HTX officers put GenAI to the test at Prompt Royale 2025

Gen Z digital native Chen Mei Jie kicked off her first year at HTX on a mission to “try everything as part of self-discovery”, and this bright-eyed sentiment eventually led her to represent HTX in the semi-finals of Prompt Royale (PR), Singapore’s largest whole-of-government (WOG) prompt engineering competition that engaged more than 5,000 officers across 114 public service agencies this year.

Organised by GovTech, the initiative aims to upskill public officers in leveraging GenAI through prompt engineering, which refers to the practice of designing and refining inputs to obtain the most accurate or useful responses from Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems.

PR 2025 marks the first time HTX is competing in the PR Agency track.

While she may not have made it to the WOG finals, Mei Jie contends that her participation alone constitutes a win.

“The cross-agency learning has sharpened my capabilities as a public servant. Seeing how other agencies are utilising AI tools has been inspiring,” she said. For instance, she was particularly impressed by a fellow competitor and Ministry of Education (MOE) school principal whose “expertise in AI curriculum design and data visualisation clearly shone through his work”.

The 24-year-old engineer splits her time between the xCybersecurity Enterprise Group (EG), focusing on AI safety and content moderation, and the Plans and Strategy team, where she helps shape long-term strategic plans and assess emerging trends for the agency.

While using GenAI to summarise lengthy five-year workplans is all in a day’s work for Mei Jie, her experience at PR 2025 has opened new possibilities for further leveraging the emerging technology.

“Last year’s Prompt Royale champion shared on how GenAI can help us more effectively showcase our work, such as by generating images for presentations. A picture speaks a thousand words,” she said.

New practical skills

The young tech professional wasn’t alone on her learning journey, which began with a series of tasks that Xponents had to complete to qualify for the HTX League competition, where they used Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools such as Microsoft 365 CoPilot and government chatbot Pair Chat. They were also invited to attend a range of workshops on prompt engineering.

Another Xponent who was involved was Yong Jin Xiang, a Senior Crime Scene Specialist with the Forensics Division at HTX’s Forensics Centre of Expertise (CoE). The 34-year-old has assisted the Singapore Police Force (SPF) with complex cases, including murder and sexual crime investigations.

Alongside high-stakes investigations, there is a more mundane facet to his job – roster planning, previously a tedious process of typing names into Excel spreadsheet cells. But he’s now able to automate such tasks using GenAI, thanks to his participation in PR 2025.

“I’ve learnt how to generate a Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) – the coding language behind Excel – script to digitalise our roster in a matter of seconds,” said Jin Xiang.

He is among three Xponents who pitted their skills against one another on 23 September for the title of HTX PR Champion, which was won by Mei Jie, who went on to represent HTX at the WOG semi-finals on 29 September.

Besides his plans to introduce automated rostering to other teams within his CoE, he’s exploring AI chatbots to support courses he conducts. He envisions GenAI transforming forensics, from streamlining documentation to guiding officers through SOPs in real time during fast-paced crime scene investigations.

For fellow HTX League semi-finalist Paul Poh, the technology proved transformative in addressing a distinctly administrative challenge – reviewing hundreds of budget papers annually.

“There’s a lot to read, some of which isn’t presented in a complete or easily digestible manner,” shared the Senior Manager from HTX's Plans & Strategy division.

“Furthermore, we may not always be familiar with the science and engineering subject matter at hand.”

As such, cultivating prompt engineering skills, Paul added, has allowed him to parse technical jargon and standardise notes.

Collectively, the contestants see GenAI as more than a competition tool, but rather one that’s fast becoming integral to their daily work.

“I didn’t realise how much I’d learn until I was fully immersed in it, from improving my communication skills to discovering ways to make better use of the tools we already have. It’s also made me think about how to refine workflows,” said Mei Jie.