‘I can’t get a job and AI is to blame’: a young person’s lament

In the first of a two-part series on AI in Hong Kong, Harvey Kong reports on the plight of young people worried about their future as firms use the tech for lower-level jobs and experts warn of a ‘broken talent chain’. Trina Lau spent nearly three months looking for work after she was laid off from an e-commerce firm in Hong Kong in December. It was the 23-year-old’s first job after graduating with a communications degree last year. The position only lasted for six months. She sent out more than 50 job applications but only received calls for interviews for six of them. Lau conceded that it was slow going because the economy was not picking up as quickly as she would have liked. But now, she said, she had the added worry that her main competitor would be rapidly rising and evolving artificial intelligence (AI), which would make junior workers like her redundant. “For instance, if I get a job in e-commerce, and suppose I rise to a senior position in two to three years, my job could be replaced by AI, and I will have to change industry,” she said. Lau is among the tens of thousands of fresh graduates caught in a bind, analysts say, as they find themselves not fully immersed in the world of AI while jobs are being transformed by this new technology. “Young people are bearing the brunt of the surge of AI as disruptions brought by the technology are coming quickly and suddenly,” said Wilson Wong Wai-ho, an associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), who has studied how the technology impacts the future of work. AI coming for junior jobs? Official statistics show signs of AI already eating into job vacancies. According to statistics from the Joint Institution Job Information System (JIJIS), a centralised online job information platform shared by the city’s eight publicly funded universities, last year marked a five-year low for the number of job vacancies posted, at 30,798, down by 51.5 per cent from 2021. Some job categories with few openings were in industries heavily associated with the use of AI, such as information technology and programming, customer services, and administrative and clerical work. Figures from the University Grants Committee showed 22,255 students completed an undergraduate degree in the 2024-25 academic year among the eight universities, compared with 22,333 in 2020-21, the year when the Covid-19 pandemic broke out. In terms of the overall number of graduates, 2024-25 recorded 29,676, while 2020-21 had 28,861. A check of the JIJIS figures found that among the 33 job categories, the number of vacancies for 23 of them had fallen to a six-year low. The information technology and programming sector, which once offered the highest volume of jobs for graduates with 8,251 vacancies in 2020, saw demand plummet by 66.7 per cent to just 2,749 by last year. Customer service sector jobs in retail, hotels and tourism fell by 54.3 per cent from 3,763 in 2020 to 1,720 vacancies in 2025, according to JIJIS. AI apps are taking over. Dylan Kwan, Hong Kong software start-up Wati’s general manager for the Greater China region, said his business was providing AI services to more than 16,000 clients around the world. The company helps businesses engage their customers on WhatsApp, with the start-up providing a range of AI services. While the obvious victims of AI are data entry and bookkeeping, Kwan said customer support roles were also among those that would have to evolve, noting that his firm had seen customer support tickets resolved by AI increase from 10 per cent to nearly 30 per cent throughout 2025. “Up to 60 per cent of the customer support tickets are actually resolved by our AI for some of our customers, so we can see that there are efficiency improvements,” Kwan said. Wati itself has its own engineers based in mainland China. Kwan said the firm’s corporate headquarters in Hong Kong had some product staff and engineers. A broken talent chain problem? While graduates can shrug off disappearing customer service roles as jobs they were not aiming for anyway, the reality is that the entire younger generation is fearful of what disruptions AI can herald for their future careers. A survey of 1,178 Hongkongers aged between 15 and 30 by the Chinese YMCA of Hong Kong between May and September last year found that 43 per cent of respondents said they would change their future choice of subjects or career path based on AI developments. Among those 43 per cent of respondents, 68 per cent said their reason for making the switch was due to a fear that their original choice of occupations would be replaced by AI, while 40.7 per cent said the change would benefit them in an environment that had these tools, and 33.6 per cent said they had adjusted as they were interested in the technology. Jessica Mo Pui-man, the organisation’s principal programme secretary, said the data reflected young people’s concerns, particularly their anxieties about whether their chosen careers would still exist as AI developed. But on the bright side, some young people also showed a readiness to embrace the opportunities opened up by AI, she said. “When we’re hearing about AI all the time, it is really hard for young people not to wonder ‘this occupation may exist today, but would it still exist in the future?’” she said. John Mullally, managing director for Robert Walters Hong Kong, said that while the decrease in vacancies was largely due to wider uncertainties in the macroeconomic environment, it had also led to firms considering whether they could turn to AI to reduce their manpower costs. “Where the people who are running these companies are getting kind of excited about artificial intelligence is in its opportunities to create cost efficiencies and eliminate certain roles,” he said. “AI plays into the whole theme of we need to be very careful about investing significant amounts of money into junior staff when we don’t know what our revenues are going to look like in two to three years.” Mullally added that young people graduating in recent years would be disproportionately affected by AI-driven changes in the job market, as they lacked the experience, skills and track record that their senior colleagues would have. “For instance, if you’re looking at commercial or sales roles, you don’t have a network, you don’t have a track record, you don’t have experience that you could point to that a company would say ‘OK, this is worth buying in’,” he said. CUHK’s Wong, who