Japan’s slow AI start could be its strategic advantage: Catherine Thorbecke

Key topics:Japan’s calm, late AI adoption may skip early hype risksAI helps aging society and boosts developer productivity gainsForeign tech entry and SoftBank bets signal long-term AI shift.By Catherine Thorbecke.In the US, the backlash to artificial intelligence seems to be scaling almost as fast as the technology itself. Japan offers a different case study.The country has been slow to adopt AI, but it’s unusually calm about it. From the outside, its late start is easy to dismiss as another sign of digital underperformance. It may instead prove a valuable opportunity to skip some of the messier, early phases of diffusion that have been marked by hype, risk and expensive experimentation..Japan can learn from the first-movers and skip to the impactful part of turning the technology into real economic infrastructure. AI has the potential to be more practical than performative here; there’s less angst about displacing workers when the labor force is shrinking. Some of the nation’s constraints, from how to care for an aging population to language barriers and software gaps, are exactly the kinds of problems AI can solve..Read more:.FT: ‘Of course it’s a bubble’: AI start-up valuations soar in investor frenzy.Diffusion, meanwhile, is finally picking up. During the first quarter of this year, AI adoption in Japan increased 3.4 percentage points, more than three times faster than the global average, according to Microsoft Corp.’s AI Economy Institute Q1 report. Separate data from Tokyo-based telecom giant NTT Docomo Inc. found that usage nearly doubled between this February and last.In a country long admired for hardware but less so for software, engineers are using AI to narrow the gap. The Microsoft report found that developers in Japan uploaded 129% more code changes to GitHub than a year earlier, compared with the global average of 78% — a signal that the technology is already changing how coders work.The world’s tech companies have noticed. There’s a new wave of entrepreneurship taking place in Japan and “we want to be part of the story,” Dmitry Shevelenko, the chief business officer at San Francisco-based Perplexity AI, told me at a recent event in Tokyo. He’s far from alone as the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and others are opening offices. Yet the country remains relatively insulated, and there’s still hesitation about going all-in with foreign institutions. Companies that want to be part of Japan’s AI transformation should act like long-term stakeholders, hiring local staff and offering serious partnerships. This could also mean fostering deeper collaborations with universities and research communities. Scientists remain one of the few groups in Japan that still command high public trust, according to an Edelman survey. AI firms that want credibility should borrow less from Silicon Valley’s hype machine and more from Japan’s institutional ecosystem.Still, as Shevelenko puts it: “If you’re successful here, it’s a real signal to the rest of the world that you’ve built something of incredible quality.” He’s correct that this discernment is an edge.Business leaders should also focus less on promises of future abundance and more on urgent, practical problems (one reason Silicon Valley’s pitch is no longer resonating so easily in the US). In Japan, tourism is an obvious example. AI could do much more than translate menus. It can build smarter itineraries, redirect travelers to regions that still need visitors, smooth congestion and help spread the record inbound demand beyond the same crowded destinations.Tokyo has favored a light-touch regulatory approach, with the goal of becoming the most AI-friendly nation in the world. But policymakers should also recognize the advantage of playing catch-up. Japan can watch, learn and adapt what works. This is especially true in higher-risk bets like agentic AI, where you hand off more autonomy to machines.None of this guarantees success. Japanese corporate culture remains cautious and the current consumer curiosity doesn’t automatically translate into broader transformation. Business leaders and policymakers are right to encourage startups, but they must extend support to smaller and medium-sized firms. In addition, mid-career and older workers are still less likely to use the technology though they remain a large swath of the labor force. Japan’s most prominent tech investor, Softbank Group Corp. founder Masayoshi Son, is making one of the world’s boldest bets on the technology with a $60 billion commitment to OpenAI. Whether that proves visionary or reckless remains to be seen, but the time horizon is instructive. On Softbank’s most recent earnings call, its chief financial officer said the company is looking at the next 30 years, adding, “The AI revolution has only just begun.”.Read more:.The Economist: How AI could create the first one-person ($1bn) unicorn.For Japan, the long view is the right one. The current frenzy creates a FOMO pressure to spend big now and justify later. But if AI is truly a transformative general-purpose technology — more akin to the steam engine that propelled the Industrial Revolution than a new smartphone app — the winners will not be the ones who sprint first. They’ll be those who do the marathon task of embedding it deepest across the economy..© 2026 Bloomberg L.P..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

Japan’s slow AI start could be its strategic advantage: Catherine Thorbecke

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