How Hong Kong should address the challenge that AI poses to its workforce

Tell us about your background.

I’ve worked in higher education for more than a decade. Before that, I was CEO of the Australia China Business Council.

Now I’m in Hong Kong, an interesting place where talent is concerned. It’s a financial hub, but when you look at the development agenda of southern China over the next 10 to 20 years, the region will live or die by the talent it can nurture, attract, sustain, and retain.  

So Hong Kong will need to import talent?

It has 7.5 million people and an aging population. The competitiveness of its universities is built on people coming in from outside. If we’re going to compete in the knowledge business, we need a borderless approach. We want to attract people from the rest of China and from all corners of the world. After three years of COVID restrictions, and with a government that is placing talent recruitment at the heart of its vision for the city, there has never been a better time to reactivate our networks and say to the world that Hong Kong is back in business.  

We have to ask: Where does AI fit into this picture?

A recent study looked at how vulnerable different workforces were to AI and robotic intelligence in various parts of the world. HK was ranked #1 globally for being at risk for workforce redundancy, and 30% of the city’s workforce could lose their jobs over the next 20 years. That’s mainly because financial services are such a big part of the economy here, and lawyers, bankers, and accountants make up such a large percentage of the workforce. Many of them will be replaced by AI.       

So what to do?

The whole territory’s got to go back to school. Reskilling and upskilling are absolutely critical for long-term competitiveness.

I cooperation with private and public sector partners, CUHK has created an AI education program that’s being rolled out in 70% of the Hong Kong high school system. It gives students the chance to learn the basics of AI tech, to program a robot, to play with robotic cars. They also learn about ethics and the responsible use of AI. Our “utopia” is that this will be embedded into the school curriculum and that mastery of AI will one day be thought about in the same way we demand young people finish school with a grasp of chemistry, mathematics, or physics.  

If people have interacted with and thought about artificial intelligence from a very young age, we as a society will stand a better chance of navigating this period of disruptive but potentially transformational challenges.

Is there a digital skills gap? Given the rise of AI and “no-code” software, might we actually need less tech talent in the future?

A decade ago, people in education were saying, “Everyone must learn to code. It was going to become part of the core curriculum. The idea was, “If you can’t code, you can’t work.”

But given the rapid rise of AI, this may no longer be true. The basics of AI tech are one way today; a year from now, they will look very different. Being able to sit alongside a ChatGPT-style intelligence and be able to discern whether it is “hallucinating”  – this may be the kind of skill people will need to hone.

How are schools adapting to ChatGPT?

ChatGPT caused a moment of existential panic among academics, one centered on integrity and the potential for plagiarism. There was this knee-jerk reaction to ban it in the classroom.

But now, universities and schools are thinking about how we can embed this technology into our educational model. It’s not going to disappear. We need to cultivate future leaders who can use it as an enabler, rather than something to be scared of. We need to re-envision the curriculum and the way students interact in the classroom. If they don’t understand AI by the time they reach the workplace, they’re going to be in trouble.

Besides integrating AI into the school curriculum, what else can governments do? Should they try to create centers of excellence—little Silicon Valleys that act as talent magnets?

For the last 10 years, governments and universities around the world have invested heavily in the idea of innovation and entrepreneurship. They had this “If you build it, they will come” model: if you invest in incubators and create an environment where VCs want to come in, you’ll get the results you want.

Governments have KPIs for how many unicorns they can create. Everyone wants to incubate the next Jack Ma or Mark Zuckerberg.

That’s fine. But there needs to be a pragmatic reassessment of what entrepreneurship is. The road to being a unicorn is riddled with failure. Ninety percent of tech startups fail. We need to be realistic about how many unicorns we can cultivate.

So the real change is in the mindset?

Exactly. Developing a disruptive mindset is incredibly important for the development of traditional industries. Employers want people who understand disruption. We’ve seen so many industries disrupted over the last 20 to 30 years. The private sector really understands that to be competitive, companies need people with an entrepreneurial mindset embedded throughout their businesses. Companies understand that they need to disrupt or be disrupted—it’s a question of survival.

Building this capability means recognizing that not all people will necessarily launch successful start-ups, much less unicorns, but they will have an entrepreneurial way of thinking—and that’s got value. That should be front-and-center when we talk about technology and entrepreneurship. So far, no one’s really been brave enough to call that out, mainly because so much political and financial capital has been spent developing these ecosystems that mimic Silicon Valley.

And we should be encouraging the proliferation of Silicon Valleys. Low taxes, good universities, a high quality of life—all these elements help. But we should also think about how to provide an educational system that encourages people to cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset.