Digital patience and AI transparency to define customer experience in HK

While 52% of Hong Kong consumers once prioritised speed, they now value “digital speed bumps” that symbolise protection and care, provided that the reasons for the pause are clearly communicated, study finds.

Conducted by customer engagement platform Twilio, the 2026 Asia-Pacific and Japan technology predictions is based on Twilio’s 2025 state of customer engagement report and digital patience study, exploring ways to improve customer interactions and experiences.

According to the digital patience study, Hong Kong consumers demand speed, with 52% preferring faster service and willing to sacrifice quality. However, predictions for 2026 suggest they will increasingly view digital speed bumps as symbols of care and protection, rather than inconvenience, as long as they feel familiar and expected. 

The report predicts that intentional friction will signal care in customer experience as brands move away from prioritising speed and instead focus on creating safe, fair, and transparent digital experiences with purposeful pauses. To avoid frustrating customers in the pace-driven Hong Kong market, brands must communicate the reasons for any delays to provide clarity and reassurance. This communication should emphasise that the friction is a deliberate protective measure aligned with users' expectations for a secure experience.

The report predicts that as the AI identity crisis deepens, AI transparency will become an enforceable consumer right. The digital patience study found that Hong Kong consumers have low tolerance for unmet AI expectations, with only 35% satisfied with AI-supported customer service.

By 2026, the “AI identity crisis”—where voice bots resemble humans—will prompt an industry mandate for disclosure. This is driven by the fact that many consumers struggle to distinguish human agents from AI, with Twilio research showing that 90% fail to identify AI-generated voice clips. In markets such as Hong Kong, with strong financial and insurance sectors, regulatory intervention is inevitable. Companies must provide clear identification to maintain brand trust and avoid fallout from synthetic deception.

AI Trust Threshold will be the new frontier of CX

In the era of AI-generated responses, consumers demand trust and control, according to Twilio’s state of customer engagement report 2025. Half (50%) of Hong Kong consumers prefer speaking to a human agent when needed, and 83% want control over how brands communicate with them instead of having AI automatically assume their preferences.

Therefore, trust is essential for engagement. By 2026, brands will track sentiment and trust drop-offs to prevent AI missteps from causing churn. Proactive brands will quickly transfer frustrated customers to human agents. Brands should identify the threshold where customers lose faith in an AI-generated response. This is where they begin to question the credibility of the entire interaction. As AI handles more front-line service roles, this invisible line becomes a critical operational metric.

The future of conversational AI will be modular and flexible

On the other hand, 40% of APAC consumers report AI agents struggle with their accents, while 41% face language support issues. As a result, the high cost and poor performance of rigid platforms will drive a major shift in Conversational AI across APJ, forcing brands to move away from aging monolithic systems.

To solve the barrier, brands will decisively move towards modular, bring-your-own-LLM (BYO-LLM) architectures that are easier to update, cheaper to run, and better equipped for nuanced local language. This is vital for Hong Kong, where users might require Cantonese, Mandarin, or English for AI solutions. By swapping out monolithic systems for flexible, specialised models, Hong Kong enterprises can deliver AI that understands the local vernacular while reducing the high cost of maintaining outdated platforms.

Meanwhile, repetition and technical hiccups in AI-human agent transitions are now a major source of frustration among consumers in the region. Twilio's study on conversational AI finds that only 14% of human agents in APAC have full context when an AI conversation is escalated, while 65% of handoffs still require customers to repeat some information.

The report believes that 2026 will mark a shift as brands work to close this damaging information gap, by driving investment in customer experience orchestration technologies that ensure real-time data and contextual continuity when a transition occurs. Consumers are viewing smooth transitions as tangible proof of a brand’s respect for their time, making seamless AI-to-human handoffs indispensable to maintain trust in the AI era.

Christopher Connolly, director of solutions engineering, Twilio, said, “In 2026, we are moving from a focus on what AI can do, to how AI should behave. Trust, conversational continuity, and credibility are becoming ever more important as a non-transparent approach to AI and customer experience is no longer viable in a market such as Hong Kong.”

“Our predictions for the coming year thus reflect a move toward radical operational visibility and modular technology stacks that can finally handle the unique cultural and linguistic complexities of this region,” he added.

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