Cover Christine Ip, former vice-chairman, Greater China, UOB—featured in the Tatler Leadership AI Coalition (Photo: Ken Leung)
Christine Ip, former vice-chairman, Greater China, UOB—featured in the Tatler Leadership AI Coalition (Photo: Ken Leung)
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AI breaks new ground every week. Six Hong Kong executives—from McDonald’s to J.P. Morgan—explain to Tatler why AI literacy, humility, curiosity and “the human touch” matter more than ever
Over four decades in banking, Christine Ip has watched the field evolve alongside technology. In her first job at a bank branch, she recalls staff counting out cash by hand—relying on touch to detect counterfeit bills—while, without digital ledgers, renewing a time deposit took over an hour. “Some people were not willing to even use a calculator in the good old days,” the long-time banker recalls.
Later, when Ip overheard senior staff discussing headcount cuts potentially tied to automation, she decided to take action. “Do you really want to be the one to be replaced?” she asked herself, “or do you want to manage your life proactively?”
Choosing the latter, Ip stepped forward and became one of the first bankers in Hong Kong to dabble in internet banking in the 1990s. Her drive to stay ahead of the curve propelled her career across HSBC, Standard Chartered, ANZ, and eventually UOB, where she rose to head the group’s Greater China operations.
“I always want to be the early learner for a new technology,” she says, pointing to her past exploration of emerging technologies, including crypto, blockchain, and non-fungible tokens. Though “no one talks about NFTs these days”, she says, what remains essential is “to have the courage and to dare to try”.
Since retiring in July, Ip has redirected her energy towards AI literacy. Through Preface, she takes classes with a 26-year-old tutor, mastering generative AI prompt frameworks and deploying tools like NotebookLM as an assistant. Ip admits that these tools remain flawed. In particular, AI-written email correspondence can become “a robot talking to a robot” with plenty of “flowery vocabulary”, she says. “I want to get to the point.”
At the same time, the veteran banker—a longstanding Tatler community member—is sharing her findings with students participating in the AI-5000 initiative. Students feeling lost amid AI hype still need human direction—or, in Ip’s words, “a teacher who truly cares about them as a person and walks with them like a shepherd”. As an instructor herself, she advocates the importance of fact-checking, properly observing and interpreting data. “Now we need to create and to learn discernment,” she says, particularly to avoid misquoted facts, or “hallucinations”, in AI outputs.
From left: Moses Cheng, Ee Cheong Wee, Christine Ip, Ka Shui Lo, Bernard Chan, and Gloria Ng—guests at the United Overseas Bank’s (UOB’s) Golden Jubilee in 2015, covered by Tatler
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Learning about AI from a tutor decades her junior has also highlighted what Ip sees as the primary barrier to literacy among senior leaders: a rigid sense of hierarchy that makes them feel they “dare not be humble enough to learn” from those younger or less established, or to admit what they don’t know. Her lifelong drive to pick up new skills, shaped by the humility to start from scratch, has helped her support younger generations in Hong Kong as they prepare for the future. “I want to engage my students, I want to be relevant to this community,” she says. “That’s why I learn AI.”
In collaboration with Preface, a Hong Kong-based tech content and training company that helps people understand and navigate technology in today’s fast-changing world, Tatler presents the AI Leadership coalition: six industry heavyweights who are redefining what it means to lead today. Read the full cover story here.
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Cat Wang is an editor at Tatler Asia based in Hong Kong, where she covers business, wealth, innovation, and impact. Previously, she was a Forbes Asia reporter and assistant editor of the Forbes Asia 100 to Watch list, spotlighting startups and small companies on the rise across the Asia-Pacific. She began her career as a trainee reporter at the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s newspaper of record. Born in New York City, she graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a B.A. in political science.