is from the institution’s governance and policy science school, also said the rise of AI was one of the factors to blame for the drop in vacancies, with firms hoping that the technology could boost their competitiveness and cut their costs. But the academic said he believed that the bigger issue was how AI had upended the traditional ways that young people entered the workforce and made their way up if firms shunned them. This could lead to what Wong described as a “broken talent chain”, leaving businesses without the right mix of young talent to sustain future operations. But he was confident businesses, universities and the government would have no choice but to fix the issue as they became more aware of this emerging phenomenon. This could include bridging courses for university students entering the workforce, more extensive internship programmes or even incentives for companies to hire young people and train them for future jobs, he said. The alternative would be higher youth unemployment, he warned, which could create social issues. “Businesses should discuss with the government and universities how to solve this issue. The sooner you talk about it, the sooner you come up with a solution,” Wong said. “If not, new graduates this year will be affected, the ones next year will be affected. We do not want so many young people feeling frustrated before they step foot in the job market. The societal cost of this is very high.” Universities and the private sector ought to be more engaged with each other, he said, to come up with the right courses or programmes to help young people attain the skills required in the modern workforce, with the government acting as a facilitator. The latter’s role was critical, many said, in setting the direction for the entire workforce. Agreeing that this talent gap was a looming problem, Gary Chin Sheung-yung, career consulting leader at Mercer Hong Kong, also cautioned firms against only using AI to slash entry-level and boost short-term efficiency. “That would eventually create a missing-generation problem, so you don’t have the pipeline for the younger generation to grow into more experienced managers in the next five to 10 years,” he said. The long-term business sustainability of companies would also be at risk, he said. Chin urged firms to redesign entry-level positions, including hiring junior employees and actively figuring out how they could work with AI. They should also plan properly for apprenticeships, job rotations and mentorship schemes to ensure companies still had access to young talent, rather than shunting them aside, he said. “At the same time, businesses themselves have to actively work with educational institutions themselves, telling them what their future needs would be, what kind of skills need to be put into the curriculum, and what experience has to be in education,” Chin said. But Ian Choy Jing-man, president of the Hong Kong Institute of Human Resource Management, said he was not too worried as he felt the rise of AI tools had yet to lead to member companies hiring fewer young people. Employers actually had a greater incentive to hire young people to help improve their AI literacy, he argued. “Hong Kong’s population make-up also increasingly consists of older people. We are a rapidly ageing city compared to other places around the world,” he said. “So, if you are a company that wants to ensure your survival, there is no way that you would not hire young people.” Choy disagreed that young people would be disproportionately affected by the rise of AI, saying instead it was anyone who refused to embrace the technology who would lose out. “A new graduate could take two to three years to learn how their organisations do things and how they can do their work in their specific field,” he said. “Now, this will be shortened because of AI. This process will be compressed from two to three years to several months.” Due to AI, newly joined staff members could perform their duties at a level similar to that of someone who had worked at the company for two to three years, he added. Mullally said that young professionals should not just deepen their knowledge but also try to get as much exposure to their chosen sectors by widening their base of contacts via networking. “That is going to give you a better line of sight as to the direction of travel within your sector, within your industry, within your company,” he said. “But also in the process of doing that, you are going to build skills, and you’re going to build a network, which doesn’t make you fully AI-proof, but it gives you a better chance versus somebody who doesn’t have one.” Mercer’s Chin argued that young people could take this further by incorporating their soft skills into their AI usage, such as using this technology to solve business problems or reviewing the output of these tools. In terms of AI literacy and utilisation, CUHK’s Wong said young people should not only strive to be familiar with these tools, but also understand how they could apply the technology to their chosen fields or careers. “Whenever they join a new organisation, they can think about how they can transform their organisations using AI, as companies want to look for people who can be a sort of internal consultant for them, who are people who understand the sector and AI, so that they could teach these skills to them,” he said. Wong added that this mindset could also be extended to educational institutions, noting that universities should take an interdisciplinary approach to the technology, instead of only limiting it to computer science or engineering departments. Young people such as Trina Lau said they were doing their best to learn about and live with AI. But they expressed fears that things were moving too fast, with newer tools emerging and overtaking their pace of learning. Lau said she had now found a job in administrative work but remained uneasy about the breakneck development of AI. “When compared with the speed at which I am learning, the speed of its improvement is moving even quicker, so what I end up learning could be done in vain,” she said.

‘I can’t get a job and AI is to blame’: a young person’s lament

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Rapid advances in AI are fuelling fears among Hong Kong’s fresh graduates that machines could replace them before their careers begin

Rapid advances in AI are fuelling fears among Hong Kong’s fresh graduates that machines could replace them before their careers begin