Singapore’s foreign minister Vivian Balakrishnan has opened a window into the future of diplomacy. In a Facebook post, he declared that “the diplomat who learns to work with AI will have a meaningful edge”. The remark accompanied his unveiling of a personal AI agent using open source software and a low-cost computer. That a sitting foreign minister coded his own AI assistant is remarkable; that he published the entire architecture on GitHub is even more so. He has shown how accessible the new AI tools have become, how the entry barriers to using AI are lowering, and how profoundly they could reshape diplomatic practice. The AI assistant that Balakrishnan built is not a regular chatbot. It connects to the minister’s communication channels, processes voice notes and images, schedules tasks, and — crucially — retains structured memory. Unlike conventional AI assistants that forget everything between sessions, his AI assistant extracts facts, synthesises them into a knowledge graph, and recalls them when needed.…