Hong Kong businesses now sit in a very precarious position. Most Hong Kong businesses are already behind in adopting new technology, preferring traditional methods like Excel sheets or custom-built technology. Compared to global competitors who are opting for new, cloud-based solutions that require very little investment or maintenance, Hong Kong businesses are already a few places behind. Now more than ever, Hong Kong businesses are faced with a challenge - adapt to the AI revolution now or face losing more market share. 

The competition between ChatGPT (OpenAI), Microsoft Bing, Baidu, and Google Bard to become the leading AI provider is fierce - a testament to the potential of this new technology and the impact it will have on businesses worldwide. Even Google, with its billions and industry-leading R&D departments, has issued a code red, with CEO Sundar Pichai stating that the technology has hit an “inflexion point”.

“Most businesses in Hong Kong are very behind global content, marketing, and technology standards. We see it daily, and two clear groups are emerging: those unwilling to embrace new technology and stick to traditional methods (with decisions made by an IT team afraid of change) and those willing to embrace new technologies and international strategies. It is clear which group will be more successful in the long-term.”

Laurent Ross - COO @ Oxygen

Image: AI robot looks out over Hong Kong - courtesy of MidJourney AI 

What Can AI Content Tools Do?

A. Lower Cost and Increased Speed for Content Creation

1. More businesses will be able to create content like blogs faster and for a lot less than it previously cost. Those fully embracing it have a small window to leap ahead of the competition online, especially in the inbound marketing space. 
2. Local competitors will find it much easier to enter new markets, using AI tools to quickly mass-translate content for new marketing campaigns and new internal teams.
3. Marketing teams can do more with less. A good marketing exec can write five blogs daily instead of one. Social media calendar for the month? AI can write and schedule this for you, using your brand tone of voice, branding, hashtags, and emojis.
4. Greatly increased access to and greatly lowered the cost of content creation in multiple languages. Google Translate partially enabled this but always required significant quality control and didn’t use natural language. New AI models can do this much more efficiently with language requiring little editing - and these will only get better.

B. Higher Productivity for Internal Teams

You don’t have to be a marketer to use content AI tools. Anyone from marketing to sales, customer support, or even HR can use these tools to do more in less time.

1. Automation of mundane tasks (email replies, creating documents, report analysis), freeing up time for more creative tasks
2.  Transcribe meetings, calls, and interactions with a summary generated by the AI to remove the need for note-taking and post-meeting summary emails.
3. Access to artificial intelligence-driven analytics and insights to identify areas of improvement. You would require integrations with an AI for this, but it’s always possible to send individual queries to the AI for a second opinion.
4. Utilization of predictive algorithms to anticipate customer needs and take proactive action. An excellent example would be using AI to measure sentiment on communication channels and report on overall sentiment or flag when sentiment drops.

C. Better Service for Leads and Customers

Higher productivity will naturally lead to better lead and customer satisfaction as your team will have more time to spend on 1:1 interactions where and when it really matters. Aside from that obvious benefit, there are a few more ways in which AI can improve experiences for every stage of the buyer journey.

1. Faster and more accurate responses to customer inquiries using integrations between AI and communication platforms (chatbot, WhatsApp, etc.)
2. Ability to provide personalized, tailored content to customers. This could include rapidly building out a knowledge base for frequent customer queries. 
3. Access to advanced analytics to gain insights into customer preferences. This might include sentiment analysis on lead or customer emails and conversations.
4. Ability to quickly identify and respond to customer trends and needs through connectivity with chat interfaces.

How Should Hong Kong Businesses Adapt?

AI will soon be used worldwide in businesses daily; this gives Hong Kong businesses around 3-6 months to embrace change and catch up or, again, fall behind as the rest of the world takes another step forward.

The first challenge is finding ways AI can be best used in your business model. This challenge might be even more difficult than learning the tools and adapting the AI. But this doesn’t mean you should hire an AI expert or head of automation to do so. Utilise the experience of local consultants or agencies who can look into the unique needs of your business and formulate a winning strategy to use AI to improve performance and empower your team.