'AI industry needs more talent to grow'
A technology expert said on Friday that Hong Kong lacks the necessary local technical talent for the territory to grow as an AI and data industry development hub.  Edmond Lai, chief digital officer at the Hong Kong Productivity Council, said his team and the Hong Kong Institute of Economics and Business Strategy at the University of Hong Kong surveyed 216 AI-related companies this year and found that about half had experienced difficulties in recruiting technical talent.  He said the SAR should attract talent from overseas in the short-term to fill the gap. He added that the government could also try to find people with diverse skillsets.  "I don't think that there is any particular skillsets that we are missing, but it's more on the quantity. How can we have more? Of course, one thing that will help is to have more, what I would call 'AI-plus' types of talents. Meaning that the talents are not just good at AI knowledge, but also have experience in different industries," he said. "You will need to have both the domain expertise of a particular industry and also AI knowledge in order to help the industry to really use AI to resolve their pain points." Lai said the enterprises also expressed having difficulties in securing processing power and collecting sufficient data. He said that while taking into consideration privacy concerns, companies could rely on existing data in the public sector, or even from the mainland. "The other way is how can we work with the mainland to see if some of the data could be used in Hong Kong for development of the AI industry," he said.  "Having our own supercomputer in Hong Kong will also be important and very critical because it is one of the most important infrastructures for the AI industry. It is good to know that the Hong Kong SAR government already have a plan so we look forward to the execution of that."