Research & Commentary

Our record on AI in Hong Kong education

Essai co-founder Renee Ho and the research team at the HK Future Economy Institute publish research and commentary on AI in Hong Kong's primary and secondary schools. This page collects all of it in one place, and states for each item who wrote it, what our role was, and where to find our own write-up.

Research report

HK Future Economy Institute · August 2026

AI Adoption and Data Governance in Hong Kong Schools

Renee Ho, Chiu Ngai-ting, Wong Berlin

The team spent a year visiting more than 80 Hong Kong primary and secondary schools. The central finding: schools typically run several AI platforms at once, and those systems share no common data format, standard or governance mechanism — so a student’s learning record ends up fragmented across disconnected "data silos". Appendix B sets out ten questions a school can put to a vendor before signing anything.

The report was picked up by several local news outlets on publication.

Our write-upRead the original（PDF）

Declaration of interest

Renee Ho is the report’s first author and a co-founder of Essai; the platform data it draws on was supplied by Essai in de-identified form. It is therefore a research collaboration, not an independent third-party evaluation of Essai, and should be read as such. The report also states its own limitation: the schools were a purposive sample, not a random sample of Hong Kong.

Op-eds

Ming Pao
20 August 2026 · Opinion

What AI education is really for: personalised teaching need no longer be a luxury

Personalised teaching was never a question of philosophy. It was a question of cost — and what AI actually lowers is the cost of understanding a student.

Our write-upRead the original
Ming Pao
18 June 2026 · Opinion

Not just an employment crisis — AI is cutting Hong Kong's talent pipeline

When entry-level roles disappear, so does the stretch of road that carries people from school into an industry.

Our write-upRead the original

Video & interviews

Will AI change how we assess students? And how should a school handle its learning data?

Principal Cheng Ka-po in conversation with Renee Ho. The angle is school management rather than technology — how assessment is shifting, and what schools actually do with student learning data. Broadcast 3 September 2026.

《冷思熱話》 is Master Insight's recurring education discussion series. Renee Ho has been invited onto three episodes since 2025; the two earlier ones are below.

24 January 2025 · with Principal Cheng Ka-po

Five ways AI helps in the classroom — and how schools should choose between AI products

5 February 2025 · with 何劍輝, Education Convergence

How students meet the challenges AI brings, and how schools and industry can work together

In the media

Third-party coverage of Essai, listed separately from the research and commentary written by our own team above.

TVB Money Magazine

Hong Kong's flagship business affairs programme features Essai's role in school-based AI education — how the platform helps schools deploy AI without losing pedagogical control.

Watch on YouTube

Keep reading

Our write-ups of the policy and research material live on the blog. For the school-level mapping, start with the Blueprint page.

All postsBlueprint mapping