Hong Kong businesses are lagging behind their mainland Chinese peers in adopting artificial intelligence, as entrenched legacy systems and a risk-averse corporate mindset slow the city’s digital transition, according to a senior executive at consultancy Accenture.
Only 10 per cent of Hong Kong firms surveyed by Accenture had integrated generative AI across multiple business functions, compared with about 21 per cent of mainland enterprises, said Robert Hah, Hong Kong office lead at Accenture Greater China, in an interview with the South China Morning Post on Tuesday.
Mainland China’s rapid adoption of enterprise AI has been fuelled by falling model costs and a flourishing domestic developer ecosystem led by firms such as DeepSeek and Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post.
Tech giants including Ant Group, Tencent Holdings, Alibaba and Baidu rushed to roll out enterprise-focused AI agents at this year’s World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai – the country’s top AI event – signalling a shift in the industry battleground from building foundation models to embedding AI directly into corporate workflows.
