Hong Kong workers lag regional peers in AI use, lose out on pay, security: PwC

Hong Kong’s workforce lags behind regional peers in the frequent use of AI, a sluggish adoption rate that experts say is limiting pay rewards and job security even as companies prepare to trim entry-level roles. A 2025 survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) released on Thursday found that half of Hong Kong respondents were infrequent users of generative artificial intelligence (AI) at work in the past 12 months, compared with 34 per cent for the Asia-Pacific region. The data showed only 22 per cent were daily users, lagging behind the Asia-Pacific's 29 per cent. “Technology is revolutionising work and, while AI integration is growing in Hong Kong, its potential is underutilised as the Hong Kong workforce is still catching up on gen AI and agentic AI usage,” Michael Cheng, workforce lead partner at PwC Hong Kong, said. AI agents are technologies capable of performing multi-step processes, such as scheduling a meeting with many participants, using little human input. Only 19 per cent of local respondents attributed a salary increase to AI in the last 12 months, far below Asia-Pacific’s 46 per cent. Likewise, just 24 per cent of Hong Kong workers said AI had increased their job security in the last 12 months, compared with 52 per cent in the region. Cheng said this experience regarding increases in salary and job security was directly tied to the slower speed of AI adoption. He pointed to the dominance of the strictly regulated financial services industry as a factor influencing how businesses made their technology choices. “Hong Kong is a very unique economy where you have a lot of different options, whether or not you’re choosing a … stack of AI,” Cheng said. “Companies have to go through a lot, and also Hong Kong is financial services-dominant, which has a lot of regulation.” The survey of 1,061 local participants, part of a global study of 49,843 workers in 48 major economies in 28 sectors, found job security had become the top priority for jobseekers in Hong Kong, the Asia-Pacific region and globally. The concern aligns with findings that 44 per cent of senior executives and managers thought AI would reduce entry-level jobs over the next three years. This anxiety comes as 51 per cent of the local workforce reported feeling fatigued, which were “especially prevalent in Hong Kong” and “consistent with” findings in the 2024 survey, “possibly due to the challenges of adapting to accelerating technological change”. Cheng offered a “hands, head and heart” analogy to forecast which roles would remain safe from automation, suggesting that while administrative tasks that are heavily manual and automated faced replacement, those requiring physical labour, client-facing professional service and creativity would endure. Albert Lo, consulting financial services leader at PwC Hong Kong, said job roles could evolve over time as technology advances. “Now it’s about AI, but we’ve already seen that with automation in the past, whereby the nature of a job changes, so different tasks or different responsibilities within a job may be replaceable by AI, but the job itself is not a black and white concept,” Lo said. “Potentially, part of the responsibility can be replaced by AI, and then the job role itself would therefore change, so that a lot more of the job that is performed by humans is focused … on the heart, on the brain, right, as opposed to the hand.” Lo said the firm remained “active in the hiring market” and it was increasingly looking for new staff, especially juniors, who could demonstrate proficiency with AI tools. “What we would like to see in some of our new hires is the ability to use AI because we very much see AI as a complementary tool to the people that we bring in, and the ability to apply AI knowledge [and] leverage AI is actually quite important,” Lo said. He noted that the survey showed younger generations, especially Gen Z, “very much enjoy utilising AI” and were “very much used to it, both in their day to day life” and at university. Therefore, its use became “very natural” as they started their careers, he said.