Amazon still hiring junior developers, CTO says during Hong Kong visit

AI summary:

*Amazon CTO Werner Vogels confirmed during a Hong Kong event that the company continues to hire junior developers at its historical rates.

*The Hong Kong government plans to launch an 18-month AI upskilling campaign in early 2027 aimed at training roughly 40,000 employees.

*PwC data shows 2025 job postings for low-AI-exposure roles reached 1.3 times 2021 levels, while highly exposed roles fell to 80%.

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Amazon is still hiring as many junior developers as in the past, chief technology officer Werner Vogels said in Hong Kong on Friday, stressing that human skills remain important in the AI era.

Speaking to university students, start-ups and technology leaders at Hong Kong Science Park, Vogels delivered a keynote speech titled “The Renaissance Developer” at  “Future Builders: The AI Career Dialogue”, hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

“Everything that AI generates for you is yours, not that of the tool,” he said. 

Discussing responsibility for errors in regulated industries, he added, “You can’t say to the regulator, ‘Oh, that was AI.’ No. It’s yours.”

“AI transformation is not really about technology, it's about people and the process,” said Chris So, managing director of AWS Hong Kong. He said the event aimed to build a steady flow for Hong Kong talent ready to lead in the AI era.

In the 2026 Policy Address, the Hong Kong government announced plans to offer more than 200 training courses and activities by the first quarter of 2028 under its "AI for All" Inclusive Programme. 

An 18‑month AI upskilling campaign, which will be launched in the first half of 2027, is expected to benefit around 40,000 employees, the government said

Sun Dong, Hong Kong’s secretary for innovation, technology and industry, said at the event, “As generative artificial intelligence (AI) flattens the technical learning curve, your true competitive edge lies in your creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving grit, and your ambition to solve human challenges.”

Hong Kong’s labour market has shown  different trends in job postings across occupations withvarying exposure to AI,  according to PwC analysis of Lightcast data. AI exposure measures the extent to which an occupation’s tasks and abilities can be performed by AI systems.  

In 2025, job postings for occupations in the lowest AI exposure quartile were about 1.3 times their2021 level, compared with about 80% for the highest exposure quartile, PwC said. 

Henry Main, 26, an AI builder who most recently worked at a logistics company implementing automation tools and chatbots, said AI was changing jobs rather than replacing people entirely.

Main said his takeaways from the event included the importance of ownership, communication and a broad foundation of knowledge, which could help people ask AI better defined questions and improve how they used it at work.

“So I think I'm going to focus more on that, making a long term plan for what skills I want to build and how I'm gonna go about that," he said.

Chen Xiao, 25, a student at the Education University of Hong Kong, emphasised the importance of human judgement, saying that the main advantages of human beings are aesthetic judgement, decision-making and relationships.

Note: This report was written by students from The Young Financial Post editorial team. Generative AI was used for polishing sentences，grammar checking，correcting errors，and research. Models used: Gemini, ChatGPT, Doubao

The final version was manually reviewed, edited, and verified by The Young Financial Post team.