”
Caveats investors and policymakers will care about
The methodology is transparent about standardizing inputs and penalizing missing data, but the ranking still reflects a specific definition of “AI-preparedness”: it is primarily a measure of enabling conditions (connectivity, infrastructure, STEM pipeline and national readiness indices), not a direct census of actual AI tool usage among young people.
That makes the list most useful as a capacity and friction map: countries at the top likely face fewer structural barriers to broad AI adoption, while lower-ranked countries may be held back less by interest and more by infrastructure gaps, education constraints, data maturity and institutional readiness—the same bottlenecks highlighted across OECD and global workforce research.
The article “Singapore Leads 2026 “AI-Ready Youth” Ranking as Skills Gaps Still Limit Adoption” was first published on AlexaBlockchain. Read the complete article here: https://alexablockchain.com/singapore-leads-2026-ai-ready-youth-ranking/
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