Blogs

By Mimi Poon, General Manager, IBM Hong Kong

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer in the distant future, but it is here, transforming industries and redefining how businesses operate. At IBM, we believe AI is not simply an add-on, but a core enabler that can reshape strategies, drive efficiencies, and create new growth opportunities. In Hong Kong, where enterprises are navigating both global competition and local challenges, the adoption of AI offers unprecedented potential.

Hong Kong CEOs: Opportunities and Challenges in AI Adoption

 According to the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) global CEO study, which surveyed 2,000 CEOs worldwide, including 20 in Hong Kong, local CEOs are primarily aligned with global trends in AI adoption:

• 50% of Hong Kong CEOs surveyed reported actively deploying AI agents.
• 90% of Hong Kong CEOs surveyed said they are already taking actions to help employees adapt to working with AI agents.
• 60% of Hong Kong CEOs surveyed confirmed they are recruiting for AI-related roles that did not exist a year ago, while 75% stressed that success hinges on equipping leadership with the right strategic insights.

These findings echo what we hear from our clients at our annual IBM Hong Kong Technology Forum 2025, which brought together 360+ industry leaders from over 150 organisations. Discussions centred on how AI can deliver measurable impact while addressing challenges such as risk management, governance, and workforce reskilling.  The key message was clear: start now, set clear objectives, balance adoption with risk, build strong governance frameworks, and invest in AI literacy across the workforce.

Building Trustworthy, Ethical, and Responsible AI

 The rise of generative AI and agentic AI not only bring immense opportunities, but also new complexities. Enterprises face three significant challenges:

1. Trust – Most large language models (LLMs) offer limited transparency into training data, making it hard for businesses to assess safety and reliability.
2. Complexity – With data spread across on-premises systems, cloud, and edge, generative AI adds another layer of IT complexity.
3. Cost – Developing, deploying, and governing AI at scale can be resource-intensive.

Despite these hurdles, companies adopt AI because of its transformative power.  At IBM, our AI-driven initiatives have delivered over US$3.5 billion in productivity gain since 2023ⁱ. 

That’s why we emphasise an AI-first approach: shifting from “+AI” (taking AI as add-on tools) to “AI+” (embedding AI into the core of operations). With IBM’s watsonx platform, enterprises can build, scale, and govern AI responsibly:

• watsonx.ai for enterprise-grade model building and deployment.
• watsonx.data for unified data access across hybrid environments.
• watsonx.governance for end-to-end AI lifecycle risk management.
• watsonx Orchestrate and Assistants for automating workflows across HR, customer service, and software development.

IBM’s Granite AI models, designed specifically for enterprises, further differentiates us by providing transparency and flexibility, with both open-source and proprietary options available. Our domain-specific Granite models offer up to 30X reductions in inference costs and 97% less energy use compared to larger models, making AI more accessible to small businesses.

Equally important, IBM Consulting, with over 160,000 consultants worldwide, helps clients translate AI technology into industry-specific transformation, ensuring business impact is both real and sustainable.

Reshaping Financial Services with Agentic AI

Financial institutions in Hong Kong are actively exploring AI for core processes such as loan approval, fraud detection, and insurance claims management. Our study highlights three areas where AI agents are poised to reshape financial services:

• Customer engagement – Delivering personalised, end-to-end experiences.
• Operational resilience – Real-time compliance monitoring and proactive risk management.
• Technology acceleration – Automating code generation, optimising resources, and enhancing cybersecurity.

Imagine how banks in Hong Kong can use Agentic AI to proactively capture wealth generating opportunities. For example, a high-net-worth individual sells a significant stake in a listed company, in this case, an AI Strategy Agent can detect this event in real time and pass it to a Wealth Advisor Agent, which then generates a tailored investment proposal. Unlike human relationship managers who may only discover such news by chance, AI agents can monitor continuously across data sources in real time.

To make this effective, banks need a solid data foundation (structured client data like risk appetite, family background, existing investments, and unstructured data like behaviour patterns) to create a 360-degree client view. Proposals can then be checked by a Compliance Agent against different regulatory requirements and internal policies before being finalised, ensuring governance, fairness, and regulatory alignment.

Finally, a human relationship manager reviews and approves the AI-generated recommendation, ensuring a human-in-the-loop approach. IBM’s governance solutions can monitor the entire AI lifecycle to maintain trust, explainability, and compliance.

The scenario illustrates how Agentic AI enables proactive, personalised, and compliant wealth management, helping banks seize new business opportunities while ensuring responsible AI use. 

For these applications to succeed, financial institutions need underlying hybrid-by-design IT architectures that break down data silos, leverage a hybrid cloud built on Red Hat OpenShift, and establish robust governance frameworks.  With its strong regulatory environment and global financial reach, Hong Kong is well-positioned to lead in this new era. 

Empowering Employees: Changing Mindsets, Building Skills

Technology alone does not drive transformation, people do. That is why IBM Hong Kong works closely with clients to ensure employees are empowered to embrace AI. In just two weeks during August, two leading banks engaged IBM to deliver AI training programs: One, initiated by the CEO, targeted senior leadership and top talent; and the other, led by HR, trained employees company-wide. The goal was clear: to shift mindsets from fear to opportunity, building AI literacy that enables employees to thrive.

 At IBM, we practice what we preach. Building an AI-first culture starts from within, and we have been fostering this mindset consistently across our workforce.  In 2023, we launched the first IBMer watsonx Challenge, giving employees the chance to co-create solutions with generative AI and directly influence product enhancements. The response was overwhelming, with more than 158,000 IBMers across 75 countries participating, forming 23,000 teams and contributing 12,000 projects that identified over 8,000 product improvement ideas. In 2024, the Challenge evolved to focus on embedding generative AI into daily work, with over 178,000 IBMers (65% of the company) actively applying watsonx and new internal tools like AskIBM and IBM Consulting Advantage to their everyday tasks. This year, in 2025, the Challenge is shifting to the next frontier: agentic AI, encouraging every IBMer to explore how autonomous AI agents can transform workflows and business processes.

These continuous, large-scale efforts demonstrate that cultivating an AI-first culture is not a one-off initiative, but a sustained journey. By equipping our people to experiment, learn, and apply AI in real-world contexts, we are strengthening our ability to help clients and partners adopt AI responsibly and at scale.

The Road Ahead 

As Hong Kong continues its journey to becoming a global AI-driven hub, the combination of open, hybrid, and trusted AI with domain expertise and human ingenuity will be the differentiator.

At IBM Hong Kong, our mission is clear: to help enterprises in Hong Kong scale AI responsibly and effectively, transforming challenges into opportunities and ensuring that AI adoption creates value for businesses, employees, and society at large.

ⁱ  Source: IBM Annual Report 2024, “A Letter from Arvind Krishna, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer”, download link:  https://www.ibm.com/downloads/documents/us-en/1227cc9d6ecb9697