HKU wants its first AI award winners to teach the next desk

Universities are strange places to roll out workplace AI. The academics already have opinions about it. The administrators who keep the place running often get the tools last and the policy first. So when a university says its staff programme is moving from confidence to practice, it is worth reading closely.

The University of Hong Kong held its AI Recognition Ceremony 2026 on 21 October and named more than 30 Visionary Award recipients for practical uses of AI at work. They came from faculties and central administration, across academic, research, technical, IT, professional and administrative roles. The point of the evening was less the awards than what the president asked the winners to do next.

The programme behind it

The awards came out of an AI Innovation Challenge Day in March 2026, where more than 300 colleagues applied AI tools to workplace problems drawn from HKU itself: communications, information synthesis, data handling, workflow planning, visual content and responsible use. That day was part of AI for Work @HKU, a multi-year learning and adoption effort open to staff across the university. It mixes practical workshops, skills clinics, challenges and online resources. Over the past 12 months it recorded more than 1,200 staff attendances.

Attendances, not people. Some colleagues will have come to five sessions and some to none. It is still a real number for a staff programme in a university.

The ask

Professor Xiang Zhang, President and Vice-Chancellor, framed the winners as a starting point rather than a finish line. "You are going to be the seed for the future of AI administration of this university. You are the first batch of pioneers." He wanted them to keep going at their own desks and then "tell your other colleagues how you use this, and inspire them, and bring them together". He described a wider set of AI initiatives under the university's AI Hub, with AI administration as one pillar.

Paul Choi, Director of Human Resources, put the shift in one sentence. "Last year, this program helped our colleagues understand AI and build their confidence. In the coming year, our goal is to help colleagues put that knowledge into practice." The next phase will push harder on turning individual know-how into lasting workplace improvements, with support for teams to find opportunities, build AI-enabled solutions and share what works.

Why it matters

Year one of most staff AI programmes is about permission and confidence. Year two is where they stall, because a workshop does not change a process. HKU's answer is a peer network: take the 30 people who already changed something and make them the teachers. That is cheaper than another round of vendor sessions and usually more credible. A colleague from down the corridor showing what she changed is worth more than any demo.

The risk is that champions become unpaid help desks. If the next phase does not give them time and a mandate, the enthusiasm burns off by mid-year.

What this means for L&D

Recognition is a cheap and underused lever. Naming the people who did the work, in front of the vice-chancellor, tells everyone else what the organisation actually values. The harder design job is the handover from individual wins to team practice, which is where AI training has to move from prompts to the workflow a department already runs. HKU has the people. Now it needs the processes to change around them.

Sources: The HKU Lead, 21 October 2026.