Only 3% of Hong Kong firms have fully integrated AI into workflows, survey finds

Only 3 per cent of Hong Kong companies have fully integrated AI into their workflows, with many facing hurdles including resistance to organisational change and outdated digital infrastructure, a survey has found.

Consultancy Accenture, which polled 150 companies and released the results on Wednesday, said the survey suggested businesses had a strong desire to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) in their work but many struggled to put it into practice.

“Hong Kong really has strong AI ambitions and strong interest, and frankly, the right ingredients in place now. However, few enterprises have really scaled AI across the business,” said Robert Hah, the consultancy’s Hong Kong office lead.

Hah pointed to government initiatives to promote the AI industry and upskill the city’s workforce, as well as Hong Kong’s robust capital markets, as favourable conditions for companies’ adoption of AI.

But resistance to change in operational and organisational models, as well as outdated digital core infrastructure within companies, was delaying AI adoption, he noted.

The survey, titled the “Hong Kong AI Index”, was launched this year. It evaluates respondents’ AI readiness across 10 dimensions, divided into two categories: foundational capabilities and new AI and data essential capabilities.

The first category assesses whether the respondents have baseline capabilities in AI strategy, digital infrastructure, data governance frameworks, ethical safeguards and overall employee AI literacy.

The second focuses on whether they can industrialise AI applications at scale. These include large language model operations, modern database structures, data source diversity, management of AI models and products and specialised talent upskilling.

On a scale of 0 to 1, Hong Kong respondents reported an average score of 0.42 in the former category and 0.47 in the latter.

But Hah cautioned against directly comparing the city’s performance with other economies, saying each market had its own unique circumstances.

The survey found that business leaders in Hong Kong had set ambitious goals for AI adoption.

The companies on average expected to deliver a 15 per cent increase in productivity, a 14 per cent uplift in revenue, a 14 per cent improvement in customer experience and an 11 per cent reduction in costs over an 18-month period with the help of AI, the poll showed.

In contrast, only 12 per cent of the respondents’ AI initiatives had currently expanded across an organisation to deliver impactful outcomes, while only 3 per cent of the organisations could fully integrate AI into their business strategies, highlighting an ambition-operation gap.

“I truly believe in today’s environment, the biggest issue with [AI] deployment has nothing to do with technology. It really is about people, mindset [and] operating models,” Hah said.

The survey found that 45 per cent of firms had identified stagnant operating models as a barrier to their wider AI adoption.

Other common obstacles included resistance to organisational change and an inability to anticipate challenges and opportunities.

According to Hah, rather than blindly introducing AI to existing workflows, companies should instead re-engineer their operations through the lens of AI.

Hah cited the example of using AI to make PowerPoint slides, which he said could be time-consuming as users had to repeatedly refine their prompts to produce slides consistent with their needs.

“You need to rethink: does this process even need to exist in the future, given how Gen AI works? Is it really a linear process like it is today?” he said.

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A successful example cited in the report was Hong Kong’s flagship carrier, Cathay Pacific Airways, which attached great importance to experimentation, making it quick to test and prove emerging ideas of AI adoption.

Proven use cases then moved into the next phase focused on outcomes, integration and accountability, the report added.

This measure had enabled the carrier to quickly identify AI initiatives that could bring value to its operation, the report said.

Hah said human resources departments should rethink the talent needed in the AI world, while IT departments should rewire their digital infrastructure to make use of the unstructured data of their organisations’ operations.

Beyond that, a sound governance framework would also be needed to ensure the responsible use of AI, he said.

The development of technology, especially AI, has taken a centre stage in Hong Kong’s first five-year plan and the latest annual policy address, with the government working to refine the governance and legal frameworks for the technology, subsidise enterprises in adopting AI and upskill the labour force amid the AI era.

Hah said these moves had set a good policy environment for companies and that it was time for them to review their governance structure to leverage the technology’s value.