AI keynote speaker in Hong Kong.

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A feel for the room before you put me in front of yours.

The measurement gap, stated precisely

The Census and Statistics Department's business survey of IT usage, released 27 February 2026, was read in full including all thirty tables. Artificial intelligence appears nowhere in it. The survey measures cloud computing at 98.1 per cent, QR codes at 37.6 per cent, RFID at 20.3 per cent, internet of things at 7.4 per cent, and augmented or virtual reality at 1.5 per cent.

Three companion publications, including the household IT survey and the flagship information society compendium, contain no AI content either. The consequence for anyone quoting a Hong Kong AI adoption figure is straightforward: it came from a private survey with a self-selected sample, and it should be introduced that way.

On strategy the position is similar. Hong Kong has published no consolidated territory-wide AI strategy. That is not an inference. The government was asked in the Legislative Council in October 2025 to map out strategies and set phased targets, and again in April 2026 to formulate a comprehensive AI development blueprint. Neither reply announced a document. The April 2026 answer was that initiatives are ongoing and being consolidated.

The regulator has done better work than the government

Hong Kong's privacy regulator is the exception. Its 2024 model framework requires that personnel exercising oversight remain aware of the tendency to over-rely on the output produced by AI, and states that human oversight should not be merely a gesture. That is a sharper formulation than most national frameworks manage.

Deskilling appears in none of the five Hong Kong instruments examined. The territory addresses whether the human starts competent, and whether they over-trust the machine in the moment. It does not address whether capability degrades through sustained use, which is the question at capability debt.

What that means for a Hong Kong board

A market that is not measured is a market where every organisation is running its own uncontrolled experiment and comparing itself to numbers produced by vendors. The absence of an official figure is not a reason to relax. It is a reason to measure internally, because nobody else is going to do it for you.

The practical version of that is at how do you measure AI adoption properly, and the full Hong Kong account, document by document, is at AI and work in Asia.

Practical

Boards, financial and professional services, regional headquarters, chambers and association conferences. Delivery is in English. Keynotes run 40 to 90 minutes, with workshop and board-session formats. Rahim travels from London, and where travel is not practical the same session is delivered online. He can travel to the region or deliver virtually across all time zones.

Three keynotes, all versions of one argument. Drift vs Design is the signature talk for boards and executive teams. We Are Superheroes covers the seven human skills that grow more valuable as the tools spread. WTH, What the Human is a live judgement test for boards, run in the room, December to March only. Full descriptions are at keynotes.

Written by Rahim Hirji, author of SuperSkills (Kogan Page, 2026), founder of The SuperSkills Intelligence Company. The research is published openly with every source graded. Found an error? Tell me and it is corrected on the page.